CHAPTER VII MENOKIJáBO

“Oh! you needn’t ‘throw the Babel switch,’ meaning you needn’t all talk together. Now! what I’d like to know is what I’ve been doing while you’ve been growing away up there?”

Thus he faced the brine-dripping, eager girls, ruddy from immersion, who clustered round him upon the white oasis of the sand-bar.

“What you’ve been doing! Sleeping--probably!”

“Sleeping! Well! Well! If that isn’t enough to make a flat fish sit up and take notice! No, I’ve been doing my wartime bit, ‘skippering’ a coaster carrying lumber to the shipyards, dodging submarines that have been sinking so many good little vessels of the Gloucester fishing fleet. After the rheumatism hung on to this lame leg o’ mine, like a puppy-dog to a root, why, I had to stay ashore. Since then, at times, I’ve been helping out at the Coast Guard Station, over there on Prawn Island; I still can mend a breeches buoy or pull an oar, and some of their men have been drafted into other war-time service. Have you visited the station yet?”

Captain Andy pointed to a white building standing sentry over the extreme point of the island into which the long sand-bar merged.

“Yes, we have! We’ve seen all the wonderful life-saving apparatus: the light steel life-boat, the big self-bailing Coast Guard boat, too, with a water-tight tank under her planking, and six little holes--wells--down through her, with valves that act like the damper in a stove, through which the water empties itself out, if she ships any. The men said she’d live in any kind of weather.” It was a simultaneous answer from two or three of the excited girls--wet as feathered sea-mice, dripping brine and information together.

“So she will; she’d ride a deluge! A regular Noah’s Ark she is--that old self-bailer! But she ain’t a hummer for speed; they can’t get more than eight or nine miles an hour out of her, even at a pinch.”

“Ha! She wouldn’t be much good for chasing spy-boats then, if there are any around here, giving out information to enemy ‘subs.’” Sesooā’s eyelashes, brilliantly brine-gemmed, like the dog-seal’s mustache, shot a sidelong, scintillating glance at the massive old master mariner whose six feet two of broad stature leaned awry, like a crooked pillar, he having been lamed for life in a battle with the seas when the main-boom of his vessel fell on him and crushed his right leg.

“Well, now, I don’t suppose she would! No doubt there are busy spies among us. Bonfires have been seen blazing on some lonely spot of this very shore before transports passed, far out to sea! But it doesn’t seem as if they could do much signaling from boats and get away with it. The Coast Guard patrols keep a pretty sharp lookout.”

“Yes, we’ve seen them, starting out at sunset from the watch-tower--that old crow’s-nest over there on the rock.” Olive nodded her small, flower-like head, around which the red silk handkerchief was wound like an Arab’s turban, towards a human a?rie perched upon a cliff of the neighboring island. “They patrol the shore in different directions till midnight, when other ‘surf-men’ go ‘on beat.’ They showed us their long, portable electric torches with which they signal the tower--and the tower signals the station--if they sight anything unusual.”

“Unusual! Good life! There ain’t anything atop o’ the ocean now, seems to me, that isn’t as unusual as wings on a whale or--or an iceberg at the equator!” Captain Andy’s big laugh exploded like a fog-gun. “Fancy seeing a gray-and-black submarine roll itself out o’ the water an’ go for you like a fork-tailed fish with a pulpit on its back, as I did last March, when I was taking that old coaster, the Susie Jane, back to Kennebunkport. Luckily, she was goin’ home light--meanin’ empty--an’ she could run like a ghost, that old girl, so she showed the sub her heels. We mightn’t have got off, though, for all that, only that a big destroyer, camouflaged till you couldn’t tell her from a flock of mermaids taking a sunbath on the surface, hove in sight, an’ the U-boat dove--crash dive, I reckon, if ever there was one!

“Gee! I couldn’t help speculatin’ as to what the finny creatures thought of her--she had some shiny fins, too, herself--as she lay on the bottom; whether it was a case of:
“‘The fishes all came around she,
And seemed to think as they scanned her log,
That she made uncom-mon-ly free!’”

The girls’ laughter echoed the old sea-dog’s briny chuckle.

In Sara’s there was an abstracted tinkle.

