ing up in the
firelight into a harlequin patchwork of merry gleams. "A henkyl! Why-y!
it's a joke. A joke that they're forever chasing up and down, trying to
get a laugh against somebody,--that absurd brigade!"

"Companionship with a Thunder Bird has sharpened your wits," smiled the
Guardian. "A practical joke it is, that most elusive thing to pull off
whole, point and all, with the laugh entirely on one side! Well! we
mustn't give them any occasion to turn the chase against us, air their
wit in our direction, by failing in our demonstration presently--the
signaling practice to which we challenged them; eh, Tomoke?"

"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!"

CHAPTER XII

OLD ROUND-TOP

"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'