Every member of that group--a canoeing party, a wading party, it was, just landed from the near-by river, the blue Housatonic--was a blaze of color.
But the sturdiest among them was simply barbaric. The warm sunlight of May dripped golden from his nickum shoulders, bronzed to the hue of a statue, bathed his bare knees and feet, his khaki shorts, the flame of an apricot jersey, the black and yellow cap,--the sheaf of mayflowers within his arm.
"Oh! how boys--big boys--do revel in color. A girl--any girl I ever knew--is demure in her taste beside them," murmured the Camp Fire Guardian, with amused, motherly tolerance.
"Pshaw! I think it's hor-rid. So flashy!" snapped Pemrose; Jack at a Pinch had made gorgeous his incivility and was parading it before her eyes.
"Oh, boy! Look at that middle fellow. He'd have a grosbeak 'skun a mile'!" gasped Stud, following the direction of her glance, with a virtuous consciousness of his own cave-soiled khaki, moderately lit by merit badge and service stripe.
"'Grosbeak!' Oh, but I love grosbeaks! And all that color--why! it paints the landscape," came flutteringly from Aponi, the White Birch Butterfly, least Priscilla-like in her tastes of the Group, when she was not in Camp Fire green, or soft-toned ceremonial dress.
"Maybe 'twill paint the blues in old Tory Cave, if we run across them there," put in Tomoke, maiden of the flambeau and the fire-talk. "They certainly are a perfect 'scream', those big boys," her eyes merrily following that clamor of color now wending back towards the canoes.
"Humph! they'd have to 'go some' to leaven the blues of Tory Cave," remarked the Scoutmaster, laughingly addressing himself to a roll. "The biggest bonfire on earth wouldn't half dry the cave-tears there."
"Yes, that's the den of the Doleful Dumps--their diggings!" laughed a younger scout, flourishing aloft a mess-mug, the gray of his rolling eyes. "Bats--bats as big as saucers--no, soup-plates! And, far in--far in--the sound of running water, like a weak wind!"
"Running water! Invisible running water! A--weak--wind! Oh-h! do let us hurry and go on there. We have to cross the river; haven't we?" The gurgle of that cloistered brooklet was already in Pem's heart as her dilating gaze spanned the Housatonic, broad and open, "warbling" amid its soft meadow slopes, as she had looked upon it from the Devil's Chair. "But, goody! I hope we _won't_ run across him there--Jack at a Pinch! Flaunting round like a grosbeak!" She bit the thought into an olive. "Stud's no grumpy riddle--if he is a Stoutheart, like the other!"