Chapter XVII: A Novel Santa Claus

"It's an Owl!"

"Only an owl--a little screech owl! Not--not so little, either! Where did it come from?"

"Yes! How on earth did it get in? Doors--windows--all are screened."

"Glory halleluiah! It came down the chimney. Look--look at the black on its feathers, the wood-smuts clinging to it! Down the big chimney of the living room!"

"Like Santa Claus down the chimney! Mercy! d'you suppose it played Santa itself? or did the boys push it down?"

"The boys! Those miserable Henkyl Hunters--always on the trail of a joke! If they did, they'll never own up! Never!"

Such was the substance of the uproar as the downy ball of mopping feathers took on a beak, claws and big brown eyes, blank and round, perching upon the foot-rail of a cot!

"Oh! it's as bad as the bats in Tory Cave. And they were so-o hor-rid!" wailed Una. "It--it just tickled my lips with its wing. Bah!"

"Bad! It's not bad, at all; it's dear," cooed Jessie, the merle, feeling instant kinship with the bewildered bird. "Girls! Girls! I believe it's blind--blind as a bat, or as the pale fish in the cave. There it goes--look--knocking its head, this way and that, against the wall!"

Yes, the fluttering thing, of a sudden taking to flight again, was now playing shuttlecock, feathered shuttlecock, to the battledore of a broad sunbeam which batted it wildly hither and yon.

"Oh! keep back--quiet--maybe, 'twill settle down again," pleaded the merle.

"Hasn't it the face of a cunning little kitten? Such a wise, blinking, round-eyed kitten! Its head is reddish, not gray--and the rufous markings on its breast, too! Oh-h! I wonder if the boys did catch it in the woods and thought it was a good 'henkyl' to put down our chimney?"

But that, as the girls knew, would remain as blind a puzzle as the long, screened dormitory was to the dazzled owl, unable to see clearly in daylight, out visiting when he should have been in bed in the cool, dark hollow of a tree.

"Oo-oo-oo-ooo ... cluck!" it cooed and grumbled, pressing a dappled breast and wide-spread wings against a screen, the mottled back-feathers ruffling into a huge breeze-swept pompon.

"See! He's playing he's a big owl."

"Oh! I wonder if he'd let me--let me catch him." Jessie sighed yearningly.

"Do-o, and we'll tame him--keep him for a mascot!" It was a general acclamation.

And the feathered Santa, apparently having no objection to this rele--finding himself no longer a waif in Babel--finally settled down again on the glittering head-rail of Una's cot, his fluffy breast to the outdoor sunlight, his solemn, kittenish face--the head turning round on a pivot without the movement of a muscle in the body--confronting sagely the delighted girls.

"Isn't he the dearest thing? Oh! I'm glad the boys played the trick--if it was the boys. I'd rather think he played Santa himself."

There was no inkling in Jessie's mind, as, so murmuring and softly barefoot, she stole up to the visitor, now motionless as a painted bird, of a much worse trick that those freakish Henkyl Hunters might play, a girl abetting them, too--shocking fact--before night fell again upon the pearly Bowl.

"Oo-oo-ooo! Boo! See me reverse!" It seemed to be what the owl was saying to the maidens as he turned the tables on them again and again with that teetotum trick of his swivel neck.

But he did not scream any more or offer the least objection when the merle took him to her tender breast, cooing reassurance.

"There! you've got a new singing teacher, Jess--a little screech owl. Little! My! he's big for a small-eared owl, isn't he?--nearly a foot long. Brush the camouflage off him--the smuts of the chimney!"

"Well--well, whether he enacted Santa Claus of his own accord, or whether he didn't--" thus Tanpa broke in on the last flow of speech which was a medley--"he's brought us one gift, anyway, the gift of a glorious day for our annual White Birch celebration."

It did prove a banner day, from the breakfast out of doors on the wide piazza in that matchless warmth of early summer when buds are bursting, trees singing themselves into leaf--for "all deep things are song--" when the inquisitive breeze peeps longingly into the yellow heart of the first wild rose and May is bourgeoning, flowering, into the joy of June.

Below the bungalow the three-mile lake, a mile and a half across--the transfigured Bowl--was still a softly glowing pearl, treasured in cotton-wool mists which entirely hid its real framing of lofty hills.

"When the mountains cease playing blindman's buff with each other, then--then it will be time for our morning swim, won't it? The first real swim of the season, too," murmured Tomoke, the signaling maiden, nestling coaxingly near to the presiding Guardian.

