It claimed her, that wild, red eye, even while her companions of the White Birch Group were excitedly discussing their picturesque plans for the morrow; for the celebration of their annual festival in honor of the birch trees bursting into leaf, for the odes, the songs, the dances, the planting, each, of a silvery sapling.
It mesmerized her, did Ta-te's eye, with its setting of flame, even to the exclusion of enthusiasm about the big dance--the joyous Together--in the evening, of which Una raved in anticipation now and again, and for which these two friends and rivals in the matter of eyelashes had brought their prettiest party dresses.
The elders presiding over the destinies of both had given a happy consent to Tanpa's invitation, and the two were now the guests for a few days of the mountain Group at their camp on the egg-shaped Bowl.
The sigh of the mountain breeze came soothingly across the lake to lull their slumbers as they lay down to rest, side by side, in the little bungalow cots of which a dozen ranged the length of the great water-side dormitory half-open, half-screened.
Yet Pem fell asleep imploring Ta-Te--and lost the little record altogether in her dreams!
Up and down old Greylock she plodded, looking for it, hand in hand with Toandoah,--but ever it eluded them!
Muttering, bereft, she tossed; then for a moment awoke, blinkingly sat up, to see the moonlight flickering--Mammy Moon's own smile--upon the pearl-woven prophecy beside her, from which she could hardly be parted by night or day.
Sleep again! And now it was not only the diary but the Thunder Bird, itself, that was lost,--astray in space, and she with it!
She was trying to catch it by the fiery tail-feathers when, all of a sudden--all of a sober sudden--those feathers became soft, flopping, buffeting,--real.
They brushed her parted lips. They flopped against her cheek. They even mopped the dews of slumber from her eyes.
Wildly she sat up--a second time--to see the dawn poking at her with a pink finger and the lake shimmering without, a great pearl found by the morning in an iridescent oyster-shell of mist.
And, within, a bumping, buffeting something, soft as moss, dun-gray as terror--blundering into every sleeper's face, as if testing its warmth, bowling its way along the line of cots.