"No, indeed!" A sixteen-year-old girl, gray-eyed, vibrant with energy, mobile as the Lightning, the mettlesome Lightning, from which she took her Camp Fire name, spoke up spiritedly. "We're going to flash a message right across the valley, over to old Round-top, that sleepy, dark mountain, a couple of miles away, just as soon as the daylight is all faded out," she explained.
"Oh, ho! That's what the Guardian meant when she spoke of showing us something--a display--with red fire, eh?" gasped Pemrose. "How are you going to signal--with what code?"
"Morse code--and a good, fat two-foot pine-knot, oozing with resin!" smiled the Lightning, vivid with inspiration. "How--how about sending over this message: 'Two strange girls in camp; you ought to meet them'?"
"Lovely! That will hit the mark!" came the appreciative chorus, to the song of logs. "Then--then you'll see old Round-top wake up, quick's a wink and 'come across' with an invitation--an invitation to that banner picnic the day after to-morrow!"
"C. F. G.! C. F. G.! We are the Camp Fire C. F. G.! Oh! none with us can compare, For we looked over And picked the clover, And the World's lit up With our Camp Fires everywhere!"
"And, fegs! wi' an aging, sober body like mysel', if he isn't a-picking o' the clover blossoms, he's a-smelling o' them the night," softly soliloquized Andrew, the chauffeur, as he listened to that halcyon song around the Pinnacle blaze--feeling barred out of Clover Land himself, as he lay among the ferns, because of the "one sair memory", the whiff of heather ever and anon wafted to his nostrils, as it seemed, from the grave of a fifteen-year-old lassie away back in Scotland.
"Hum-m! if 'tweren't for that, I could maist fling out an' dance the 'Rigs o' Barley' a-watching o' those happy lasses," he whimsically confessed in the ear of a king fern. "I could, for sure, same's we used to dance it in the glen around a bonfire!"
But if the heather in his heart, reinforcing chauffeur primness, checked even the first lashing kick of a Highland Fling, it did not restrain him, that grave Church Elder, from taking part later in something fully as giddy; a wild and storming torchlight procession.
"Now! what we need, girls, is a good r-rich pine-knot, with a juicy, resinous knot in it, that will burn ten minutes, anyway, for signaling purposes," said Tomoke, the personified Lightning, as the "C. F. G." proclamation over, the magic moment came for the flashing of the light of this particular camp fire in speaking fire from mountain to mountain--across the mile and a half of intervening valley. That inflammable knot was not hard to find. Split with the toy axe which the girl who had won an honor bead for signaling carried at her belt--a modern Maid Marion, at home in all woodcraft--it blazed, transplendent, a foot-long flambeau, searching the Pinnacle's darkest nooks, winning sleepy birds from their slumbers, calling upon them to follow too, as Tomoke, nimble of foot as her aërial namesake, presently dashed up the hill, with it held high!