Diane of the Green Van

Lilac and wistaria flowered royally. Carpenter, wheelwright and painter departed. The trim green wagon, picked out gayly in white, windowed and curtained and splendidly equipped for the fortunes of the road, creaked briskly away upon its pilgrimage, behind a pair of big-boned piebald horses from the Westfall stables, with Johnny at the reins. On the seat beside him Diane radiantly waved adieu to her aunt, who promptly collapsed in a chair on the porch and dabbed violently at her eyes.

"I shall never get over it," sniffed Aunt Agatha tragically. "Carl may say what he will, I never shall. But now that I've come up here to see her off, I've done my duty, I have indeed. And I do hope Carl hasn't any wild ideas for the summer--I couldn't stand it. Allan, as long as Miss Diane is camping within reasonable distance of the farm, you'd better take the run-about each night and find her and see if she's all right--and brush the snakes and bugs and things out of camp. If everything wild in the forest collected around the camp fire, like as not she wouldn't see them until they bit her."

The boy shifted a slim, bare leg and sniggered.

"Miss Westfall," he said, "Miss Diane she says she's a-goin' to a spot by the river and camp a week an'--an' if she finds anybody a-follerin' or spyin' on her from the farm, she'll skin him alive an'--an' them black eyes o' her'n snapped fire when she said it. An' Johnny, he's got weepons 'nough with him to fight pirutes."

Aunt Agatha groaned and rocking dolorously back and forth upon the porch reviewed the calamitous possibilities of the journey.

But the restless young nomad on the road ahead, sniffing the rare, sweet air of early summer, had already relegated the memory of her long-suffering aunt to the forgotten things of civilization. For the summer world, sweet with the scent of wild flowers, was very young, with young leaves, young grass and flowering, sun-warm hedges, and beyond the Sherrill place on the wooded hill, the sun flamed yellow through the hemlocks.

"Oh, Johnny Jutes! Oh, Johnny Jutes!" sang the girl happily, with the color of the wild rose in her sun-brown cheeks. "It's good--it's good to be alive!"

With a chuckle of enthusiasm Johnny cracked his whip and opined that it was.

Now even as the great green van rolled forth upon the country roads, bound for an idyllic spot by the river where Diane had planned to camp a week, two men appeared upon the wide, white-pillared Sherrill porch, smoking and idly admiring the bluish hills and the rolling meadowlands below bright with morning sunlight. To the east lay the silver glimmer of a tree-fringed lake; beyond, a church spire among the trees and a winding country road traveled by the solitary van of green and white.