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diff --git a/31748.txt b/31748.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c4c9b23 --- /dev/null +++ b/31748.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6046 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook, Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl, by Isabel +Katherine Hornibrook, Illustrated by Nana French Bickford + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl + + +Author: Isabel Katherine Hornibrook + + + +Release Date: March 23, 2010 [eBook #31748] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PEMROSE LORRY, CAMP FIRE GIRL*** + + +E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online +Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.fadedpage.com) + + + +Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this + file which includes the original illustrations. + See 31748-h.htm or 31748-h.zip: + (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31748/31748-h/31748-h.htm) + or + (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31748/31748-h.zip) + + + + + +PEMROSE LORRY + +CAMP FIRE GIRL + + * * * * * + +By + +ISABEL HORNIBROOK + +DRAKE OF TROOP ONE + +SCOUT DRAKE IN WAR TIME + +COXSWAIN DRAKE OF THE SEASCOUTS + +PEMROSE LORRY: CAMP FIRE GIRL + + * * * * * + + +[Illustration: Not a remote sign of a biplane decorated the sky overhead. +Frontispiece. See page 171.] + + +PEMROSE LORRY + +CAMP FIRE GIRL + +by + +ISABEL HORNIBROOK + +With Illustrations by Nana French Bickford + + + + + + + +[Illustration] + +Boston +Little, Brown, and Company +1921 + +Copyright, 1921, +By Little, Brown, and Company. +All rights reserved + +Published October, 1921 + +Norwood Press + +Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co. +Norwood, Mass., U. S. A. + + + + +TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER, VETERAN AUTHOR, +WHO FIRST HAD AN ADMIRATION FOR THE WISE WOMAN +WHO SAVED THE CITY, THIS STORY IS DEDICATED. + + + + +PREFACE + +This, the first story written upon the latest and unique conquest of the +age, the conquest of empty Space, with the subsequent reaching out to +the Heavenly Bodies, has the permission of the conquering inventor, +Professor Robert H. Goddard. + +May it bring to every Camp Fire in America, and to boys as well, the +romance of the transcendent achievement, beside which all dressing of +fiction pales! + +The Author also acknowledges her indebtedness to Professor Frank G. +Speck for permission to reprint the music of the Leaf Dance. + + + + +CONTENTS + Chapter Page + I. A QUAKER GUN 1 + II. GIMCRACK ICE 20 + III. THE WRONG SIDE OF HER DREAM 31 + IV. THE SECOND WRECK 40 + V. SHE SAVED A CITY 49 + VI. A HOTSPUR 60 + VII. THE PINNACLE 69 + VIII. A USURPER 78 + IX. JACK AT A PINCH 86 + X. CAMP FIRE SISTERS 98 + XI. MOTHER EARTH'S ROMANCE 109 + XII. OLD ROUND-TOP 124 + XIII. COBWEB WEED 134 + XIV. STOUTHEART 147 + XV. AIRDRAWN AEROPLANES 160 + XVI. THE COUNCIL FIRE 174 + XVII. A NOVEL SANTA CLAUS 190 + XVIII. REPRISALS 207 + XIX. A RECORD FLIGHT 229 + XX. THE SEARCH 244 + XXI. THE MAN KILLER 262 + XXII. A JUNE WOMAN 280 + XXIII. THE CELESTIAL CLIMAX 296 + + + + +ILLUSTRATIONS + +Not a remote sign of a biplane decorated the sky overhead Frontispiece + +"Oh! de-ar Mammy Moon--what a shock she'll get" PAGE 2 + +"Keep cool! Don't stir! I'll reach you in a moment!" 86 + +The man looked up at her, some dash of whimsical fire + mastering weakness 268 + + + + +PEMROSE LORRY + +CAMP FIRE GIRL + + + + +CHAPTER I + +A QUAKER GUN + + +"And will the Thunder Bird really lay its egg upon the moon? Such a hard +egg, too! Will it--really--drop a pound weight of steel upon the head of +the Man in the Moon?... Oh! de-ar Mammy Moon--what a shock she'll get." + +The girl, the fifteen-year-old Camp Fire Girl--all but sixteen now--to +whom Mammy Moon had been the fairy foster-mother of her childhood, ever +since she lay, wakeful, in her little cot, looking up at that silvery +face of a burnt-out satellite, picturing it the gate of Heaven and her +mother's spirit as bathed in the soft, lunar radiance behind it, caught +her breath with a wild little gasp whose triumph was a sob upon the +still laboratory air. + +"Lay its egg in a nest of the moon! A dead nest! It will do more than +that, little Pem!" Toandoah, the inventor, turned from fitting a number +of tiny sky-rockets into the supply chamber of a larger one,--turned +with that living coal of fire in his eye which only the inventor can +know, and looked upon his daughter. "Yes, it will do more than that! The +Thunder Bird will lay its golden egg for us--if it drops its expiring +one upon the moon. It will send us back the first record from space, the +very first information as to what it may be that lies up--away up--a +couple of hundred miles, or so, above us, in the outer edges of the +earth's atmosphere of which less is known at present than of the deepest +soundings of the ocean. Our Thunder Bird will be the--first--explorer." + +[Illustration: "Oh! de-ar Mammy Moon--what a shock she'll get." Page 2.] + +The man's eyes were dim now. For a moment he saw as in a prism the work +of his fingers, those little explosive rockets--the charges of smokeless +powder--which being discharged automatically in flight, would send the +Thunder Bird upon its magic way, roaring its challenge to the world to +listen, switching its rose-red tail of light. + +Then--then as the mist cleared those deep, glowing eyes of his became to +his daughter a magic lantern by which she saw a series of pictures +thrown upon the sheeting whitewash of the laboratory wall, culminating +in one which was almost too dazzling for mortal girl of fifteen--though +born of a great inventor--to bear. + +"And to think," she cried, rising upon tiptoe, swaying there in the +February sunlight, "just to think that it's a Camp Fire Girl--a Camp +Fire Girl of America--with the eyes of the world upon her, who will push +the button, throw the switch upon a mountain-top, launch the Thunder +Bird upon its glor-i-ous way, send off--send off the first +earth-valentine to Mammy Moon!... Oh! Toandoah--oh! Daddy-man--it's