“The patrol men use the blinker system to signal the tower or Coast Guard Station--International Code--I don’t know but that I could do a little signaling with that myself, at a pinch,” she remarked, her eyebrows lifting tentatively. “Iver taught me; he’s my brother--lieutenant-brother--at the front,” sinking to a sitting posture on the sands and looking up explanatorily at Captain Andy.

“Proud of him, ain’t you?”

“Well, maybe so!” The gold-tipped eyelashes twinkled over a tear that was diamond pride of the first water. “I like to practice anything I learned from him; and it has won me a new honor-bead, a local honor for signaling--the color chosen by our Guardian herself.... Iver thought Camp Fire was just ‘great’!” went on the seventeen-year-old sister, “that it taught us to love and live the outdoors life, to be hardy, plucky, resourceful, and yet--yet remain girly!... Not too girly, though! Another couple of years and I want to go out into the world--be free--make my mark!”

“As you’re doing now, leaving footprints on the sands of time,” chaffed Olive, as the Flame who had just spoken fitted a black-stockinged foot into the moist edge of the sand-bar. “Well! to steal a metaphor, it’s in moccasins that we Camp Fire Girls will make footprints on the sands of time, linking the past with the present, eh?”

Blue Heron, also, sank dreamily to a sitting posture, her arms encircling her knees, which did homage to the flame of the Torch Bearer’s emblem upon the breast of her bathing-suit; her wide, dark eyes gazing mistily across the ocean, perhaps toward a front-line trench in France, at a young officer whose homing thoughts would turn to the poetry of the Council Fire, to all that it typified of America--progress, beauty, sisterhood--when he missed the things that make life hum.

“Humph! Talking o’ footprints, I suppose, that, from now on, it’s bound to be ‘Skirts go ahead!’ along some trails, anyway,” murmured Captain Andy. “Well! I’m not kicking, so long’s they remain skirts.”

“With bloomers upon occasion, and overalls when we’re working in that green oasis of a war-garden over there on Squawk Hill, where nothing but wild vetch and barb-weed grew until last summer, when some farmer found out that there was enough clay mingled with the sand for it to be cultivated, so he started in to--to make the squawky desert bloom. We’ve rented it from him now, and quite often it blooms with backaches.” Sara kicked at the turning tide.

“He’s my nephew--that desert-coaxing fellow.” The mariner, on whom, three years before, this same group of girls had bestowed the Indian name of Menokijábo, or “Tall Standing Man,” straightened his great back. “I made my headquarters with that ’ere nephew an’ his family part o’ the time last winter,” he went on, “in that bleak little settlement over yonder, on the island.”

“What! Do people live there all the year round?” It was Little Owl--Lilia--who put the staggered question, turning from the spot where she, with other of the younger girls--Sybil Deering, Betty Ayres, Victoria Glenn, called by the Council Fire Sul-sul-sul-i, or Little Fire--had been frolicking with the Indian canoe and its short paddle. “How can they?” Lilia blinked at the lonely sea-girt colony whose suburban boulevard, at low water, was the teeming sand-bar. “How--ever--can they make a living?”

“Hum-m! This time o’ year we live off the ‘summer boarders;’ in winter we live off each other!”

“Mercy! I hope nobody is going to live off me--on me!” Sybil bounded into the fern-decked canoe--all agog for comic flight.

“Ye gods an’ little fishes! You’d be a delicate morsel--a choice goldfish--wouldn’t you?” Captain Andy beamed down on her yellow head, his massive brows working up and down like a cloud-bank above the blazing sun-dog--mock-sun--in his eyes. “Well! I’d advise you not to get so near to that big old submarine seal again; he mightn’t be able to resist a nibble.”

“Oh! seals won’t attack you, nowadays, will they, no matter how large they are?” It was Arline who thus thrust her symbolic rainbow into the conversation; she had been paddling in the surf with Flamina--little Green Leaf--whose foreign glances in the direction of the Tall Standing Man were flutteringly shy as spring leaves.

