Six o’clock—and packs weighing heavily! Una next door to trailing hers by its cross ropes in the dust—almost like the can at the old dog’s tail—but the hand of Pemrose or warm “Copper-nob” steadied it upon her back!
Six o’clock! And it was not their fit-for-fit song of the Mountains At Home that steadied pluck now, kept girlish feet from slipping backward on the trail but the song made sacred in mud and mettle by their brothers over there:
“Oh! it’s not the pack that you carry on your back, Nor the rifle on your shoulder, Nor the five-inch crust of khaki-colored dust, That makes you feel your limbs are growing older, It’s not the hike on the hard turnpike That wipes away your smile, Nor the socks of sister’s that raise the blooming blisters, It’s the last—long—mile!”
“Oh! it’s not the dusty highway, That—Camp Fire Girls don’t mind! And it’s not the thirsty hiking, There are always springs—to find. Oh! it’s not the mountain climbing, Our jol-ly packs are light! It’s not even snakes nor ’squitoes, It’s the—sleeping out—at—night.
“Sleeping out in the quiet night, With the stars for bedroom candle-light, Boo! Woo! Woo-oo!”
Around the waning camp fire the wail of a parody rang, voicing or burlesquing the sentiments of a dozen Camp Fire Girls.
The other half dozen were loftily silent. They were seasoned campers—or supposed they were. They had dwelt much upon the hike on the bliss of the poncho-bed, with a mattress of pine or spruce boughs—the bliss that never clung to wall or bedstead of a paper-hung room.
“It’s not the stars for big candle tonight; it’s the moon, a full, bright moon; there she’s rising now,” said a seventeen-year-old girl, Madeline Fitch. “How about a ring concert?”
“We’re too far from any strong sending station here, I think, to pick up anything by radio—even a murmur, with such a tiny set,” said Pemrose Lorry. “But I’ll try it if you like. Here, Unie,” to her girl chum, “you put the ring on; I’ll play ‘ground’—sink my heel into the edge of the spring—there. But, heavens! you mustn’t pickle the crystal,” she was gasping deliriously, a moment later, interposing a quick palm to catch the little tear of homesickness and novelty—swollen, perhaps by the remembrance of strange sensations experienced when last she had “listened in” on the ring—which came trickling down Una’s pretty nose.