Margaret Vandercook - The Camp Fire Girls at the End of the Trail

The castle had been built before the first known palace in Europe. It was fashioned centuries ago inside the walls of a stone cliff with two taller cliffs rising on either side. Beyond was a break between, allowing a narrow entrance to the cliff dwelling from the outside. In front there was a small plateau of rock ending in a precipice, which descended with a drop of a hundred feet to a new ledge, and then came another still deeper fall.

That afternoon a group of four persons were inside the ancient cliff dwelling. One of them – a young girl in an odd costume which was partly modern and yet suggesting an older race – had climbed to the crest of the ruins and stood, with her hand above her eyes, gazing about her.

Another girl, in a chamber below, was sitting upon a comfortable camp stool which she had undoubtedly brought with her, she was hammering industriously with a small steel hammer, and now and then stopped to work with her chisel at a solid stone wall. Evidently she believed some extraordinary treasure was embedded inside, since she never glanced away from her labors.

On the bottom floor historic influences had not kept the two remaining girls from the cheering occupation of preparing tea. The wood must have been brought from the country behind the cliffs, for a camp fire was burning in the old stone chamber, with a large kettle of water simmering above it.

One of the two girls – tall and foreign in appearance, with large dark eyes and thick dark hair parted in the middle over a low brow – left her task now and then. She would then walk twenty yards or more toward a figure lying quietly in the sunshine. In spite of the warmth this figure was wrapped in a great blanket which allowed only a fair head and thin face to show forth.

If no attention was vouchsafed her, she would quietly return to her occupation. But, by and by, without speaking, she came and spread a small cloth on a flat surface of rock. Then she unpacked an Indian basket stored with things for making tea. Immediately afterwards, putting her fingers to her lips, she summoned the other girls to join her.

In response Alice Ashton rose up at once and carefully stored away her precious bits of stone and her hammer and chisel into the bag she carried for the purpose. Then she climbed down the jagged but secure steps cut into the face of the rock so many years ago.

But Peggy Webster, at the summit of the cliff dwelling, refused to descend in any such sensible fashion.

Instead, she began to slide over the face of the rock, losing and then regaining her foothold. Below the others watched her half fascinated and half annoyed.

“Peggy!” one of the girls called warningly.

For Vera Lageloff had seen her safely reach a flat surface about ten feet from the plateau below. She had walked out to the edge of it and there stood poised for a moment with her back to the sun. Her pose was as virile and graceful as that of a young boy.

Then, before the watchers exactly realized her purpose, she had crouched and sprung from the ledge. For the instant she was in the air she was a figure of bronze and crimson. The moment had struck the earth, she was merely Peggy Webster, in a khaki Camp Fire costume with a red band about her black hair and a little out of breath from her plunge.

“There I have been wondering if I could accomplish that feat ever since I arrived in this stone age country,” she announced penitently, appearing more ashamed of her performance than proud.

“Well, as long as you are gratified and still alive, Peggy, I only request that you never make the same attempt again,” Betty Graham returned, her color returning swiftly, now that her momentary nervousness had passed. For she had come away from her task of guarding the fire just in time to behold the other girl’s act.

“Really, since we came West, Peggy dear, I am becoming more and more convinced that the Fates never intended you for a feminine person,” she went on. “There is never any guessing what reckless thing you may do next. I am afraid an accident may happen to you.”

While she was speaking, Bettina Graham had taken her seat on the ground and had begun pouring the hot water into a tea-kettle of generous size.

Peggy now dropped down beside her.

“Don’t say I am masculine, please, Bettina; I do so hate a masculine woman. Your last remark was only a more polite way of expressing the same unpleasant idea. Why don’t you say instead that I am ‘Seraphita?’ She is Balzac’s charming character – half girl, half boy, neither and both. When I am in favor with Tante she has a way of declaring me another Seraphita.”

“Besides your sudden plunge might have frightened Billy,” Vera Lageloff interrupted, not realizing how her speech betrayed the interest usually uppermost in her mind.

The figure, still wrapped in the blanket, was at present sitting up, looking from one girl to the other in a quietly disinterested fashion.

“Oh, no, I am never worried over Peggy when she is attempting athletic feats,” he announced. “She will never do herself serious harm in that way. What I fear for her, what I know will hurt her some day, are the experiences about which she is so scornful at present. You see she is perfectly convinced that she will never care for any human being outside her family and a few friends. So nothing and no one can ever harm her.”

Billy Webster accepted the cup of tea and a comfortable number of sandwiches which Vera now offered him.

“Don’t be absurd, Billy,” Peggy challenged, her face reddening in spite of her effects to appear undisturbed. “As far as you are concerned you will look ever so much better as soon as you cease behaving like an invalid. I do believe you are in better health than you wish us to think you are.”

“Perhaps I am; really I don’t exactly know,” Billy returned dispassionately, as if he were speaking of some one else. He was holding his cup and gazing over its rim. “I do enjoy having so little asked of me. It has never happened before, as I have always been expected to do the things I dislike. Now, I would far rather be half ill than to have to shoot and fish and do the kind of things Dan and the other fellows out here like to do. Besides, I really tried to make myself ill, so that father would have to consent to my coming West.”

Billy made this announcement without embarrassment, but not as if he cared whether or not it were believed.

It was his sister, Peggy, who flushed uncomfortably as she always did over her brother’s oddities. To her truthful mind and straightforward nature his peculiarities were impossible to understand.

But Billy did not look as if his words had been altogether true. In spite of his sister’s speech, he was far more fragile than he had been when she had said farewell to him at their farm in New Hampshire a few months before. She had then started west to join her aunt, Mrs. Burton, and become a member of the Sunrise Hill Camp Fire club in Arizona.

At this instant and without being observed, Vera shook her head at Peggy.

If no one else understood Billy Webster’s vagaries, the Russian girl with whom he had so deep a friendship apparently did, or if not she usually had an excuse for him.

But Peggy suddenly remembered that her brother was not supposed to know how ill he had been.

Then, almost at the same time, an interruption followed in the form of an extraordinary sound, or combination of sounds. First there was the long-drawn-out wail of annoyance and protest made by a small western burro; then an intermingling of faint shrieks of fear with gay laughter.

Peggy and Bettina both ran forward to the narrow opening between the two cliff walls. Then they beheld an extremely pretty, rather plump woman, with rose-colored cheeks and grey in her brown hair, riding astride a burro. The burro was being lead by another woman of the same age, extraordinarily like and yet unlike the other one. The woman on foot was more slender and paler, her hair was darker and not grey, and her eyes a deeper blue.