"Not an aeroplane in sight! Not a single one!" breezed the girls, all ready to be angry. "Who--who put that hoax over?" "Varnish right--and aeroplane wrong!" It was the freakish voice of a nickum which answered. "No! No buzzer, as the boys say, but there was a rattler, in there, beside that rock. If some of you girls had gone ahead, you'd have stepped right on him!" "A 'rattler!' A big rattlesnake! And--and you started the cry, to get us out quietly--quickly!" "Not we! The Scoutmaster had the presence of mind to launch an aeroplane. We boomed it," came the laughing reply, as Jack at a Pinch, second fiddle now, marched off with his companions. "Who--is he?" Pemrose caught wildly at the arm of Stud, who was wishing that he and not those patronizing big boys had caught the Scoutmaster's cue and created airdrawn aeroplanes by the corps. "Do you--do you know who he is; that biggest--that gaudiest--one among them?" "Yes! No-o! I do--an' I don't!" stammered the boyish Henkyl Hunter. "I--we--" indicating his scout brothers--"have met him a couple of times in the woods; I guess his father an' he have a camp on the opposite side of the lake from ours. We've talked with him--tried to be friendly. And he--he's always jolly, you know--like now! But--but when it comes to finding out anything about either of them, gee, you might 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.