The Camp Fire Girls at the End of the Trail

To Vera he now appeared a young Sir Galahad riding in front of her. The boy’s hat was off, his fair hair curling over his white forehead, he was pale and thin from his recent illness. But it was a fact that Billy usually had strength for the things he wished to do.

Naturally, Billy Webster had not developed his socialistic ideas alone. Unknown to his parents there had been a laborer on his father’s place, who had once been a school teacher in Russia and because of his views had been compelled to leave. He had been accustomed to come often to Vera’s father’s house, and when Billy was present to talk for hours on his revolutionary propaganda. Moreover, Billy also had a teacher at the High School who, although saner than the Russian, also wished to make the world over according to his own plan. Besides, as Billy was not strong enough to be outdoors so much as the rest of his family, he had spent many quiet hours in reading books on social questions.

“How do you expect to find your way to the place, Billy?” Vera asked, after five or ten minutes’ more of riding in silence.

Again the boy turned his head, laughing cheerfully.

“Sure I don’t know, but I pumped Peggy as much as I could this morning without actually having my plan found out. Besides, I am trusting somewhat to luck. I meant to get some information out of Marshall when he reached camp this morning, but he and Peg went off somewhere to talk. Queer, their being intimate friends all of a sudden, Vera, don’t you think? I agree with Bettina Graham, I never knew two people so unlike. And I don’t know whether I admire Marshall.”

Vera frowned. She cared for Peggy more perhaps than for any of the other Camp Fire girls and she also had been a little surprised at her recent behavior. Yet she answered sensibly:

“It isn’t important, you know, Billy, whether you like Ralph Marshall or not, so long as Peggy does. You know you have said a hundred times you did not think outsiders had a right to interfere with friendships. And Peggy’s pretty clever! If she likes Ralph there must be more to him than the rest of us can see. She don’t like many people.”

Billy nodded. “Yes, that is why I am puzzled. One does not expect nonsense from Peg. And Ralph is rather inclined toward it with most girls. Still you are right, Vera, and I feel a little snubbed – like the fellow always does who is told to practice what he preaches.”

“I didn’t mean to be disagreeable.”

Billy laughed back. “No, you never do and you never are. But, come, let’s cross the road here. We must manage to get lost in the right place – just as Ralph and Peggy did. But do you know, Vera, something already tells me that I am not going to be happy this afternoon? Fact is, I am abominably hungry and we can’t have been riding an hour.”

“Let’s stop, then, and rest for a little while,” the girl suggested. She had been afraid that her companion might grow overtired, as he had taken no long ride before. “You see, I had an idea that we might both develop an appetite, as lunch is so early, so I brought along lots of sandwiches.”

Billy uttered a boyish whoop of delight which had nothing visionary or unselfish in it.

“Trump!” he declared getting off his pony almost at once and then turning to help Vera.

They were in the pine woods, so it was easy enough to find an agreeable resting place under the trees.

In the most natural fashion, after Vera sat down, Billy stretched himself out resting his head in her lap. It was the same as if she had been Peggy, except that he honestly believed she cared for him more than his sister did.

Then he deliberately stuffed himself with sandwiches and talked, as Billy adored doing when he could find a sympathetic audience.

“I just want to find out what those fellows are in hiding for, Vera – not for any special reason,” he insisted. “You see, it gets a little dull, just lying around all day in the sun. I like scenery, but I like it as a background. I am afraid I want a little – a little more – ”

“Excitement,” Vera finished the sentence.

Three-quarters of an hour later Billy Webster had discovered the secret camp.

He and Vera were riding quietly when they came to the circle of hills which Peggy had described. Stopping their ponies they heard the sound of low voices before seeing any one.

Dismounting, Billy asked Vera to wait until his return.

It seemed best that she should allow him to go on his adventure alone, and yet she watched his slender, boyish figure disappear, feeling wretchedly uneasy.

What absurd reason had Billy for wishing to take part in some trouble which assuredly was no affair of his? If anything happened to him, Vera knew that she would always blame herself.

