"And, Helen and Louise dear," Winona wrote to her own two best friends back at Camp Karonya. "Some of the girls in our cla.s.ses that we scarcely knew, and thought were quiet and stupid, are as nice and bright and funny as ever they can be, and ever so Camp Firey! I believe we can organize another Camp Fire this fall. And I have my housework arranged so that I have two hours in the morning, and most of my afternoon and evening, to do what I please with. So I have a gorgeous time working for honors. It's a scheme I shan't tell you about till it's all worked out and over with, but I think it's going to work all right. Florence suggested it, bless her heart. Love to the whole Camp Fire, and ask them to take a hike for me!"

Winona's supplementary plan for honor-winning had been suggested to her this way:

One day she was on the back porch, mending, and Florence had four bosom friends out in the back garden, making a most fearful racket. Mrs.

Merriam had a headache, and Winona knew that in a little while the headache would be worse, or that she would have to go and send Florence's friends home, which meant hurting that independent young person's feelings.

"Florence," called Winona, "wouldn't you and the other girls like me to come down to the end of the garden and tell you fairy-stories?"

The little girls seemed to very much want to. So Winona took her mending and her rocker, and they sat down in the shelter of a big tree. Winona told them stories till it was time for her to go in and see about supper. By then her mother's headache was over. But after supper Florence came up to Winona, and said, "The girls want to ask something.

They want to know if you won't tell them stories other times, too!"

"Why, what a lovely idea!" said Winona. "Of course I will!"

So to the Porch Club and the housekeeping Winona added two hours every other day, telling stories to Florence and her small friends. She felt rather shy over it at first, but gradually it began to be more and more easy. When the fairy-tales ran low she went to the library and hunted out the Robin Hood and Arthur legends, and even history stories once in awhile. And one day when she was rummaging the card catalogue for more stories about King Arthur she found out that the Malory book was only a very little of what there was to be told. Everything seemed to lead somewhere else. So the story-hours kept to King Arthur, except for one fairy afternoon a week, for the rest of the month, and Winona learned a good deal about him that she would never have found out by herself.

After one or two meetings, sewing as she talked, she began to show the children a little about darning, too. They brought stockings after that, and kept quieter, she found, when they were working as well as she. The most surprising thing of all to her was that she had time enough for everything. The story-hours took care of all the household mending that her mother did not do; the Porch Club, which met at different houses in rotation, was no trouble at all, merely a good-times affair. The housekeeping was running smoothly, and Winona got time for letter-writing and walks with the boys, and even practice on the piano.

There were lots of places where she and Nataly and Tom and Billy could go trolley riding on hot evenings, and there were always boys and girls running in and out, asking her to go places and do things. Winona discovered, as others have before her, that you can have a very good time by staying home in the summer.

One night, toward the last of August, her mother asked her a question.

"How would you like to go back to camp to celebrate your birthday, dear?" she asked.

Now Winona's birthday, her fifteenth, was on the eleventh of September, just two days before the girls were coming back.

"I would, very much," she said, "but do you think you will be able to spare me?"

"I am quite sure of it," said her mother. "Indeed, I might be able to take charge of the house again by next week, if my ankle improves as it is doing now."

"Oh, no," said Winona, "I won't take the risk. Besides, I couldn't leave the story-hour children, and the Porch Club has to have some things planned for it that I think I'd better help with. But if I can go up there over my birthday it will be lovely."

"You'll have to get somebody else to tell the stories while you're gone, then," said Florence. "I don't want my story-hour broken up!"

"By all means, don't break up Florence's private story-hour!" said Tom.

"Why don't you do the story-telling yourself, Floss?"

But, "That's true, Florence," said Winona. "I think I can find one of the girls in the Porch Club who will do it. You see, mother dear, I'll need to get all the loose ends up out of the way if I go back even for three days!"

But all the loose ends tied themselves up neatly. Ellen Marks, one of the nicest of the Porch Club girls, promised to tell the stories for the two days Winona would miss. Nataly could look after things elsewhere, and by the eleventh Mrs. Merriam was nearly as well as ever. So the morning of that day saw Winona on her way back to Camp Karonya, with joy in her heart, and her ceremonial costume over her arm, in a special bag.

The whole crowd of girls rushed out to meet her, and sang a cheer from the time her motor-boat was in sight till she landed. They surrounded her, and carried her into camp, where supper was nearly ready.

It seemed very good to be back. The pine needles smelled as woodsily as ever, and the long wooden table looked very homelike, with its brown, chattering girls surrounding it, all trying to tell her everything at once. As soon as supper was over Helen and Louise swept her off to her old tent.

