The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit | Page 3

Hildegard G. Frey
When
Sahwah traveled she traveled with all her might and there was nothing
visible to the naked eye that she did not notice, inquire about, and store
up for future reference. She observed down to the last nail wherein a
Pullman differed from a day coach; she found out why the man ran
along beside the train at the stations and hit the wheels with a hammer;
why the cars had double windows; what the semaphore signals
indicated; why the east-bound freight trains were so much more heavily
loaded than the west-bound; she noticed that there were no large
steamboats running on the Susquehanna, although it looked like a very
large river; she counted the number of times they crossed the river on
the run through the Alleghenies; she noticed the different varieties of
trees that grew along the mountain sides; she scrutinized every
passenger in the car and tried to guess who they were, what their
business was and where they were going. Sahwah's mind was like a
photographic plate; everything she looked at became imprinted there as
upon a negative, accurate in every detail. Like the Elephant's Child,
Sahwah was full of 'satiable curiosity, and her inquisitive trunk was
always stretched out in a quivering search for information.
The brakeman, an amiable personage, was interested in her thirst for

knowledge of railway affairs, and answered her innumerable questions
in patient detail until his head began to buzz and he began to feel as
though he were attached to a suction pump.
"Goodness gracious, child, what do you think I am, an encyclopedia?"
he exploded at last, and sought refuge in the impenetrable regions at the
forward end of the long train.
Sahwah, deprived of her source of information, turned to join her
traveling companions, Gladys and Hinpoha and Migwan, up in the
other end of the car. She stood for a moment at the water cooler,
looking down the car at the people facing her and indulging in her
favorite pastime of trying to read their faces. The car was crowded with
all kinds of people, from the stately, judicial-looking man who sat in
front of the Winnebagos to a negro couple on their honeymoon. There
was a plentiful sprinkling of soldiers throughout the car and one or two
sailors. Sahwah looked at them with eager interest and classified their
different branches of service by the color of the cord on their hats. One
Artillery, three Infantry, one Ambulance Corps and one Lieutenant of
Aviation, she checked off, after a long and careful scrutiny of the last
one, whose insignia puzzled her at first.
A porter brushed by her as she stood there with a glass of milk in his
hand. Sahwah watched the progress of the milk idly, and the porter
stopped beside the Lieutenant of Aviation with it. The lieutenant
seemed to be asleep, for the porter had to shake him before he became
aware of his existence. Just then Hinpoha caught Sahwah's eye and
motioned her to come back to her seat, and Sahwah went tripping down
the aisle to join her friends. She glanced casually at the young
lieutenant as she passed him; he was staring fixedly at her and she
dropped her eyes quickly. A little electric shock tingled through her as
she met his eyes; he seemed to be about to speak to her. "Probably
mistook me for someone else and thought he knew me," Sahwah
thought to herself, and dismissed him from her mind.
"Where have you been all this while?" asked Hinpoha with a perspiring
sigh, laboriously "knitting backward" across the length of the needle in
vicious pursuit of a stitch that should have been eliminated in the

process of decreasing for the heel turn.
"Pursuing knowledge," replied Sahwah merrily, settling herself in the
seat beside Hinpoha, facing Migwan and Gladys.
The four girls were on their way to spend the summer vacation with
their beloved Guardian, Nyoda, at her home in Oakwood, the little
town in the hills of eastern Pennsylvania where she had lived since her
marriage to Andrew Sheridan--"Sherry"--the summer before. Sherry
was in France now with the Engineers, and Nyoda, lonesome in the
huge old house to which she had fallen heir at the death of her last
relative, old Uncle Jasper Carver, had invited the Winnebagos to come
and spend the summer with her.
Vacation had begun inauspiciously for the Winnebagos. To their great
disappointment Katherine wrote that she was not coming east after all;
she was going to remain in Chicago with Miss Fairlee and help her
with her settlement work there. They had rejoiced so at the first news of
her coming and had so impatiently awaited the time of her arrival that
the disappointment when it came was much harder to bear than if
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