But Billy was entirely unalarmed and, although he was supposed to be timid, he was not even nervous.

He walked straight ahead with his hands in his pockets and a friendly, curious expression in his big, clear eyes.

Billy could not fully explain the reasons for his interest. The excuses he had made of being bored, of wishing to help if the men were in trouble, or if possible to prevent trouble if it were brewing, these were merely somewhat impudent inventions of his. For, after all, what could he do in any case?

The fact of the matter was that Billy simply had been seized by an overwhelming desire to find out what was taking place, and was more inclined than he should have been to yield to his own wishes.

Just as they had been doing the afternoon before, the men were again sitting about a smouldering camp fire, smoking and talking.

Without being observed Billy walked quietly up to them.

The next instant one of the men swung round and cursed him.

Without the least show of fear or anger the boy waited until the fellow had tired himself out. Then, instead of running away, as they plainly wished him to do, he walked a few steps nearer the group.

“I am tired; would you mind my sitting here with you a while?” he asked in a matter-of-fact voice. He seemed so friendly and so totally unafraid that the men must have been favorably impressed. In any case, as no one answered at once, he dropped to the ground between two of the roughest of the group.

Billy had already observed that the men were not of the character Peggy and Ralph suspected them of being.

One of the men now laughed and, leaning over, thrust his evil smelling pipe at the delicate boy. And Billy, who had never smoked a single whiff of anything in his life, took the pipe gravely, put it to his lips drawing in the smoke with several hard puffs. It made him feel slightly ill, yet he never flinched. When he gave it back the man appeared more friendly.

A little later Billy asked two or three simple questions and some one answered him, afterwards they went on talking as if he were not there.

Certainly the boy had some quality which made certain types of people trust him.

Fifteen minutes passed. Resting in a hiding place they had chosen, Vera grew more and more uneasy. If nothing had happened to prevent, why had Billy not returned? If he were all right certainly it was selfish of him not to care for her anxiety and dullness.

But, then, Billy was selfish about little things and Vera recognized the fact. One had to accept this fault in him, feeling there were other characteristics which made one willing to endure it. In big matters the girl believed he had wonderful stores of unselfishness.

Half an hour afterwards Billy came strolling toward her as nonchalantly as he had gone away. Only his eyes were brighter and his expression less boyish.

“We must hurry to get back to camp before dark,” he said, without apologizing for the delay. “I’ll tell you what I found out while we are riding home; but, of course, I understand I have your promise, Vera, never to repeat anything I tell you – no matter what takes place.”

Vera nodded silently. She was accustomed to Billy’s confidences and did not take them all seriously, and this one did not appear as especially important.

“The men have been working on the railroad out here and have gone on a strike. The railroad has refused to come to terms, but they don’t seem to be planning to go away. They are not exactly in hiding, only they want to be left alone until they decide what they are going to do next.”

CHAPTER X

A Good Samaritan

Ellen Deal came out into the September sunshine with a breakfast tray in her hand. The tray chanced to be a flat pine board, but it was covered with a neat little paper napkin. And, although the china on it was rough and failed to match, the aroma of the coffee, the fragrance of the freshly broiled bacon, made one indifferent to details.

The tall young man, who had been lying back in a steamer chair mournfully reading a torn newspaper several days old, suddenly straightened up and smiled.

The instant after he had taken the tray from Ellen’s hands his face clouded.

“Isn’t your breakfast all right?” she asked, a little furrow appearing in her forehead. Ellen’s expression was nearly always serious, but it was even more so now. Although it was so early in the morning and she had been cooking, she looked exquisitely neat in a fresh white blouse, a dark khaki skirt and one of her big hospital aprons. Her sandy-colored hair, a little redder from the past week’s outdoors, was drawn English fashion into a kind of bun at the back of her head. But, although Ellen tried to be prim, and although she could control her face, she had rebellious hair. One knows the kind – it would break out into little ripples on her forehead and at the back of her neck. And her skin, where it was not exposed, had the peculiar whiteness and beauty that belongs to her type of coloring.

The young man in the chair laughed at her question.