“No, I guess not! They have some awful battles between themselves, but they’ve been persecuted enough to let human beings alone. I saw a seal-hunter--strange to these parts--hanging round this bar day before yesterday. He had come down the Exmouth River--tidal river--in a launch, with a guide, from that little shipbuilding town up at the head of the river to which I was freighting lumber last spring. It’s just humming now, building wooden vessels, all sizes!”

“Oh--that hive! That’s where my Cousin Atwood is working, since he was drafted for labor, putting in his six hours--and more--a day, so his mother wrote me. I believe she’s actually worrying about him.... Between you an’ me, Atty’s an only son--rather a spoiled boy! Never did a blessed thing in his life that he didn’t want to before; that’s my private opinion! Oh! we’ll just have to get you to take us up the river in a launch, some day soon, to visit him, won’t you, Captain Andy?”

Olive, starting up from the sloping sand-ridge, laid a pleading hand upon the massive old “king-pin’s” arm.

“Oh--go to it!” He sighed like a hurricane under the blue mock-sun in his eyes. “I suppose, from now on, I may’s well make up my mind to be shoved about, like a vessel in a rip, for the rest of the summer, while you girls are camping here.... What’s your cousin’s full name?”

“Atwood Atwell.”

“Hum-m. A. A., if not A 1, ain’t he? And he’s one o’ those rich boys--‘candy kids’--who are helping to man the short-handed country shipyards now? Well, I declare! What’s he look like? ’Bout five feet seven or eight in height, heavy build, light-haired, pink-skinned?”

“That sounds as if it might be a description,” Olive laughed. “What was he doing when you saw him?”

“Leading a big blind horse, hitched to a heavy ship’s timber, across the yard, under a blazing sun.”

“Did he look as if he enjoyed it--took hold well?”

“Wal, now, I’m frank to say that his smile wasn’t ex-act-ly that of a man with a likely bale of goods to sell--or who wouldn’t swap his job for a kingdom.” The sun-dog in the eye sported a tail of sarcasm now. “’Twas when I sheered off from him an’ his blind draft-horse, was prowling round the shipyard that I first saw the seal-hunter I spoke of, who was hanging round the bar here day before yesterday watching for a shot. He was just starting down the river then, with his guide, an old river-man, ’Merica Burnham, whose launch he hires.”

“Oh-h! did he have on a Norfolk suit--belted tweeds and knickerbockers? Gracious! Olive, I wonder if it could be the same man who passed while I was painting my dory--camouflaging her?”

Sara’s paddling toes suddenly tickled the tide into questioning spray that camouflaged her cry.

“Now--now, by the ginger joker! Was it you who turned a sensible dory into a smeared freak? Oh! I saw her as I rowed by your camp. Land! the sight of her would make a dogfish drop his herring.”

Thus the old mariner laughingly diverted that speculative spray.

“Bah! Captain Andy, you’re horrid. I think it was quite a cunning idea to camouflage her, put her into the disguise of the high-seas uniform--so to speak--as Iver gave her to me.... But if anybody else made a joke of her!”

“You’d be ready to tar ’em, eh? And so that sportsman chap--seal-hunter--passed while you were fathoms deep in camouflage! Bet my life he was amused! I guess it was the same man, girlie, for the fellow I saw did have on a top-shelfer’s rig such as you mention; he was a walking arsenal, too, rifle an’ shotgun both; perhaps he hopes to make some profit out o’ the seal-skins, if he gets any; most everything is profitable these times! But he missed the one shot I saw him try; probably at the big old bull-seal that played submarine with you.”

“Humph! Glad he did!” came from Sara, mouthpiece for the unavenging girls. “He must be a tenderfoot sportsman, though.”

“Not necessarily. A blubbery seal is about the quickest thing on earth; it can dive between the flash of the gun and the time the shot strikes the water--where it has been. Well:
“‘What is missed is mysteries,
What is hits is histories!’”

The old sea-dog chuckled again.

“It certainly is a mystery to me where I’ve seen him before--before to-day!” Sara’s brows were puckered. “His face, as a whole, isn’t exactly, so to speak, familiar. But the eyes are! He blinked as he passed--a cool sort o’ blink--and one of them closed just a shade faster than the other. Oh, bother! ’twill haunt me now.”

It did haunt her, that uneven blink--dogged her back to camp from the sand-bar.