"Yes, if you think the water will be warm enough."

"Oh! it was quite warm yesterday when we paddled out around the float--the floating pier." Jessie, who was tempting the feathered Santa Claus, pampered captive under her arm, with every tidbit she could think of, from cereal to lake-cod caught by the girls themselves, looked down at that buoyant pier--a golden raft, at the moment--tossing a dozen yards from the base of a fifteen-foot cliff where the shore jumped sharply down to the water. Yesterday it had been wreathed with boughs for the coming festival: the swimming structure, naevely composed of two great barrels, boarded over, with a broad plank, as a bridge, running out ashore.

To it a couple of shining canoes and two broad camp boats were moored; it also served as a springboard for diving.

Built by girl-carpenters themselves--with a little masculine help--presently to be garlanded with daisy-chains and buttercups, for the June carnival, and to hide its crudity, it stood, so the Guardian thought, exquisitely for the practical and the poetic in Camp Fire life, which ever in "glorifying Work" seeks Beauty!

The sun was seeking that too, just now, gloating over his own noble reflection in the green-lipped Bowl,--benevolently promising, indeed, a day hot for the season, as well as radiant.

"Yes! the temperature has taken a leap ahead," said Tanpa musingly. "I think you can go in--for a short swim, any way."

"Notify me--notify me if you see me drowning--for I can't hear the voice of doom through my bathing cap!" laughed Una Grosvenor, two hours later, in consequence of this permission, wading coyly out beyond the float, to where the lake-water rose over the crossed logs of the Camp Fire emblem on the breast of her blue bathing suit.

"Oh! she's in no danger of drowning; she swims better than I--I do-o now," shivered Pemrose, rather wishing that June were July and the Bowl had undergone the gradual glow of a heating process. "Aren't you coming, Thrush?" she cried. "Aren't you coming in, Jessie?"

"I can't leave the owl! I believe the boys meant him as an anniversary present--though they went about presenting him in a queer way," was the fostering answer.

The other girls, however, were in the water, as those grigs of boys had been before them; the Bowl seemed to froth with their laughter, spray creaming around the bare, sunflushed arms flung above it, as if the lake itself, in festive mood, were a sentient sharer in the joy of these daring June bathers.

"Now--now who wants to dress and come out in the boats for a study of pond-life under the microscope?" cried the Guardian.

"Whoo! Whoo! That--that's a bait to which the fish always rise," cried one and another, eagerly splashing ashore blue of brow and covered with gooseflesh, yet loath to admit that on this the feathered Santa Claus' gift of a prematurely perfect June day the creamy Bowl was still too emphatically a cooler.

Up the rude sod steps of the cliff they trooped--a bevy of shivers--fleeing for warmth and the shelter of the bungalow.

"Oo-oo-oo! I've never been in bathing so early in the year before," shook out Pemrose, to whom the experience--the lingering chill of this mountain Bowl many hundred feet above sea-level--was rather too much of a weak parody upon her last freshwater ducking.

"Oh! you'll soon warm up. Come, hurry and dress! It's no end of fun studying water-snails and egg-boats--gnats' funny egg-boats--under a microscope, with the Scoutmaster," encouraged Tomoke, in everyday life Ina Atwood, blue as her lightning namesake, and rather hankering after the warmth of her pine-knot torch.

"Ye-es; and--and minnows--where every one of them is--is a chief Triton among the minnows!" laughed another girl, scrambling into her clothes. "Meaning no minnows, at all--all-ll Tritons!"

All Tritons, sure enough, rosy Tritons, brilliant now in the early summer, the breeding season, with wonderful colors, the males, especially.

Swimming about, near the surface, as the minnows usually do, the clear waters of the June Bowl became for the girls, looking, one by one through the large microscope over the boat's side, a "vasty deep" in which leviathans played--fairy fish--seeing everything rose-color, painting themselves to ecstasy with the joys of mating, the joy of June.

"See--see they're not all red--or partly so--s-such a lovely pinky-red, especially around the fins and head--that's where they keep their pigment," said Tanpa. "Some have colored themselves like goldfish; others are greenish--or lighter yellow."

"Ha! While others, again, are gotten up as if for a minstrel show for their marriage--painted black, for the time being!" laughed her husband, the tall Scout Officer.

"Yes. That's why we like, girls and boys, to come down to our camp early in the season--if only at intervals--because we watch the summer coming and can study the wonderful lake life as at no other time," remarked the Guardian again, and then subsided into private life in the stern of the broad, red camp-skiff, scribbling something in verse form to be read at the White Birch celebration in the afternoon when land as well as lake was a-riot with young color, strewn with wild flowers for gay June to tread on.

