The Camp Fire Girls; Or, The Secret of an Old Mill — Story, Setting & Ideas

ou for a memo. pad, Nat!” and once more Alice embraced her chum.

“Why so pensive?” asked Marie, as, to give entrance for her friends she opened the door of the little cottage, over which she presided as mistress. “Has anything happened, Natalie? Did you miss in Latin to-day?” and Marie, dropping her books on a chair in the hall ushered her chums into the little library. The girls were on their way home from the Academy and from class had gone to a meeting of the Camp Fire Girls Association, which had recently been started in their town. They had been initiated as “Wood Gatherers” of the Dogwood Camp Fire, which name Mrs. Pierce Bonnell, the Guardian, had chosen for the group.

“No, nothing has happened,” said Natalie slowly. “I was just thinking what delightful fun we would have this summer if we could really gather around a camp fire of our own, out in the open.”

“Well, why couldn’t we?” asked Marie. “Let’s think about it, anyhow. I’m going to ask Nellie to make tea. It’s real chilly, even if the bluebirds are here and the flowers almost out. Oh, I have it, I’m going to choose the name Bluebird—I wonder what that is in Indian?”

“Che-no-sag-ak!” exclaimed a guttural voice, as Marie opened the door of the dining room. “Che-no-sag-ak! Wah! Pale face maiden heap talk much. Ugh!”

“Oh Jack! How you startled me!” cried Marie, shrinking back, with her hands to her breast, as she beheld her brother and his two intimate chums, Phil Anderson and Blake Lathrop, calmly seated at the dining room table, luxuriously regaling themselves on water crackers and old cheese, with some ginger ale which they had evidently smuggled in from the corner grocery.

“What is it?” echoed the voice of Mabel, as she and the other two girls crowded to the portal. “Phil!” she went on, “and Blake! Have you been listening to what we were saying?” she demanded as she marched out and stood half-threateningly over her brother.

“How could we help it—the way you talked?” he inquired, defensively.

“And so Marie is going to be a bluebird; is she?” went on Jack with a grin. “Fine! That’s the Indian for it that I was reciting—‘Che-no-sag-ak!’ Little bluebird of the wildwood, come and let me have thy feathers—have thy feathers for my new hat, for my new hat made of satin. Little——”

His voice died off into a gurgle for Alice, with the intimacy of a chum of Jack’s sister, had clapped her hands over his mouth, to the destruction of a cracker he had been about to munch.

“Look out for that cheese!” warned Phil.

“And the carpet!” added Blake.

“Well, let him stop making fun!” snapped Alice, as she glided away before Jack could take a fair revenge.

“What’s it all about, anyhow?” asked Blake, when quiet had been somewhat restored. “Why all this Indian hocus-pocus? Has a medicine show come to town?”

“It’s the Camp Fire Girls,” declared Jack, trying to get up from the carpet some of the cracker crumbs before Nellie, the maid came in, for Jack and his chums were only in the dining room on sufferance. “Sis has been mooning around the house about it for the last three weeks.”

“I have not, Jack Pendleton!”

“Gibbering about Wood-gatherers, Fire-makers, and what not,” went on the irrepressible brother. “She’s been looking in the back of the dictionary for something or other—I thought she had fallen down on her Latin, and was trying to work off a condition.”

“I was looking for Indian words,” declared Marie, “only I couldn’t find any. You know we can each choose an Indian name,” she went on to her girl chums, ignoring the three boys. “It may be anything, only it ought to mean something in English. But my dictionary doesn’t have any Indian information in it.”

“I have an Indian book at home,” said Blake Lathrop quietly, speaking to all, but looking rather more intently at Natalie. “I think it has a lot of names such as ‘bluebird’ in it. If you girls want to pick out titles for yourselves I’ll bring it over.”

“Oh, will you, really?” cried Mabel. “I want an Indian name, too, if the rest are going to have them.”

“Say, what is this Camp Fire Girls’ racket, anyhow?” asked Phil. “I’ve heard you talking about it, Mabel, but I thought it was one of the Academy societies.”

“It’s nothing of the sort,” declared Alice, while Natalie went to the piano and softly played a weird Indian song, in a haunting minor key.