CHAPTER XV SEEKING THE SPARK

Alas! for vindication. Alas! for the invisible practical joker which seems sometimes to dog our steps in life and steal our trick when we least expect it.

A maiden knelt upon the white sands out at the wild heart of the sand-dunes, here purple with the shading blossoms of pea-vines, lace-trimmed with everlastings, or raggedly plumed with rank beach-grass and prickly barb-weed.

Near the great pyramid of clam-shells, where the Indians had held an historic feast and got their fire with primitive rubbing of sticks, she knelt upon her right knee, her left foot pressed down hard upon the flat fire-board whose scooped pit, or hollow, had a notch resting upon a wooden tray placed beneath it.

Her left hand--its arm escaping from the white middy-blouse, bared to the shoulder to allow free scope--grasped the handle or socket of her upright drill.

The right pink arm, each muscle strenuously “on the job” under the rounded flesh, worked steadily to and fro the fire-maker’s bow, hand-painted with flame, drawn taut by its leather thong, resting upon the socket at the top of the drill, thus grinding the lower point of that drill into the soft, punky wood of the fire-board, which presently, as the powdered wood-dust fell into the tray beneath, turned black--smoked.

Her hand-painted bag of tinder lay on the sands beside her--that inflammable tinder to foster the spark when it came!

Steadily she drove the bow at first! Anxiously, now, with a horrid little fear beginning to get a hand-hold on her heart, that, after all, the ordeal by fire might not work out as she had expected--the vindication come off--and prove her triumphant mistress of this situation, at least, a perfect fire-witch, even if she had behaved like a simpleton in the shipyard!

Faster, faster--with more and more force--desperately, at last, slipped backward and forward the bow! Harder--harder--ground the drill; the fire-witch, her drooping face aflame, her pretty eyelashes twinkling in a paroxysm, working for dear life now--for vindication--honor--as it seemed to her whose moods were generally highly colored, touched with the extravagance of flame.

Smoke and more smoke in little dun-gray billows! And never a spark of red!

“Rest a while, dear,” said the Guardian. “Then try again--and perhaps you’ll get it.”

She did rest, Sesooā, the fire-witch, in the shadow of the historic shell-heap over which the last flame of sunset most tantalizingly rioted. She curled down upon her left side on the sands, easing her aching right arm.

Then a second fierce trial! A breathing spell! And another wild paroxysm of effort, the decorated bow almost demented now!

Flat failure!

Smoke--and no fire!

She looked up--and caught a smile upon the face of Atlas!

Atlas who had rowed down the river when his day’s work in the shipyard was over, to meet his hostesses, the Camp Fire Group, midway of the dunes for this picnic-supper--and to excitedly discuss the fact that the new ship’s hull which they had so lately seen launched, had been fired upon by a submarine on her towed trip round to Gloucester--would have been sunk had not a Destroyer appeared!

Atlas whose halo the dune-breezes bared--the prismatic bump upon his temple, fast diminishing! Atlas who had laid himself out to make friends with the little fire-witch, deciding that she would make a perfect “pal,” the sort of girl he had always desired for a chum, with plenty of pep in her--if only she wasn’t such a little fire-balloon!

Atlas who had been met with flame turned to ice--or next door to it--with as much frigidity as politeness would allow, tempered by a perfunctory little speech of thanks, rehearsed a dozen times beforehand and eked out by the Guardian, for his heroic presence of mind in that swift leap which prevented the extinguishing in herself of the vital spark by a heavy ship’s rib!

And now it was Atlas’ turn! His smile at her failure was fleeting, involuntary--gone in a moment. But for that one moment it was a smile; a perfectly uncivilized--highly barbaric--grin.

Down went Sesooā’s hand-painted bow beside her tinder-bag!

Neck aflame, so that it could scarcely be distinguished from the red tie of her Minute-Girl Costume, cheeks burning, if the wood-dust wouldn’t, eyes, eyelashes, red-gold hair, all, emitting sparks, a fire-ball herself, she uncurled--sprang to her feet!

Her hand went to her throat. Breathlessly, desperately, she was fighting to get the better of the stray powder-puff of anger--as Iver had done--before it exploded openly.

One glance she flung at Atlas--and he was consumed!

“Let me--let me go!... Oh! we haven’t--haven’t--got wood enough for a fi-ire. You’d better light it with matches. I’ll go--let me--and get some more--driftwood, wreck-wood--to make a rainbow fire! Back--back near--the--bungalow....”

In explosive incoherency her eyes met the Guardian’s. And Gheezies never failed to read a girl’s soul.

“All right!” she said. “If one of the other girls goes with you! It would be nice to have such a wonderful fire, giving off every hue in the rainbow, out here in the middle of the dunes--as we had the night we entertained aviators--and sit around it after our cooking is through. But it’s coming on dark! Don’t be long! Take--Betty!”

Betty had to take herself--little evergreen Holly! The Flame had already flown--a tearing, scintillating flame, as it raced over sand-mound and graying sand-hill.