"Oh! isn't it the most wonderful--wonderful season? In the city we go camping too late. The freshness isn't there." Pem's eyes were dim as she applied one to the lens of the microscope, to gaze once more at the painted Tritons; she was glad that in the freshness of the year it was--oh! so soon now--that the little Thunder Bird would momentarily color the skies and paint the World rose-colored in excitement over its demonstration--over the heights that could be reached--paving the way for the Triton of Tritons to come.

"Well! if we spend any more time with the minnows, we'll have to 'cut out' the 'fresh-water sheep', the little roaches, and the insects' egg-boats," said the Scoutmaster. "Speaking of the latter, I saw a curious one yesterday upon a stagnant pool over on the other side of the lake; perhaps the visitors would be interested in it."

The visitors were interested in the bare mention. Warming equally to comfort and excitement again, they clamored--Pemrose and Una--for a sight of that raft of gnats' eggs, so cunningly formed and glued together, minute egg to egg, hundreds of them, that it was a regular lifeboat--no storm could sink it, and pressure only temporarily.

Yet, after all, Pemrose only half heard the Scoutmaster's explanation of how the insect chose a floating stick or straw as a nucleus, placed her forelegs on it and laid the egg upon her hind ones, holding it there until she had brought forth another to join it, gluing the two together by their sticky coating,--and so on till the broad and buoyant boat was constructed!

Pemrose hardly heard, for as the party made its way to that stagnant pool, an overflow at some time of the sparkling Bowl, and hidden in a dense little wood, she had a sudden demonstration of how, under certain circumstances, a girl's heart is much more capsizable than a gnat's egg-boat.

Hers positively turned turtle--yes! really, turned turtle--at sight of a long, gray figure lying, breast down, amid undergrowth upon the margin of a little stream that was hurrying away from it to the lake.

She felt momentarily topsy-turvy, every bit of her, for anywhere on earth--aye, even if she were scouring space with the Thunder Bird--she would recognize that angular figure.

It had once pulled her up a snow-bank to the distant rumble of an engine's explosion.

Yes, and surely she had seen it again, once again, since then--although, sandwiched as it now was between egg-boats and painted Tritons she could not--for the moment--remember where.

"Fine day! Having luck? Catching anything?" hailed the Scoutmaster, with genial interest, as one woodsman to another, for the figure was angling with a fly-rod.

The latter shot a side long glance at the party from under a broad Panama hat,--then jammed that, rather uncivilly, further down upon his head.

"Bah! The fish aren't ex-act-ly jumping out of the water, saying 'Hullo!' to you!" it returned in the freakish drawl of a masked battery, shrinking deeper into cover amid the ferns.

Yet, when the Nature students had passed on, one quivering girl, with ears intently on the alert, heard it fire off something in the same fern-cloaked rumble about a certain fly being a "perfect peach" to fish with.

And the answer came in clear, ringing, boyish tones--from another angler presumably--momentarily rainbowing the wood.

"Yes--sure--that Parmachene belle is _the girl_, Dad! If--if there's a trout in the stream, she'll put the 'come hither!' on it."

"Bah! Likening a trout-fly to a girl! So like his 'nickum' impudence!" Pem's teeth--in her present mood--came together with a snap. And, of course, she couldn't see the gnat's raft when she arrived at the stagnant puddle, for she had borrowed the gnat's sting with which to barb the snub which she meant to inflict, some time, upon that angling youth who had sat, unabashed, in the Devil's Chair,--if ever luck held out a chance.

"Yes--yes! and if he had played Jack at a Pinch forty-eleven million times, I'd do it." Her eyes were flashing now like the sky-dots in the pool, forked by iridescent shadows. "So--so _here's_ where they have their camp," craning her neck for a glimpse of a log-cabin amid the spruces. "Stud said it was just across the lake from the girls'!"

After that--well! who could be interested in gnat-boats when they had just lit upon the ambush of a Puzzle; a puzzle that would only open in a pinch and shut up, like a Chinese ring-box, afterwards?

And, moreover, that woodland lurking-place was just a bare mile and a half across the Bowl from the floating barrel pier, decked, as it was built, by girls' hands, and from the great heart's-ease bungalow, now, too, in process of decoration for the gala time in the afternoon around the White Birch totem; and for the blissful, far-off event, drawing nearer with every shining moment, the brilliant piazza, dance in the evening!