She was still puzzling over it when, late that evening, after darkness fell, she stole down from the big brooding bungalow to the tide’s edge, to say good-night to her harlequin dory, hauled up into the black pocket of a little sandy cove.

Sands and superstition go together. Suddenly Sara found herself shaking from head to foot in the dim, weird light of a clouded moon, with the full tide wailing like a bad ghost below her.

Somebody--somebody besides herself--had been at work upon her dory, that precious legacy!

Was it man or mocking sprite?

The dim little boat, its smears hidden, shone sprite-like now, as if a water-fairy had taken possession of it and infused into the wooden shell an elfin soul which defied the petrified girl-owner through two tiny luminous eyes, the whiteness of whose enchanted glare, at close quarters, made up for the pin-head nature of their size.

Lo and behold! The dory’s blunt, unromantic nose was bewitched into radiating light in the darkness, too. Down it shone a narrow streak, bright as a Milky Way!

“What is it? Who--who could have done it? Could--could it be the phosphorescent trail of some creature thrown up by the tide?”

But the high tide sobbed, “Not guilty!” as the girl--her flesh beginning to creep upon her bones--turned towards it with the question on her lips.

“No! It doesn’t look like any ordinary phosphorescent trail of a slimy thing!” So her chilling lips answered half aloud the question put by her quailing heart.

She retreated a long step--two--three! The luminous eyes, so whitely shining, faded out--were hidden--lost in a veil of darkness.

“Bah! What a goose--an utter goose--I am to feel creepy, even for an instant! If a spirit has got into my dory, it’s a mighty short-sighted one.... ’Twould be easy to dodge it!”

She broke into a low chuckle, sharpened by rising anger.

“It--it’s the work of somebody! That--that seal-hunter! Could he be the--Blighter?”

Strange how, out of the stirred waves of her subconscious self, the epithet used by her soldier-brother, when the gas, catching a disobedient “doughboy,” had temporarily withered a fiery officer’s holiday, sprang--a kindred flame now--to her parted, stiffening lips, as she turned to the night-breeze for an answer!

But the sea-wind replied, “Not guilty!” pleading an alibi for the seal-hunter of the uneven blink, one of whose eyes was just an iota quicker on the cool wink than the other--who had missed his shot at the big dog-seal, although he had made a traveling arsenal of himself to invade the bar.

For, as the temperate gust argued, what possible object could a grown-up man have in giving a harmless little merry-andrew of a dory a luminous figurehead, visible, with the naked eye, only for a few yards--even if his present place of sojourn had not, according to Captain Andy, been miles away, at a little town far up a tidal river, which rang with the noise of shipbuilders’ mallets--or launching axes--where Olive Deering’s rich boy-cousin was working as a draftee of labor, to replace the gaps made in shipping by raiding submarines, and apparently not in love with his chosen job.

“No! That hunter’s face haunts me, not--not with a ‘comfy’ sort of feeling either, though, for the life of me, I can’t tell why. But I don’t think he’s the blighter--in this case. And it was a good joke my camouflaging that little dory, if somebody hadn’t gone an’ spoiled it--turned her into--into a toothless bead-eye,”--with a raving chuckle--“into a miserable little guy of a dragon-dory!”

A gurgle faintly tickled the air, like water bubbling out of an over-full bottle.

Sara Davenport wheeled about, her flame suspended.

Forth from between two low sand-mounds near by shot an arm, a bare, round arm, scintillating with six tiny twinkling white stars--a mundane Milky Way!

The dory’s owner caught her breath. For a brief second the “creeps”--the goose-flesh--almost came back. Then she leaped and grasped it.

The air gurgled like a cataract--a foamy cataract--suddenly shot by a wail!

“Oh, don’t--don’t! You’re h-hurting me!” screamed Sybil Deering. “O dear! how mad you are! Ha! ha! ha! R-rough you are--uh-huh-huh!... Don’t! You’re--hurting!”

“Hurting! I mean to hurt you! What right--what business--had you to go meddling with my dory, at all? Just because you’re a rich girl you think you’re privileged! The little boat Iver gave me--t-turning her into a guy!”