too +much." + +Pemrose Lorry clasped her hands. Her blue-star eyes, blue at the moment +as the tiny blossoms of the meadow star-grass for which some fairy has +captured a sky-beam, were suddenly wet. + +A slim, girlish figure in forest green--last sylvan word in Camp Fire +uniforms which she was trying on--she hung there, poised upon an inner +pinnacle, while sunbeams racing down the whitewash did obeisance before +her, while spectroscope, lathe and delicate balances, brilliant +reflectors, offered her a brazen crown. + +"Well--well, it's coming to you, Pem--you sprite." Her father shot a +sidelong glance at the nixie green as he fitted another little rocket +into its groove in the larger one's interior, where the touch of a +mechanical appliance, like the trigger of a gun, in the Thunder Bird's +tail, would ignite it in flight. "You alone, girl as you are, know the +full secret of the Thunder Bird, as you romantically call it, the +principle on which I am working, child--in so far as you can understand +it--in creating this model rocket for experiments and the master +sky-rocket, the full-fledged Thunder Bird, later, to soar even to the +moon itself--Mars, too, maybe--you alone know and you have kept it dark. +You've plugged like a boy at your elementary physics in high school, +so's to be _able_ to understand and sympathize--you've lived up to +the name I gave you--" + +"My chowchow name!" interjected the girl, winking slily. + +"Well! it is a mixture." Her father echoed her chuckle. "But I guess +you've been son and daughter both, you good little pal--you sprite of +the lab." + +"Oh! Toandoah--oh! Daddy-man--I'm so glad." + +Here there was a little laboratory explosion, a rocket of feeling fired +off, as the owner of that hybrid name, Pemrose, came down from her +pinnacle and, perching upon a low tool-chest at the inventor's side, +took the humbler place she loved,--fellow of her father's heart. + +"I--I used to wish I was all boy until I became a Camp Fire Girl; that +bettered the betty element a little," she confided, the spice of her +mixed cognomen floating in her eye. + +It was a joke with her, that chowchow name--original mixture--and how +she came by it. + +Her father, Professor Guy Noel Lorry, Fellow of Nevil +University,--Toandoah, the inventor, she called him,--wearing his +symbol, a saw-toothed triangle, embroidered with her own upon her +ceremonial dress--had at one time almost prayed for a son, a boy who +might help him to realize the dream, even then taking hold upon his +heart, of conquering not the air alone but space--zero space, in which +it was thought nothing could travel--so that old Earth might reach out +to her sister planets. + +He planned to call the boy Pemberton after his own father. + +Likewise the mother of the maiden in green now seated upon the tool-box +had longed for a daughter and aspired to name her Rose, in tender memory +of a dear college chum, a flower no longer blooming upon earth. + +And when the little black-haired mite in due time came, when she opened +upon her father eyes blue as the empyrean he hoped to conquer, he had +cried out of a core of transport lurking in the very heart of +disappointment: "Oh! by Jove, I can't quite give up my dream: let's name +her Pemrose. If she had been a boy, I'd have called her Pem." + +The young mother blissfully agreed--and did not live long to call her +anything. + +Grown to girlhood, the sprite of the laboratory, who had looked through +a spectroscope at seven, clapping her small hands over the fairy +colors--pure red, orange, green, blue, violet, separated by little dark, +thread-like lines, each representing some element in that far-away upper +air which her father hoped to master--preferred for herself the boyish +Pem to the oft-worn Rose. + +But in order to square accounts with what she called the "betty" element +in her, she evened things up on becoming a Camp Fire Girl by choosing a +name all feminine wherewith to be known by the Council Fire. + +Wantaam, signifying Wisdom--a Wise Woman--was the title she bore as one +who wore the Fire Maker's bracelet upon her wrist and had pledged +herself to tend as her fathers had tended and her fathers' fathers since +time began, that inner, mystic flame which has lit man's way to progress +from the moment when he forged a bludgeon to conquer his own world, +until, to-day, when he was inventing a Bird to invade others. + +And it was that Wise Woman who spoke now; she, of all others, who knew +the secret of the magic Thunder Bird; and who, trustworthy to the core, +had "kept it dark." + +"Oh! if I've 'plugged' hard in the past over those fierce first +principles of mechanics, electricity, optics, heat and the rest--and +those 'grueling' laws of gravitation--that's just nothing, a scantling +compared to the way I'm going to study and make a hit when I get on into +college," she cried; "so--so that, some day, I can, really, work with +you, Toandoah--you record-breaking inventor--oh! dearest father ever +was." + +Laughingly, passionately she flung an arm around the neck of the man in +the long, drab laboratory coat, half strangling him as he bent over the +two-foot model rocket, testing it with his soul in his finger-tips, from +its cone-shaped steel head to its steering compartment, thence to the +supply chamber with all the little propelling rockets in it, down to its +complicated nozzle, or tail. + +"Why--why! there's no knowing what you and I may be doing yet, when we +strain our wits to cracking, is there, Daddy-man?" she exulted further. +"You say, yourself, that once space is conquered, that horribly cold old +zero space outside the earth's atmosphere, anything devised that will +move through it, as our Thunder Bird can do, then--then there's no +limit! We might be shooting a passenger off to the moon now, provided +the Man in the Moon would shoot him back," gayly, "if only the master +sky-rocket, twelve times as large as this little model you're working on +for experiments, were ready. The re-al moon-going Thunder Bird! Oh, +dear!" Her little fingers restlessly intertwined. "How--how I can +har-rdly