“My breakfast is perhaps the most perfect thing that ever happened, or at least that has happened to me in many a day,” he answered. “You see I have been living under my Sister Marta’s ministrations for a year, and Marta thinks herself above cooking. She prefers to follow the fine arts. Truth of the matter is the child has never been taught anything and has never had the right kind of feminine influence. You see, my mother and father died when Marta was a little girl and she and I have spent our lives in boarding houses. I don’t mean to criticise her; the child has made a terrible struggle to take care of me, and it has been awfully hard on her, staying out here in the wilds with a hopeless stick of a brother. You can’t imagine what it means – her discovery of the Camp Fire girls and your kindness. As for you, Miss Deal; well, I haven’t words to express my gratitude. It positively takes away my appetite for breakfast because I feel under such obligation to you.”

Ellen flushed uncomfortably. Her companion was a Southerner and talked easily and charmingly. He might say he did not know how to express his gratitude, but this was not true, for few hours passed in the day without his showing it in one way or another.

However, Ellen had not the gift of self-expression, and cordiality from another seemed to freeze her up. It was this trait of her character which had made Mrs. Burton not care for her much at first, and which kept her from greater intimacy with the girls, except Alice Ashton, who was not unlike her.

Now, instead of appearing gracious, she looked annoyed.

“I have asked you several times not to mention gratitude,” she returned, staring ahead and turning undeniably red. “If I must tell you the truth, I like it better here than at our own camp. That is, I like being useful – not your camp itself – there is no comparison.”

This time her companion showed embarrassment.

“Naturally there is no comparison. My sister’s and my arrangements are of the simplest and I have no doubt Mrs. Burton’s camp leaves nothing to be desired. That is one of the causes of my gratitude. I am afraid we have not been able to make you comfortable, though there is little doubt of what you have done for us.”

Robert Clark glanced around his own quarters. Even outdoors there was a pleasanter sense of order and comfort. An outdoor camp can be made the most disorderly place in the world.

This morning the fire was burning in the right place so that the smoke blew away from the two tents – not toward them. There was no litter of paper and of cans; no broken sticks cluttering the ground. The wood was neatly piled; the very earth itself appeared to have been swept.

“I wish you would eat your breakfast,” Ellen replied curtly.

Then she watched her companion so carefully there was no mistaking her interest, even if her manners were somewhat abrupt.

However, her companion was not in the slightest degree offended. In some way he seemed to understand Ellen’s curtness and her domineering attitude. Perhaps, if she had cared more for herself she would have tried to make herself more agreeable.

“Of course I’ll go back as soon as Marta is strong enough to take proper care of you,” she announced a few moments later as she arose to take away the empty breakfast dishes. “I know my being here makes the place more crowded, but I really would like to stay a few days longer and let Marta have a good time. She is better now and can get about after a fashion, and the Camp Fire girls want her to go on a few of their excursions. Mrs. Burton has taken a fancy to her, I think.”

“Then Marta will be in a seventh heaven. Only, I hope Mrs. Burton will get the nonsense out of her head that she wishes to be an actress. I am afraid, however, just the sight of her may have the opposite effect. You see, Marta and I used to plan to set the world on fire. Most youthful persons do, I was to be a great author and she a great actress. You see what our plans have come to.”

The young man’s tone was utterly despondent.

“I see nothing at all except that you are ill and have come out to Arizona to get well. You have been here a year and I presume you are already better.” There was not the least trace of sympathy in Ellen’s tone.

“As for being a great author, you seem to write all day as it is; so I don’t see how your illness interferes. I don’t suppose you were becoming famous as a newspaper reporter.”

Rob Clark sat upright, his whole face changing, both in color and expression.

“Miss Ellen Deal, you are the best tonic as well as the best nurse I have ever run across. I believe I would have a fighting chance in more ways than one if you were going to stay in my neighborhood until I do get well.”

He had spoken spontaneously and without thinking beforehand. Of course there had been no serious meaning in his words.

But Ellen continued to stand holding the tray and looking at him.