“I’ve just got to be alone! If not--I’d explode! Oh, he’s simply--simply hateful, that Atlas boy--if he did save my life!... Oh-h! I knew how important he felt--as if the shipyard sun shone on him alone when he was crouching with his back under that horrid ship’s rib. Ridiculous, when he wasn’t really supporting it at all!... And--and to think I should have failed--failed, before him, to get the fire, when I have broken the record before, for a girl, and got the spark in thirty seconds; that--that I should have--again--made a fool of myself!”

“Oh! Sally--Sara--have mercy! Don’t run--quite--so hard: I can’t keep up with you!” It was Betty’s panting cry, tugging at the steps of the racing Flame.

It had never been such a reckless flyaway--that Flame--that it had not a heart for a Camp Fire Sister.

Within a few hundred yards of the bungalow-beach, quarter of a mile from the group, back there, upon the dunes--amid the skirts of twilight, light and filmy yet, which the dune-breeze was shaking out--Sara Davenport, out of breath herself, paused and caught Betty by the hand.

“If--if we can just get over that big sand-hill in front of us, and the low mounds beyond, we’ll reach the spot where we saw all that wreck-wood, such a lot of it, when bathing to-day, Bettykins!” she breathed. “It--’twill save my being a wreck--myself! Oh! why couldn’t I get the spark to-night--of all nights? And--and to be grinned at by that Atlas boy! If--if that wouldn’t make a dogfish drop his herring, as Captain Andy would say!... If I can only look out over the bay--over the sea--in--in the direction of where Iver is--over there--I’ll feel better!”

“I know-ow!” soothed Betty. “It was too bad you couldn’t get it!”

She drew on her last pinch of pep, of breath--the Holly--as they raced on, over the tall, white sand-peak, shadowy in the gloaming, tripping over wild pea-vines, empurpling, faintly now, the lower dunes.

The scampering sea-breeze racing from their own beach, where cranberries slept with their coral cheeks on dimming pillows, clasped them like a brother.

“We’ll just have time to gather a few chunks of the coppery wreck-wood. Then--then we’ll have to hurry back,” said Betty. “I really didn’t think it was so far to this spot, and I guess the Guardian didn’t either! You swept her----”

“Hush! Listen! The chug, chug, of a launch--motor-boat--passing quite close in to shore, too! Tide’s high!” Sara halted on tiptoe now, a poised, breathless figure, and held up her hand.

“I’m afraid!” whispered Betty. “I wish we hadn’t come!”

“Nonsense! Nobody runs close in to shore--close to our beach--except Captain Andy--funny if ’twas him!--the artist’s brother, or--or, now an’ again, that seal-hunter, who passed when I was camouflaging the dory--toothless bead-eye”--with a recovering chuckle--“whose face, the hunter’s I mean, I can’t.... Goodness! I rather hope it isn’t--him!”

“If we crouched down behind those two low sand-mounds in front, we could peep over--between them--and see who it was without being seen,” pleaded Betty timorously.

“Right you are--little Chicken-heart,” came the older girl’s response.

“I feel as if I were in the trenches now, looking over the top.” Betty gathered a handful of purple pea-blossoms from the sand-rampart before her.

“Standing on the firing-step, peering out over the sand-bags, as the soldiers do! But there’s nothing to fire at here! Pretty sure to be a friend, whoever it is!... My s-soul! I do believe it is the--mysterious--seal-hunter!”

“He’s--alone!” whispered Betty.

“Yes--for the first time, except when he passed us on the beach!”

Chug, chug! hiss, hiss! the motor-boat, a trim little launch, was abreast of them now, passing within twenty-five yards, so close to shore that its occupant seemed to have made a bet with the crowing high tide that he could thus skirt the beach without grounding.

He was standing up, amidships, his left hand on the pilot-wheel, narrowly scrutinizing the shore.

Either he saw or did not see two pairs of eyes peering at him, ferret-like, through clumps of beach-grass. With a complacent gesture, satisfied on some score, the fingers of his right hand went up to the comer of his mouth, describing a crescent, a twirling motion, as they thoughtfully fondled the tip of a small, bristling mustache.

It was with a low moan--a strange searching moan--that Sara Davenport fell back, and lifted a long-drawn face to the sky--all madcap flame, petty flame, wilted in her now.

“Bet-ty!” She clutched the other girl’s arm, and pinched it so tight that the Holly, little thorny evergreen, quivered like her namesake of the dunes in a wintry blizzard.

“I do believe it is the--mysterious--seal-hunter.”

“Bet-ty! I have seen him before--seen him do that--with his fingers! But where--where? I must remember! I feel--now--that I ought to remember! Oh! God, help me to--remember!” Sara Davenport bowed her paling girlish face against a purple cushion of wild pea, raised it again in half a moment, and crept cautiously around the screening mounds.

“He’ll bear watching!... I’m going to watch him,” she gasped. “I’m going to see what he’s up to! Oh!” winking fiery tears back, “oh! if I could--only--get the spark now--the spark from my memory, instead of just smoke--I wouldn’t care if I never--never--got it, the fire, from wood again, in all my born life!”