wait to throw the switch upon a mountaintop and--watch it +_tear_, as the college boys say!" + +"Sometimes--sometimes I'm inclined to think it will never 'tear'; that +another than I will be the first to reach the heavenly bodies." Toandoah +sighed. "For where are the funds coming from, Pem, the little +bonanza--fairy gold-mine--necessary to gorge our Thunder Bird for its +record flight--fit it out for its novel migration to the moon, eh?" The +inventor clasped his hands behind his head, whistling ruefully. "Funds, +child! Already, it has pecked through the biggest slice of mine!" + +"Ah! but--ah! but--" the girl suddenly flashed upon him a sky-blue +wink--"ah! but the third _nut_ hasn't been cracked yet, remember, +for the Bird to peck at that. Isn't it in four weeks from now--oh! in +five--" the slight figure swaying like the blue-eyed grass upon its tall +green stem, blown by a wild breeze--"in five weeks from now that the +third drawer will be opened, containing the third and last installment +of Mr. Hartley Graham's queer, queer drawn-out will. When it is--oh! +when it is--maybe, then, at last, there will be something coming to the +University, our University, to benefit your inventions, Daddy." + +"My child! when that third nut is cracked, 'twill only benefit a 'nut'." +The man chuckled drily now. "In other words, the remainder of Friend +Hartley's fortune, all that his sister, Mrs. Grosvenor, hasn't already +got, will still be held in trust by me, as executor of the will, +for--for that griffin of a younger brother of his who cleared out over +twenty years ago and hasn't sent a line to his family since." + +"Was Mr. Treffrey Graham--really--such a--zany?" Pem asked the question +for the nineteenth time, her black eyebrows arching. + +"My word! 'Was he?' A--a regular hippogriff he was, child! A hot tamale, +like that Mexican fruit which burns you if you bite into it! At college +one could hardly come near him without getting scorched by his tricks. +Remember my telling you about my putting in an appearance in class one +day--Physics 3--boasting of the latest thing in student's bags, setting +it down beside me--and not seeing it again for three weeks? The terrible +Treff, of course! The climax came, as you know, when he locked a +gray-haired professor into the padded cell for opposing baseball too +early in the season, while the campus was still soft." + +"Mer-rcy! And kept him there for ages--in that stuffy little room, all +wadded and lined with brown burlap, used for analyzing sound--the prof +not able to make himself heard!" + +The listener, girl-like, drew fresh excitement from a faded tale. + +"Yes--that meant expulsion, of course, and his family, one and all, +turning a cold shoulder on Treff, before he went away for good--nobody +knew where. His engagement was broken off. His brother Hartley saw to +that--married the girl himself." + +"I wonder--I wonder if the Terrible Treff ever married?" Pem musingly +nursed her chin,--and with it a wildfire interest in the "hot tamale." + +"I heard he did. Somebody said so--somebody who met him out West, years +ago--that he was a widower, with a little son. But--apparently--he has +no more use for his family." + +"No more--no more than his sister, Mrs. Grosvenor, has for us since you +were made executor of that outlandish will, left, piecemeal in three +drawers, to be opened on the first three anniversaries of Mr. Graham's +death--and not her husband!" Now it was an entirely new breeze of +excitement, a stiffening, pinching draught, which swept the forest-green +figure upon the tool-chest until its voice grew thin and sharp and edged +as the blades in the box beneath it. "Oh-h, yes! she's at daggers +dr-rawn with us now--on her high ropes all the time, as you'd say. +And--and she sneers at your inventions, father! She calls the rocket, +the rocket," half-hysterically, "the moon-reaching rocket,--a Quaker +gun--a Quaker gun that'll never be fired, never go off--never hit +anything!... _Oh-h!_" + +With her hand to her green breast at the insult, the girl bounded, +blindly as a ball, from her box, across the laboratory--and on to a low +platform. + +Through her raging young body there shot like a physical cramp the +knowledge that Quakers, noble-hearted Friends, did not use any guns; +that the mocking term was but a by-word, a jesting synonym for all that +was impotent--non-existent in reason and power--a dummy. + +Savagely she applied her eye to the tall, ten-foot spectroscope rearing +its brazen height from this low pedestal. + +Without, beyond the glaring white-washed laboratory, was a February +world, equally white, of zero ice and snow. + +Through the spectroscope she saw a world in flames--blood-red. + +It was not more flaming than her thoughts. + +Her father's transcendent invention just a faddist's dream! The Thunder +Bird a joke--a _Quaker Gun_! + +"Bah!" Convulsively her little teeth bit into her lower lip as she +adjusted the telescope portion of the instrument for analyzing +light--reducing it to prismatic hues--a little. + +And now, lo! a world brilliantly jaundiced--her orange--the snow being a +wonderful reflector of the sun's divided rays. + +"Father! Father-r! I used to love Una Grosvenor. Now I h-hate her! If +her mother made that hor-rid speech about a Quaker gun, she repeated it, +before all the boys and girls in our Drama Class, too! If I see her this +afternoon at the Ski Club, the skiing party out at Poplar Hill, I shan't +speak to her. And we used to be so chummy! Why--" the girl fluttered +now, a green weathercock, upon the two-foot platform--"why, we used to +stand side by side and measure eyelashes, to see which pair was going to +be the longer. I'll wager mine are now!" + +With a veering laugh the weathercock was here bent forward, striving to +catch some brazen glimpse of a winking profile in the polished brass of +the spectroscope. + +Her father laughed: this was the Rose side of her--of his maiden of the +patchwork name--the Rose side of her, and he loved it! + +"But--but Poplar Hill! Poplar Hill! Why! that's away outside the city +line--out at Merryville," he