"A henkyl! Oh! if you ask _them_, they say it's a freak of an animal that they hunt up and down in the woods, trying to get its scalp, or--or catch it alive. Which they seldom or never do!" Jessie's eyes sparkled. "Stud says a whole 'henkyl' is hard to capture; it's so sure to shed its horns or its teeth just as you pounce upon it." Pem was staring intently at the speaker, her black brows drawn together over eyes as speculatively blue as ever they had been in Toandoah's laboratory when grasping, or trying to, grave problems of the air. "Oh! I know. I know!" she cried suddenly, the blue breaking 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.