ht as well
whistle jigs to a milestone--so-o you might!"

CHAPTER XVI

THE COUNCIL FIRE

"Across the lake in golden glory,
The fairy gleams of sunlight glow.
Another day of joy is ending,
The clouds of twilight gather low."

Another day of joy, indeed! Without peril of rattlesnake--or marplot
nickum to spoil it!

"'Varnish right--and aeroplane wrong!' That's what _he_ said when
they laid that trap to get us out of the cave, without any fuss. But I
say it's: 'Varnish right--and puzzle wrong!' All wrong!" snapped Pemrose
to herself again and again, repeating an old saying during the week
following that first Get Together. "Nobody--nobody has a right to drift
around as a puzzle, these days! If ever I get a chance, see me snub him
har-rd--though he did rescue me twice! Well, thank goodness! it was the
Scoutmaster, not he, who played Jack at a Pinch in Tory Cave."

And it was the Scoutmaster, in days gone by, with the help of his boys,
who had built the great stone fireplace in the girls' bungalow in which
a brilliant Council Fire was now blazing. Across the lake the golden
glory stole, and girls came tip-toeing to the hearth-flame in soft,
ceremonial dress, fringed and beaded, the firelight, like dawn, flushing
the pearl of their headbands,--and Pem forgot the enigma of that
eighteen-year-old youth who seemed to have a trick of bobbing up, now
and again, under the lee of a summer holiday, like some menacing spar to
leeward of a vessel in fair sail.

Well! to recall Stud's figure of speech, nobody was "whistling jigs" to
his milestone heart now--or trying to. The fire was the fiddler; and wax
was not softer or more responsive than the pliant breasts on which its
music fell.

"I watched a log in the fireplace burning."

They whispered it one to another and under the spell of its
transfiguring lay, bent forward, they witnessed the last act in a
pine-tree pantomime.

A dazzling transformation scene it was: in the glow they could see,
summed up, each transition of light and heat that went before: dawn's
tender flame, the fierce blaze of high noon, ruby rays of evening
streaming now across the Bowl--hill-girt lake without--gathered, all
gathered, in a golden age behind them to feed the sap of a noble tree,
here poured forth, amid a radiant ballet of flame and spark, to furnish
life, light--inspiration--to a Council Fire.

"I watched a log in the fireplace burning,
Oh! if I, t