exclaimed, a minute later, in +consternation. "Goodness! child, you're not going off there to ski +to-day--in a zero world, everything snowbound, no trolley cars running?" + +"Oh! the trains--the trains aren't held up, father." The coaxing +weathercock now had a green arm around the neck of the man in the long, +drab coat. "And I just couldn't give up going! I'm becoming such a +daring ski-runner, Daddy-man; you'll be proud of me when you see! Why! I +can almost herring-bone uphill; and I'm getting the kick-turn 'down +fine.' Darting, gliding, stemming, jumping downhill--oh! it's such +perfect fun, such creamy fun; I'm not a girl any longer, I'm just a +swallow." + +"One swallow doesn't make a summer; all this doesn't change the +weather." The inventor glanced anxiously through a window. + +"No, but it's such a very short train-run. Pouf! only six miles on the +two o'clock express bound north, why--why! the very train that you and I +will be taking, later, Daddy-man, along in May, when you try out +experiments with that little model rocket you're working on now, upon +old Mount Greylock--highest mountain of the State. Oh-h! if ever a +girl's thumb itched, mine does to press the little electric button and +start it off, to fly up a couple of hundred miles, or so, to send you +back your golden egg, siree--the first record from space. Oh! through +all the fun of slope and snow I'll be thinking of that the entire time +to-day--the whole, enduring, livelong time. Yes!" + + + + +CHAPTER II + +GIMCRACK ICE + + +She was thinking of it two hours later--having gained her coaxing +point--seated in the well-nigh empty parlor car of the north-bound +express, that green-aisled Pullman being the first car behind the cab +and plodding engine which, regardless of schedule, crept along slowly +and warily to-day upon ice-shod rails. + +But as she caressed the honorable thumb--the little girlish member which +would press the button while all the world wondered--and peered out +through a window fairly frosted, lo! again she saw a landscape dimly in +flames--blood-red--as viewed through the spectroscope of her own raging +thoughts. + +For ice was within the car, as without. + +There--there, seated almost on a line with her, on the other side of the +moss-green aisle, and only three other distant passengers in the +compartment, was the girl whose caricaturing tongue had repeated the +indelible insult about a Quaker gun; whose mother considered her father +a mere chuckle-headed dreamer, with his visions of bridging the absolute +zero of space--just a mild three hundred degrees, or so, lower than the +biting breath of Mother Earth at the present moment--and reaching worlds +far away amid the starry scope. + +Pemrose had kept her word about not speaking. She just dropped one +pointed little icicle in the shape of a nod upon her one-time friend as +she sank into her own swivel chair and threw off the heavy coat with +which she had covered her ski-runner's silken wind-jacket and belted +skiing costume of pure, creamy wool, with its full freedom of +knickerbockers. + +"There's Una--Una Grosvenor!" Her face frosted over at the thought. "Oh, +mer-rcy! how I hate her--shall everlastingly hate her--for passing on +that sneer about the Thunder Bird.... And I know-ow her eyelashes aren't +as long as mine now!" + +Mingled spice was in the furtive glance which Toandoah's little pal, his +maiden of the chowchow name, threw across the narrow train-aisle at the +delicate young profile opposite, outlined against a crusted window. + +"And she still has that funny little near-sighted stand in one of her +dark eyes, too--Una! Although they're pretty eyes--I'll admit that!" +mused the critic further. "Goodness! won't she open them one of these +days when the world is all ringing with talk of Dad and his rocket: when +the Thunder Bird, the finished, full-fledged Thunder Bird, undertakes +its hundred-hour flight to the moon.... For, oh! I know-ow that it will +go, some day--some day." The girl stared passionately now into the +future in the frostscript of the pane near her. "Man would not let it +fail, God _could_ not let it fail--just for lack of funds--however +that third nut may turn out--that third section of a queer will!" + +And now the mulled world outside changed again, shading from blood-red +to fairy rose-color as seen through the spectroscope of hope. + +She became lost in the most magnificent dream that ever entranced a Camp +Fire Girl yet--with any hope of fulfillment. + +Standing of a starless night upon a lofty mountain-top, she was looking +up at Mammy Moon, dear, silver-footed Queen, so near to the heart of +every Earth-daughter! + +In the darkness she felt the eyes of the whole world upon her--she but a +satellite reflecting her father's light--its joint ear was bent to catch +the wild, triumphal song-sob of her heart. + +And at the words: "Ready! Shoot!", Toandoah's battle-cry, she was +pressing the electric button which, connected with a switch in the +Thunder Bird's tail, would start it off, pointed directly for the moon, +to light up that silver disc with a bright powder-flash visible here on +earth. + +She was mesmerized by its wild, red eye. She was watching it switch its +rosy tail feathers, two hundred feet long, that dashing explorer, as, +roaring, it leaped from its mountain platform at incredible speed for an +incredible flight. + +She was echoing the college boys' untamed slogan: "Watch it tear; oh! +watch it tear--the fire-eater." + +She.... + +But what--what was this? Was she tearing with it? Was she, she herself, +just a shocked girl, at the heart of its rapid-fire explosions? + +Was she being hurled with it through space, blank space, Absolute Zero, +below what human instrument could register,--or human girl encounter and +live? + +All she knew was that she was being flung, first forward, then backward; +and then, oh, horrors! against the train window near her where glass was +all splintering and crashing, through which ice and water, mad, mad +water and ice, were rushing together. + +There was an awful, punching jolt, a frenzied shriek of steam, a +splashing, hissing roar--that, surely, could not be the steel Thunder +Bird's challenge, unless it had suddenly become a wading goose--and, lo! +she was hurled straight out of her dream across a Pullman aisle, fast +flooding, right into the girl with whom she had once vainly measured +eyelashes,--between whom and herself had existed that thin bridge of ice +but one little minute before. + +Alas! poor human ice that couldn't stand a moment under the blows of +Nature's ice-hammer. + +Both pairs of girlish lashes were stark with terror now. + +"Una! Una! _Una!