“I am seriously considering staying with you, if you will allow me,” she answered so unexpectedly, that her companion could only stare at her incredulously. “In the last few days I have decided that there is no reason why you should not recover if the right care is taken of you. But I doubt Marta’s ability. She is too untrained and too undisciplined. I am glad she is to come into our Camp Fire circle, where she ought to learn a great deal that will be valuable for her. But it will take some time.”

Robert Clark reached up and took the tray away from Ellen.

“Please sit down again for a moment,” he asked, pointing to the camp chair she had just occupied.

“What you have just said does me more good than you imagine. My sister and I haven’t many friends; we have always been poor, and an ancestry that has not made good in the last generation does not count for much nowaday – not even in the South. Then, you are very kind to try to brace me up; but a fellow is a quitter who breaks down in his early twenties and has to live on the money a few friends and relations furnish him and his sister. So you see, even if I would give my right hand to have you remain with us until you get really tired, why we just can’t afford it. A nurse like you. Miss Deal, is a luxury no man is rich enough to deserve.”

Although Ellen had sat down as her companion requested, she did not seem to be paying much attention to his words. But, at the last sentence, she frowned.

“Don’t be absurd. Of course, I know you can’t afford the expense of a trained nurse or you would have had one. You haven’t even a cook, and a cook may be more important than a nurse in your present condition. But I know how to cook as well as nurse. I have known ever since I was a little girl. New England girls are brought up sensibly. And I am not a trained nurse. At least I am not a graduate. I have simply been staying out here in the West as a guest of Mrs. Burton until I got over a slight breakdown. There was nothing the matter with me but being tired, and I feel splendid now.”

Ellen stopped a moment and seemed to be thinking deeply.

“I don’t see why you can’t let me stay here for a while with you and your sister without paying me. I have accepted Mrs. Burton’s hospitality when I didn’t even know her. I thought I might be useful in case any of the Camp Fire girls were ill, but they keep perfectly well. I think I am tired being idle, and I have money enough to pay my share of expenses with you. They cannot be much.”

Ellen was tactless.

Robert Clark was a Southerner and shrank from a discussion of money matters at all times. Ellen’s speech had touched him where his nerves were raw.

“Thank you, very much, but your suggestion is entirely out of the question,” he answered coldly. He had a sensitive, well-bred face, made more so by illness. Now his manner showed a hauteur of which he was wholly unconscious.

Ellen felt strangely ill at ease. She had a sensation of shrinking, of shriveling up, inside her. Then, to her intense anger, her eyes filled with tears. She hated herself for having hurt her companion and she hated him for having hurt her. But, most of all, she was horribly ashamed of her own tactlessness – her fashion of making people dislike her when she had intended being kind.

“I am sorry,” she said a little huskily in spite of her efforts to speak calmly, “I did not mean to force myself upon you and your sister. Of course you will be happier alone, and I am sure you will soon be stronger.”

What the young man would have answered could not be known, for just then Marta came out of her tent. She still limped a little but was not using a crutch.

Her eccentric, somewhat irregular face was radiant, and she was wearing her same best grey-green dress.

“When do you think the Camp Fire party will come for me, Miss Deal? You are an angel to stay here and let me go on this expedition with them. I am so happy I would like to dance with one leg, even if the other is slightly out of commission. But what is the matter, Rob; why are you looking so grouchy?”

Marta had come up close to the older girl and her brother and now surveyed him severely.

“Don’t mind Rob, if he is having a tantrum, Miss Deal. He does now and then, though I must say he has a better disposition than I have. If I were you I would just go away and leave him for a little while. When he gets lonely he is sure to behave better. Come with me, won’t you, and let us see if the Camp Fire party is nearly here.”

Ellen and Marta moved a few steps away. They had not gone far before they heard the old Camp Fire call.

“Wo-he-lo for work, wo-he-lo for health, wo-he-lo for love.”

CHAPTER XI

The Canyon

“There is a song in the canyon below me,And a song in the pines overhead, —As the sun creeps down from the snow-lineAnd startles the deer from its bed;With mountains of green all around me,And mountains of white up above,And mountains of blue in the distance,I follow the trail that I love.”