“You made a freak of her yourself!”

“She was mine. I could do what I liked with her. You know how I hate people to--to fool with anything belonging to me!... And this----”

The jealous speech snapped explosively.

“There--there’s somebody in that sand-pocket with you! Who is it?”

“Only--me!” clucked Little Owl very deprecatingly, thrusting a touzled head over the mound. “We--we didn’t think that you’d get mad, like this, fly up in the air--clap your wings an’ crow--hiss--positively hiss!” in a half-cowed whimper.

“Yes, and peck, too!” savagely. “I’ll get even with you both! I’ll punish--find some way of punishing you! I’ll leave camp to-morrow--if you don’t!”

The anger in the injured one’s breast--fed by the raveled fluff of weariness strewing the day’s end--now leaped to wild exaggeration, like the little boat’s disguise, which had passed from camouflage to caricature.

“If I could have my way----” Sara fairly ground her teeth, confronting the wooden bead-eye. “If I could only have my way, I’d----”

But what figure was rising from the dim, dark sands beyond the dory? What figure bestrode it, like Hercules mastering the many-headed water-monster?

Ah! that of a young officer coolly smiling from out a puffy storm of blue powder-blisters which rimmed his face, and covered his neck and wrists--with a powder-hole smoking upon his breast--holding out a right hand, humorously, to a paling private.

“Oh! if Iver--if Iver could squelch his powder-puff--the one exploding in him, I can.... There! There! Girls! I didn’t mean to take a joke so badly. I am a jealous cross-cat, especially where----”

The faltering tongue refused to speak the brother’s name.

“And we didn’t mean to hurt you! We were--thoughtless.” Sybil’s penitent speech, still shooting a cataract of frothy gurgles, tumbled towards sobs. “But we--we found some of the luminous powder that Olive has in a tiny bottle--very little, it’s so fearfully expensive--powder that shines in the dark, which she mixes with a few drops of oil to make radio-paint. Of course it isn’t ra-radium--really, but----”

Shooting rapids of laughter, between boulders of sobs, the explanations of Olive’s sister wavered towards collapse.

“You know, or I guess you don’t know, for she has kept it secret--a secret that shines in the dark--that Olive is determined, when we get back to the city, to go to work at something--anything--to release a man--a man for the front! Any kind of work for Olive, so long’s it isn’t farming or gardening! So she has been learning how to paint dials for a?roplanes and submarines--radio-dials on which the arrows and figures shine like cat’s eyes at night; the darker it is, the more they shine! She means to practise the work down here, but hasn’t begun yet. She’s kept the paint and the secret hidden away. But I knew, and I----”

“You thought of painting a luminous figurehead on my dory! The powder is composed of radio-active substances, I suppose.” Sara was laughing herself, now. “Well! it certainly does shine. No submarine officer could fail to see his depth-gauge, if he was diving by it, with lights out; or aviator----”

“Shine! Glory hallelujah! It costs enough to outshine diamonds--everything else on earth, except radium itself!” wailed Sybil--called, by the Council Fire, Light of the Home--glancing down at the pin-head galaxy upon her arm. “I suppose if--when--Olive discovers that I stole some, I’ll have to pay for it,”--rocking with stifled laughter as she looked at the bead-eyed dory--“with--with a month’s allowance of pocket-money!”

“Serve you right, too! I’m glad of it! Wasting anything so precious in war-time! But what a brick Olive is--bent on going to work to release a man! I wonder she didn’t tell me, at any rate! I suppose she thought I’d write of it to Iver--over there--and she’d hate to be advertised as a heroine--in a mild sort of way!” This last a softened little windy-weep-sighing as Sara, without another glance at the dragonized dory, started back towards camp.

“So--so it’s anything but gardening--or farm-work--for her! I wonder how she’ll keep up at fighting barb-weed and witch-grass to-morrow. I’ll be a barbed weed again myself if I don’t turn in now. Well! come along, Galaxy! I forgive you! You certainly are a radiant--blighter!”

She, the oldest girl, seized Sybil’s twinkling arm and the trio started at a race for tent and bungalow, leaving that toothless bead-eye, the luminous dory, staring unwinkingly at the tide.