_ Ac-ci-dent! Tr-rain accident! Gone +through--through into--the--lake!" moaned Pemrose, half stunned, yet +conscious, as she was ten seconds before, that they had been crossing +frozen water. + +Water! A pale pond, now plainly seen through awful, swirling, +wave-blocked window-gaps! Yet across its wan and shattering crust there +shone a trail of fire, red fire, heart fire--vivid at that moment as the +Thunder Bird's pink tail feathers switching through the space of +horror--and somewhere in that stretched consciousness which is beyond +thinking, Toandoah's daughter knew that it was the Camp Fire training in +presence of mind. + +"Una! M-mer-rcy! Una! Water's r-rushing in-n--in so fast--through +windows--doors ahead--m-may dr-rown right here, 'less we can f-fight +it--get out," was her struggling cry as, paddling desperately like a +little dog, she found herself topping the flood, that lashing, interned +lake-water, now blotting out window-frames on one side of the +car--groping with icy fingers for the painted ceiling of the +Pullman--then undulatingly sinking below them on the other. + +For it was a case just half-a-minute before, while Pem was still +sanguinely loosing the Thunder Bird, of small pony-wheels on the big +express engine striking a frog in the rails, an icy groove, and +skidding,--then recklessly plunging down four feet, those runaway +ponies, from the low bridge which they were crossing on to the ice, +dragging the engine, the cab and the two front cars with them. + +And now--now--to the inventor's daughter, the girl-mechanic, who had +plugged so hard at her high school physics that she might understand her +father's work, came a thought that was worse, worse even than the hiss +of the imprisoned flood, tossing her like a cork: the engine might +explode--the sneezing, sobbing engine, with the steam condensing in its +boilers--wreck the car she was in--she and Una! + +No! She did not think of herself alone. All the frail girlish ice was a +gimcrack now. + +But the terrors of the swamped car, that snuffling threat of steam +ahead--a deep bass uz-z-z!--momentarily made a gimcrack of other things +too--of everything but the desperate instinct to get out--free, somehow. + +Calling upon Una to follow, she headed for a dripping window-gap, to +seize the moment when the flood, now lower upon that side, might give +her a chance to paddle through--scramble through--escape on to the +cracking ice, before the opening was again blotted out. + +But together with the cruelty of glass-splinters, ice-spars scratching +her set face, came the shock of an inner splinter: an inkling, somehow, +that Una was helpless, could not follow, that, battered by concussion, +tossing like a log upon the flood's breast, her senses had almost left +her. + +Many waters cannot quench love--the love of a daughter for her +genius-father. + +In that moment--that moment--there leaped up in the breast of Toandoah's +child the fire, the red fire, which alone can carry anything higher, be +it rocket or girl's heart. + +They had called her father's invention a joke, a Quaker gun, Una and her +mother. + +_Never_ should they say that of his daughter's pluck: that it was a +dummy which would hit no mark,--or only to save itself! + +"Una!" Wildly she seized the other girl's creamy flannels, buoyed like a +great, pale water-lily upon the imprisoned lake-water. "Catch--c-catch +me by the belt--Una! I--I'll try-y to save you! Oh-h! s-stick ti-ight +now." + +And the daughter of the man, still sitting afar in his quiet laboratory, +fitting little powder charges into a model Thunder Bird, set +herself to battle through the swirling gap of that half-covered +window-frame--clutched and hampered now--yet upholding, even if it was +her daring death-thought, Toandoah's honor in the flood. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +THE WRONG SIDE OF HER DREAM + + +The ice had been thick-ribbed, product of a bitter winter, but it could +not withstand the shock of a hundred and eighty tons of leaping +locomotive--it splintered in all directions. + +Of the whole long train, however, only two cars and the cab had followed +the engine's plunge when those skidding pony-wheels turned traitor, and +were now ice-bound and flooded in the middle of a small lake, while the +remainder of the fast express, with one coach actually standing on its +head, hanging pendent between the ice and the bridge, was not submerged. + +It was as if a steel bar were hurled violently at that solid ice, when +one end only would pierce the crust and the remainder be left sticking, +slanting, up. + +When Pemrose, a Camp Fire Girl of America, greater at that moment than +when her hand should loose the Thunder Bird, because she was determined +that whatever might be said of her father's invention, nobody should +ever say that his daughter's courage was a Quaker gun, paddled through +the window-gap of that swamped Pullman, towing Una, she found herself in +such a vortex of zero water and shattered ice that all the strength +behind her gasping breath turned suddenly dummy. + +"S-stick tight, Una! Oh-h! stick tight," was the one little whiff that +speech could get off before it froze--froze stiff behind her chattering +teeth, in the pinched channel of her throat. + +And then--then--she was clinging to the jagged spur of an ice-cake, her +left hand convulsively clutching Una's flannels, while the eddies in the +half-liberated water around them, spreading from a blue-cold center to a +white ring, made horrid eyes--goggle-eyes--which stared at them. + +To Pem--little