When the verse ceased and Peggy had turned around, there was a little burst of applause.

The little poem she had just recited was so perfectly descriptive of the scene surrounding the Camp Fire party at this moment that it was almost as if it had been created for the place and the occasion.

They had come part of the way down one of the easier trails leading to the Grand Canyon and had reached a broad, flat rock like a table-land. On it there was a growth of scrub pine; way below the deep, subdued roar of the Colorado River and beyond the blue, snow-topped hills.

Peggy was standing at the edge of the plateau of rock looking down the trail which descended lower into the canyon, when the lines of the song had occurred to her and she had spoken them aloud.

She was one of a group of half a dozen or more persons near enough to hear what she was saying while the others were not far away in the background.

“That is charming, Peggy,” Gerry declared when the applause ended. “I do envy your being able to remember a thing so delightfully appropriate. I never can at the right moment. But it isn’t like you, Peggy, to be reciting poetry; one might have expected it of Bettina. I believe you are in love.”

She spoke good-naturedly but with a little teasing inflection that only Gerry had at her command among the Camp Fire girls.

However, Peggy laughed and shrugged her shoulders.

“Of course I am in love. I am in love with the whole world and I never have been half so much so before in my life. Who wouldn’t be in such a place on such a day and in such society?”

Peggy made a slight grimace and bowed to her assembled friends, but by accident her gaze rested last on Ralph Marshall’s eyes and she flushed a little.

“Who of you is going a portion of the way down the trail with Ralph and me before lunch?” she asked. “Mother says she is willing if we don’t go far and are depressingly careful. I have promised not to put one foot before the other without taking thought.”

“Oh, your mother will trust you to me. I have asked her consent,” Ralph protested.

Gerry and Sally both giggled. Ralph’s speech had been made in good faith and without the least idea of a double meaning, but they were apt to be silly and sentimental on subjects they had better not have been considering while they were Camp Fire girls.

Fortunately, Peggy did not even see the point in their sudden amusement. She was waiting to have some one except Ralph Marshall reply to her question.

“I do wish you would not go, Peggy. The rest of us are satisfied with this view of the canyon for today, at least. We did not plan to go further down,” Bettina Graham protested, looking anxious. “I would go with you if I dared, but you know how I hate looking down great distances.”

Peggy laughed. “Oh, you are not to come, ‘Tall Princess.’ We would not have you along for a great deal. Remember what a time we had with you on a much less difficult trail. But I thought some one of the others – ” She turned toward Sally and Alice Ashton and their companions, Terry Benton and Howard Brent.

Terry shook his head, but for some unknown reason appeared a little uncomfortable.

“Not today, Miss Peggy. Under the circumstances I don’t feel I ought to make the third.”

But Peggy paid no attention to Terry Benton’s refusal, because almost immediately Howard Brent interrupted him.

“I am coming along,” he announced brusquely.

Peggy waved her hand.

“Good-bye; I ought to be safe with two escorts.”

Then, with Ralph Marshall in front and Howard Brent behind, the three started down the second trail.

From the fat plateau of rock a second trail descended to another ledge below. The first trail had been gentle and the Camp Fire party had come down to their present resting place without difficulty. But the second trail was a steeper and more dangerous kind.

It was cut into the side of the rock and filled with loose stones and gravel. After the first turn, the rocks on the one side rose up almost perpendicularly and descended with equal abruptness on the other.

There were other trails deeper and deeper, down toward the bottom of the canyon, but these Peggy had promised not to attempt. However, they would have taken too long a time to follow and would have required the service of a guide.

But this particular strata of rocks was still in what is known as the limestone formation. Now and then blocks of blood red showed through the scrubby patches of underbrush, and then there would be a line of grey sandstone, so that the red and grey looked like alternating ribbons.

Twenty feet below the starting place the little party of three stopped to wave to the group above them. They had previously come down through the white wall of stone which now rose like a mountain of snow above them.