The Camp Fire Girls; Or, The Secret of an Old Mill — John Shaqi
The Camp Fire Girls; Or, The Secret of an Old MillGaris, Howard Roger
Philosophy
The Camp Fire Girls; Or, The Secret of an Old Mill
Garis, Howard Roger
Camp Fire Girls -- Juvenile fiction; Haunted places -- Juvenile fiction; Mystery and detective stories
“No, nothing has happened,” said Natalie slowly. “I was just thinking
what delightful fun we would have this summer if we could really gather
around a camp fire of our own, out in the open.”
“Well, why couldn’t we?” asked Marie. “Let’s think about it, anyhow. I’m
going to ask Nellie to make tea. It’s real chilly, even if the bluebirds
are here and the flowers almost out. Oh, I have it, I’m going to choose
the name Bluebird—I wonder what that is in Indian?”
“Che-no-sag-ak!” exclaimed a guttural voice, as Marie opened the door of
the dining room. “Che-no-sag-ak! Wah! Pale face maiden heap talk much.
Ugh!”
“Oh Jack! How you startled me!” cried Marie, shrinking back, with her
hands to her breast, as she beheld her brother and his two intimate
chums, Phil Anderson and Blake Lathrop, calmly seated at the dining room
table, luxuriously regaling themselves on water crackers and old cheese,
with some ginger ale which they had evidently smuggled in from the
corner grocery.
“What is it?” echoed the voice of Mabel, as she and the other two girls
crowded to the portal. “Phil!” she went on, “and Blake! Have you been
listening to what we were saying?” she demanded as she marched out and
stood half-threateningly over her brother.
“How could we help it—the way you talked?” he inquired, defensively.
“And so Marie is going to be a bluebird; is she?” went on Jack
with a grin. “Fine! That’s the Indian for it that I was
reciting—‘Che-no-sag-ak!’ Little bluebird of the wildwood, come
and let me have thy feathers—have thy feathers for my new hat, for
my new hat made of satin. Little——”
His voice died off into a gurgle for Alice, with the intimacy of a chum
of Jack’s sister, had clapped her hands over his mouth, to the
destruction of a cracker he had been about to munch.
“Look out for that cheese!” warned Phil.
“And the carpet!” added Blake.
“Well, let him stop making fun!” snapped Alice, as she glided away
before Jack could take a fair revenge.
“What’s it all about, anyhow?” asked Blake, when quiet had been somewhat
restored. “Why all this Indian hocus-pocus? Has a medicine show come to
town?”
“It’s the Camp Fire Girls,” declared Jack, trying to get up from the
carpet some of the cracker crumbs before Nellie, the maid came in, for
Jack and his chums were only in the dining room on sufferance. “Sis has
been mooning around the house about it for the last three weeks.”
“I have not, Jack Pendleton!”
“Gibbering about Wood-gatherers, Fire-makers, and what not,” went on the
irrepressible brother. “She’s been looking in the back of the dictionary
for something or other—I thought she had fallen down on her Latin, and
was trying to work off a condition.”
“I was looking for Indian words,” declared Marie, “only I couldn’t find
any. You know we can each choose an Indian name,” she went on to her
girl chums, ignoring the three boys. “It may be anything, only it ought
to mean something in English. But my dictionary doesn’t have any Indian
information in it.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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