visionary--plunged from her dreams of pressing the magic +button on a mountain-top, of watching the Thunder Bird tear, tear away +moonward, switching its long tail of light, the whole thing seemed an +illusion--the wrong side of her dream. + +It was as if she had soared with that monster rocket, Toandoah's +invention, outside the earth's atmosphere, were being hurled about in +the horrible vacuum of space, its unplumbed heart of cold, so far--so +annihilatingly far below the balmy zero point of old Mother Earth on a +February day when two light-hearted girls were going skiing. + +She was growing numb. + +In vain did her waterproof wind-jacket, the ski-runner's belted jacket +of thin and trusty silk, defend, like a faithful wing--a warm, conscious +wing--the upper part of her body. + +The deadly water was encroaching, clasping her waist with an icy +girdle,--stealing under it, even to her armpits. + +And the petrifying little hand which had left its fistling in the +train,--the thick mitten that should have grasped the balancing stick in +all the wild swallow-fun of climbing, stemming, darting amid slope and +snow upon a wintry hillside--could not hold on very long to the glacial +spur. + +The ice-cake was threatening to slip away, to seesaw, turn turtle and +waltz off, to the tune of blood-curdling sounds: screams for help here, +there, everywhere, always with the background of that menacing hiss of +steam in the great engine's boilers--that low, sneezing uz-z-z! as if it +were taking cold from its bath--the engine that, at any moment, might +explode. + +Frantically she would have struck out, the little girl-mechanic, and +fought the whole ice-pack to get away from that threat, to reach a solid +crust, but she knew that she could not "swim" two, herself and Una. + +Yet would they go under--one or both--perish in water not deep because +of the starving cold, even if--if the engine...? + +Her teeth snapped together upon the thought, its diddering horror. +Surely, it was as bad a predicament as could be for a girl! + +But, suddenly, through all the horripilation there seemed to shine a +light. + +Somehow, Pem was conscious of it in the poor numb sheath of her own +girlish being--and beyond. + +And she knew that her stark lips were praying: "Oh! Lord--oh! +Father--help me-e to hold on. Don't let us--go--under! I want--I want +so-o to live to see Daddy's rocket go off!... He ..." + +The stiff sobs tumbled apart there, as it were. + +But the Light remained, the Presence, so near as it seemed to Pem at the +moment--even as she had felt it before upon a mountain-top, or at some +matchless moment of beauty--that she almost lisped confusedly: "Daddy in +Heaven!" as once, a two-year-old, she had prattled it at her father's +knee. + +Then what--what? Another voice prattling near her--chattering icily! A +bully human voice! + +"Gosh! Something r-rotten in the State of Denmark," it gasped. "Jove! I +like excitement, but I'd rather be warm enough to enjoy it. Oh! Dad, if +there are any others left in that car, the one on end, you help 'em. I +must attend to these girls." + +"T-take her first--Una!" flickered Pem, a spicy flicker still, as she +felt a strong grasp on her shoulder and looked up into the face of a +broad-shouldered youth in a gray sweater; the engine might explode, but, +to the last, they should not say of Toandoah's daughter that her courage +was a Quaker gun. + +"Jove! but you're game," flashed the youth. "Well, keep up--hang +on--I'll be back in a minute!" + +The minute was three. + +He had to lift the second girlish victim almost bodily out of the water +and drag her with him as he wriggled and crawled over the broken +ice-pack, to reach a firm spot, where he picked her up and--with all the +vigor of an athletic eighteen-year-old--carried her to the shore, now +not more than twenty yards off. + +"Humph! I was just in time, wasn't I?" he ejaculated on the transit. "By +George! You've got pep, if ever a girl had--I'll wager you pulled your +friend out of the parlor-car and held her up! Some horripilation, eh?" +breezily. "Now--now what have you and I ever done that the Fates should +wish this on to us--that's what I'd like to know?" + +It was what the daring little ski-runner, Pem, herself, had been vaguely +wondering; she liked this jolly wit-snapper who preferred his excitement +warm. + +"Ha! there goes the engine exploding," he gasped a moment later, as he +set her down. "Bursting inward! Now, if it had done the mean thing, +burst outward, piling up the agony, doing a whole lot of damage, 'twould +have been quicker about it.... Oh--you! Dad," to a gray-bearded man, +with a gray traveling cap pulled down almost to his eyes. "Here, I'll +hand over these girls to you now! Will you look after them? I'd better +go back." + +Simultaneously there was a low, sullen roaring, the crack of doom, as +condensed steam sucked in the heavy steel casing of the locomotive's +boilers and shattered it like an eggshell. + +In Pemrose it shattered something too. + +Wildly she looked into the eyes of the man in the tourist's cap and was +conscious that in one of them horror was frozen into a fixed stand, as +it was in one of Una's, as he helped her up a snowy bank. + +And, with that, her brain laid its last egg for the present, as the +Thunder Bird would drop its expiring one upon the dead surface of the +moon, in the knowledge that, the Fates notwithstanding, she was still +alive--still alive, to see the great rocket go! + +And as for its completion--as to the little gold mine necessary to gorge +it for its record flight--why! the third rich nut of which she had +spoken a little while ago in her father's laboratory, had not yet been +cracked: the third mysterious drawer containing the third and last +installment of a dead man's very strange will had not yet been opened. