The Camp Fire Girls Amid the Snows. Vandercook Margaret
really to say serious farewells when returning to their school in Philadelphia, but they departed with at least the consoling thought that they were to come back to the cabin for their Christmas holidays. So that there remained only seven of the original girls pledged to give this experiment of winter housekeeping as a Camp Fire club a real test. And as they worked, pleaded and waited, one by one each difficulty had been overcome until now there remained but one – the necessity for finding a new guardian able to give all of her time to living at Sunrise cabin and to working with the girls.
One evening toward the early part of November after the cabin had been completed, Betty Ashton had called a meeting at her home for the final discussion of this serious problem. As there were no outsiders present, before mentioning the subject the girls had arranged themselves in their accustomed Camp Fire attitudes, in a kind of semi-circle about the great drawing room fire, in order to talk more freely. For the past week each girl had been asked to search diligently for a suitable guardian. Yet when Betty looked hopefully about at the faces of her friends without speaking she sighed, shading her gray eyes with her hand. Only by an effort of will could she keep her tears from falling – not a line of success showed in a single countenance.
Mollie O’Neill, understanding equally well, made no such effort at self-control. Placing her head on her sister’s shoulder she frankly gave way to tears, while Polly stared moodily into the fire with Sylvia Wharton’s square hand clutching hers despairingly. Esther and Eleanor frowned. Nan Graham, who had more at stake than the other girls, not trusting herself, jumped up and running across to a far corner of the big room flung herself face downward on a sofa. So there was a most unusual silence in the Sunrise Camp Fire circle and yet when a light knock sounded on the door no one said “Come in.” An instant later, however, the knock was repeated, but this time, not waiting for an answer, the door opened and a figure walked slowly toward the center of the floor. It was a lovely figure, nevertheless, there was scarcely a person in Woodford whom the girls at this moment desired less to see. Certainly there was no one who had been more bitterly opposed to the whole Camp Fire idea and particularly to Betty Ashton’s having a part in it.
“I don’t know whether you allow an outsider to come into one of your meetings,” the intruder began, dropping into a near-by chair.
From her place on the sofa Nan Graham lifted her head. She alone of the little company did not know their visitor’s name. She saw a young woman of about twenty-six or seven with light golden brown hair and eyes with the same yellow lights in them, dressed in a lovely crepe evening gown with a bunch of roses at her belt and a scarf thrown over her shoulders. Nan’s eyes glowed with a momentary forgetfulness, having long cherished just such an ideal and never before seen it realized.
But Betty only shook her head, answering with little enthusiasm:
“Oh, it doesn’t matter this evening, Rose, you may stay if you like, though we don’t generally have strangers at our meetings.” And then, though she usually had good manners, Betty fell to studying the dancing lights in the fire without making any further effort at conversation. She had no desire to be rude, but it was trying to have Rose Dyer, her mother’s intimate friend, the one older girl, held up as a model for her to follow, who had done her best to prejudice Mrs. Ashton against the Camp Fire plan the summer before, come into their midst at an hour when their very existence as a club seemed to be in peril.
For a few moments Miss Dyer waited without trying to speak again. Although Polly and Esther were both endeavoring to make themselves agreeable, the atmosphere of the drawing room continued distinctly unfriendly.
“I – I am afraid I am in the way although you were kind enough not to say so,” Rose suggested, finding it difficult to explain what had inspired her visit with so many faces turned away from hers. “I think I had best go; I only came to ask you a great favor and now – ” She was getting up quietly, when Betty with a sudden realization of her duties as a hostess made a little rush toward her and taking both the older girl’s hands drew her into the center of their circle.
“Please forgive our bad manners and do stay, Rose,” she pleaded. “We really have no business to attend to to-night and perhaps company may cheer us up.”
But although Rose, without the least regard for her lovely gown, had immediately dropped down on the floor in regular Camp Fire fashion, apparently she had not heard what Betty had suggested, for straightway her expression became quite as serious as any one else’s.
“You may not care for what I am going to say and you must promise to be truthful if you don’t,” Rose began, as timidly as though she were not ten years older than any other girl in the room, “but I have been hearing for the past two months that you were looking for a Camp Fire guardian to spend the winter with you and I have been wondering – ” Here pulling the flowers from her belt she let her gaze rest upon them. “I have been wondering if you would care to have me?”
The silence was then more conspicuous than before and Rose flushed hotly.
“I am sure you are very kind,” Polly began in a perfectly unfamiliar tone of voice and manner since she too had known Rose all her life.
“We appreciate your kindness very much,” Eleanor added, fearing that Polly was about to break down.
But Betty Ashton dropped her chin into her hands in her familiar fashion and stared directly at their visitor. “My dear Rose, whatever has happened to you?” she demanded. “Why it’s too absurd! You know you don’t care for anything but parties and dancing and having a good time. You simply haven’t any idea of what it means to be a Camp Fire guardian; why it is difficult enough when you have only to preside at weekly Camp Fire meetings and to watch over the girls in between, but when it comes to living with us and teaching us as Miss McMurtry did last summer – ” Betty bit her lips. She did not wish to be discourteous and yet the vision of the fashionably dressed girl before her fulfilling the requirements of their life together in the woods was too much for her sense of humor.
Then suddenly, to Betty’s embarrassment and the surprise of everyone else, Miss Dyer’s eyes filled with tears.
“Please don’t, Betty,” she said a little huskily. “You know, dear, one can get rather tired of hearing one’s self described as an absolute good-for-nothing. Oh, I know I was opposed to your Camp Fire club last summer, but I have watched you more carefully than you dream and have entirely changed my mind. I am not asking you to let me come into your club to help you. I am afraid I am selfish, I can’t explain it to you now, but I want to help myself. Of course I am not wise enough to be your guardian, but I have been talking to Miss McMurtry and she has promised to help me and it is only because you don’t seem able to find anyone else that I dare offer myself.”
At this moment Nan Graham, whom Rose had not seen before, tumbled unexpectedly off her sofa. It was because of her eagerness to reach the other girls. They, at a quick signal from one to the other, had arisen, and now, forming a circle, danced slowly about their new guardian chanting the sacred law of the Camp Fire.
CHAPTER IV
“The Reason o’ It”
“Rose,” Betty Ashton called at about ten o’clock the next morning. Betty was sitting alone before the living room fire, the other girls having gone into town to school several hours before. Books and papers and writing materials were piled on a table before her and evidently she had been working on some abstruse problem in mathematics, for several sheets of legal cap paper were covered with figures.
“Rose,” she called again, and so plaintively this second time that the new guardian of the Sunrise Camp Fire girls hurried in from the kitchen. A gingham apron covered her from head to foot, a large mixing spoon was in one hand and a becoming splash of flour on one cheek.
“What is it, dear?” she inquired anxiously. “Does your foot hurt worse than it did? I ought to have come in to you right away, but Mammy and I have been making enough loaves of bread to feed a regiment and I have been turning some odds and ends of the dough into Camp Fire emblems to have for tea – rings and bracelets and crossed logs. I am afraid I am still dreadfully frivolous!” And Rose flushed, for in spite of Betty’s own problem she was smiling at her. This the Rose who had come to her first Camp Fire Council