"Hurry," said Helen. "Get into your ceremonial costume, honey. Heap big Council Fire to-night."

"Council Fire?" said Winona in surprise. "Why, is it the night for it?"

"This is an extra-special," explained Helen hastily. "Here, Win, let me help you."

She began to unfasten Winona's travelling suit.

"You have a lot more beads than you had," Winona observed a little wistfully, as Helen took her own gown down from the wall and began to put it on.

Helen laughed as she slung the long string of colored honor-beads around her neck.

"Maybe you'll catch up," she remarked carelessly. "You'll doubtless get an honor or so to-night."

"Oh, yes," said Winona. "I ought to get a bead or two for home-craft, and I did some story-hour work, too."

"As if that was all you did!" said Helen indignantly; and stopped herself short.

"Hurry up, girls!" said Louise, sticking her bead-banded head into the tent. "Time to begin. Hear the drum!"

"Oh, the nice old drum!" cried Winona happily, as she heard its well-remembered monotonous sound in the distance. The three girls linked arms, and hurried to the council hill.

"Oh, but it's good to be back!" said Winona for the third or fourth time, as she sank into her place in the circle around the first place.

She listened dreamily as the ceremony of fire-lighting and all the rest went forward. Things had been happening, it appeared. The reports were given one by one. Winona listened on, and Hike the Camp Cat trotted noiselessly over the ground and curled himself into Winona's lap. Even he remembered her. She stroked him and listened.

Helen, they told, had managed to coax an old farmer down the road, the identical one they didn't buy the music-box of, to stop setting traps that hurt rabbits. Louise had, after many hoppings about in solitude, actually managed to master five folk-dances. Adelaide and little Frances had made an emergency dash down the river to get the doctor, when one of the other little girls had fallen from a tree and broken her wrist.

There were other things as thrilling.

"And all I did was stay home!" thought Winona as the tales went on, and the beads were awarded. Then she sat up and began to listen more closely, for Mrs. Bryan, Opeechee herself, was rising to give this report, and that was something sure to be special and worth while. When Opeechee related what a girl had done it was an honor worth having.

"You have all done well, and deserved the honors you have been awarded on this, our final Council in the open," began the Guardian. "Here, together in the woods, it has been easy to follow the law of the fire.

We have found it so, I know.

"But now I want to tell you about a watcher of the Camp Fire who has been following the law without any of the helps we have. She gave up the camp and its good times, and went back to a.s.sume the duties of a woman-the tending of the real Fire of home. She had charge of the household. She kept a family of four beside herself, including an invalid mother, comfortable, well taken care of and happy, for one month. She made a pleasure out of her duties, and showed others how.

Besides this, she collected girls who had not much social life and gave it to them. She led them for a month, three times a week. She told children stories and taught them sewing every other day for a month. And through it all she was happy, and made light for others wherever she went. She has carried the Torch of happiness and health and work and love, and pa.s.sed it on undimmed to others. Winona, the Flashing Ray of Light, is just fifteen to-night. That is the earliest age at which anyone can be made a Torch-bearer-but I think she deserves the rank, Sisters of the Camp Fire. What do you say?"

Before the girls could answer Winona was on her feet with the kitten in her arms, scarlet and protesting.

"But I didn't do all those wonderful things, Opeechee!" she cried. "I just did what there was to do. I like to plan things and have people have good times. I just wanted to get as good a time out of it all as I could. And I don't believe I have enough honor beads to be a Torch-bearer."

Mrs. Bryan paid her protest very little attention.

"What do you say, Sisters of the Camp Fire?"

The girls burst out into cheering.

"Winona, Flashing Ray of Light, is to take the rank of Torch-bearer to-day," repeated Mrs. Bryan inexorably. "Rise, Winona."

And as Winona stood up again (she had sat down hastily after her first objection) Mrs. Bryan repeated the honors she had won, and that her mother and Florence had kept track of so faithfully. She had expected the honor for story-telling, but the one for marketing-and the one for folk-songs-and-why, that Alice Brown pantomime had meant an honor bead! So had bringing in and arranging her mother's invalid-tray, and the Porch Club and the story-hour had given her a double right to the Torch-bearer rank, which requires leadership of a group. Then, of course, the wood-craft honors she had won before she went home-she had known about those. But to think that everything, even that hilarious ten-course dinner she and Louise had planned, had been good for a bead!

Winona had far more than the fifteen required honors for the highest rank of the Camp Fire.

"Repeat the Torch-bearer's Desire, Winona," said Mrs. Bryan, and Winona, half in a dream, said,

The light which has been given me I desire to pa.s.s undimmed to others.