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +THE SECOND WRECK + + +That third nut was cracked just five weeks later in the firelit library +of what had been Mr. Hartley Graham's home--the home of a man who during +his lifetime, so it was occasionally said, had been, in some ways, +almost as eccentric as his madcap brother--and concerning the latter his +college chums, those who knew him long ago, were of the opinion that he +was a freak whose "head grew beneath his shoulder." + +The house, a white marble mansion on Opal Avenue, finest of the old +residential streets in the University city of Clevedon, was now occupied +by the sister of the two, the mother of Una, who had snapped her fingers +at the Thunder Bird, calling it a joke, a dummy, a Quaker gun. + +That jeering nickname still rankled in the breast of Pemrose, who looked +more like a colorless March Primrose, owing to the lingering shock of +that train wreck, upon the spring morning in early April when the family +lawyer whose duty it was to settle the affairs of the man who had left +three separate portions of his will in as many drawers, to be opened on +three successive anniversaries of his death, drew forth the last. + +She was not the only pale girl present. + +By her side was Una, neighbor again in heart as in body, who laid one +little agitated fist on Pem's knee while preparations for reading the +will were being made, the two girls nestling together, as in chummy +days, three years before, when in the peacock pride of thirteen they had +conceitedly measured eyelashes. + +And the remorseful affection mirrored in that little near-sighted stand +in one of Una's pretty dark eyes was only typical of an entirely similar +state of feeling in the once scornful breasts of her father and mother. + +Mrs. Grosvenor was no longer "on her high ropes," as Pem had said in her +father's laboratory; to-day she seemed to be, rather, on a snubbing-line +which brought her up short now and again, even in the middle of a +speech, when she looked at the inventor's blue-eyed daughter, his trusty +little pal--and that, sometimes, with spray in her eyes, too. + +Also, her glances in the direction of the inventor himself, Professor +Lorry, with whose name the world was already beginning to ring, were +appealing--not to say apologetic. + +She was quite sure now that any man who could turn out a daughter, not +yet sixteen, to behave in a fearful emergency as Pem had done--without +whom her own daughter would not be here to-day, as Una constantly kept +repeating--could never forge a gun, be it rocket or rifle, that would +hit no mark! + +She even expressed some agitated interest in the great invention, +inquiring when the first experiments with the little model Thunder Bird, +upon a mountain-top, were to take place. + +And as for her husband, he boldly declared himself deeply interested in +the conquest of the upper air and space--so far beyond the goal which +any aviator had dreamed of reaching yet. + +He even went so far as to say that he would be glad to see the remainder +of a fortune, represented by that third section of a will, go for the +furtherance of the professor's wonderful moon-reaching, planet-reaching +scheme, instead of being "hung up" awaiting the return of the dead man's +younger brother who had been such a queer flimflam fellow in +youth,--whose family did not even know whether he was dead or alive. + +And, at first, while the shell of that third nut was being solemnly +cracked by the reading of opening sentences of the will--oh! how the +heart of Pemrose jumped, like a nut on a hot shovel--it did seem as if +the kernel were going to be a rich one for the Thunder Bird. + +For now, according to the testator's wish, if his brother, Treffrey +Graham, had not yet returned to claim his portion of his elder brother's +wealth, then the money--a little bonanza, indeed, a solid fortune--was +to be turned over, forthwith, to the University of his native city, to +be used for developments in the science of the air--the upper air and +what lay beyond it--chiefly for the furtherance of any inventions that +might be put forward by the dead man's trusted friend, Professor Lorry. + +It was here that two pale girls, abruptly transformed from April +primroses to June roses--oh! such pinkly blooming tea-roses--gave +simultaneously a wild little shriek. + +It was here that Pem, dazzled, saw the Thunder Bird, with a clear sky, +tear--tear away moonward--and noticed at the same time, through some +little loophole in the watch-tower of her excitement, the figure of a +man with a gray tourist's cap pulled down to his eyes, rather waveringly +crossing the street without. + +He circled to avoid an April puddle,--she saw him clearly through the +broad library window, at a distance of some fifty yards, beyond a flight +of marble steps and a graveled entrance. + +A queer little shiver, a horrid little shiver--a snowflake in +summer--drifted down her spine! + +The figure had an icy background. She had seen it before amid the +terrors of that February train-wreck. The boy who saved her, the boy +with the jolly tongue in his head, humorous amid the "horripilation," +had addressed it as Dad. + +And then--then, she caught her breath sharply, as something blew upon +her, hot and cold together--and came back to the library, to the present +moment. + +For the gray-haired lawyer, with his mouth opening gravely, wide as a +church door, with a little forward pounce of his body upon the +typewritten sheets, the sheets that meant life or death--flight or +stagnation--for the Thunder Bird, was beginning to read again. + +"Ah, but that's not all, even yet!" he said. "This curious will has +dragged its slow length over three years--and now we haven't finished +with it, quite. Here's a codicil still to be read--its last word, +written later, just two days before Mr. Graham's death, so it seems." + +Alack and alas! that was the moment of the second wreck; the moment for +one jubilant girl of the dire breakdown, when the Victory Express to +Clover Land, goal of blossoming success, crashed through into zero +waters of blankest disappointment,--almost as bitter as those in which +she had held up her friend. + +For the last word of the strung-out will set forth that, whereas it +seemed borne in upon Mr. Hartley Graham, with life drawing to a close, +that he had not been quite fair to his madcap brother in youth, and that +the latter would some day return, the disposal of his wealth in the +other direction named--to the University and for invention--should not +come into effect for at least twelve years after the opening of that +third drawer. + +"And so--and so, it's all hung up for another dozen years--unless +Treffrey Graham comes back to claim the money! Well! I'm sorry, +Professor Lorry; there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip," said the +lawyer, laying down the codicil with a blue look; he was interested in +invention, progressive invention--he had never thought that the Thunder +Bird was a Quaker gun. + +"And so it's all hung up for the next twelve years," was the baffled cry +which went around the circle, with no single note of longing for the +wanderer's return. + +It would not have been very flattering to the terrible Treff, if he was +alive and present to hear, thought a gnashing Pemrose: to the exile who +had been such a hazing firebrand at college, burning out the fine flame +of youth in the straw blaze of senseless pranks,--a griffin and +shatterpated jester. + + + + +CHAPTER V + +SHE SAVED A CITY + + +"And so--and so it's all hung up for another twelve years--the Thunder +Bird's flight! For I don't suppose there's much chance of the money +coming from another direction." + +Pemrose Lorry echoed the cry, repeated it desolately, hours later, +standing in her own room--a room that was a sort of sequel to herself, +as every Camp Fire Girl's nest should be. + +Her father had echoed it, as she sat very close to him, driving home in +the Grosvenor's limousine. + +"Well! so far this strung-out will has been for us much cry and little +wool, eh, girlie," he muttered; and for the first time she heard +discouragement in his voice; perhaps he had "banked" upon that third nut +more than he admitted. + +"So the money is hung up for the next dozen years, as far's any benefit +to the invention is concerned," he went on presently, just before his +own home was reached. "I'd better be putting my time into something +else, I guess," with a raw scrape in the tones. "How--how about a +machine for the manufacture of paper clothing, eh, or airdrawn rugs--" +sarcastically--"prosperity, _riches_, in that! Ha! Get thee behind +me, Satan--but don't push!" added the inventor whimsically, thrusting +his head out of the auto window,--with a sound that was neither laugh +nor groan. + +"Get thee behind me, Satan--and don't push!" + +Tears sprang to those blue eyes of Pemrose now, as she recalled the +half-piteous tone in the voice. + +Toandoah was discouraged. Toandoah was tempted--tempted to sacrifice the +highest claim of his intellect, his original dream, or the dream whose +originality he had made practical, of reaching the heavenly bodies; of +being a pioneer in exploring the Universe outside his own earth and its +enveloping atmosphere; of finding out the secrets of that mysterious +upper air, and where it ended, of getting back a record of it--the +Thunder Bird's golden egg, the first record from space. + +And the girl in her buoyant young heart of hearts felt that hope--nay, +certainty--were still there, green, springing, as the first signs of +happy springtime in the world outside. + +How--how was she to make him feel it; she his little Wise Woman, his +laboratory pal? + +Her eye went to the emblems upon her wall: a pine tree on a poster, +typical of strength, a banner with a sunburst, the sun shedding warmth +upon the earth. + +And then--then! To the little squat figure of a woman, as the Indians +depicted her, with a torch in her hand, Wisdom's torch--her own emblem +as Wantaam of the Council Fire. + +But there was another representation of that Wantaam--that Wise Woman. +Pem had designed it herself, painted it herself upon a two-foot poster, +gaining thereby a green honor-bead for handicraft. + +And before that the girl, wrestling with the heavy disappointment of +that tantalizing will, brought up--her hands clasped. + +It was a curious scene: a lot of little tents with a wall around them, +the same symbolic figure of the woman with the torch stood upon the +wall, pointing a stiff arm at a man outside, a warrior, who had a knife +in hand. + +Underneath were printed in flaming characters two Indian words: "Notick! +Notick!" signifying: "Hear! Hear!" + +"I always did feel fascinated by that Wise Woman who saved--a--city." +Pem looked adoringly at her handiwork. "A besieged Jewish city, away +back in King David's time! To be sure, one reads of it in--in what's a +bloodthirsty chapter of the Old Testament! And she saved the town by +ordering the death of a rebel, a traitor, proclaiming that she, herself, +was loyal and faithful to the king--so were her people--making Joab, +David's captain, that man with the knife, outside the wall, listen when +she cried to him: 'Hear! Hear!' She had more sense than the men about +her--and one isn't told the least thing further about her, not even her +name. That's what makes her mysterious--and fascinating.... Yet she +saved a city!" + +The girl drew a long breath--a suddenly fired breath. + +Was it up to her now to save a city: the citadel of her father's +courage--of that rose-colored conviction which is half the battle on +earth or in the air? How was she to do it? + +Her eye went wandering around the room. Trained to the eloquence of +symbols, it lit on something. Just a sheen of pearls and a little loom +upon a table--myriads of pearly beads, woven and unwoven, with here and +there a ray of New Jerusalem colors, ruby, emerald, blazing through +them--the New Jerusalem of hope. + +"Ah-h!" + +Breathlessly she caught it up, that something, four feet and a half of +the beaded history of a girl,--pearl-woven prophecy, too! + +Hugging it to her breast, that long leather strip, an inch and a half in +width, on which her glowing young life-story was woven in pearls, with +those rainbow flashes of color--the loom with it--she hurried out of the +room. + +Never, perhaps, did a professor's laboratory, the stern, hardware "lab." +of a mechanical engineer, react to anything so fairy-like as when Pem, +scurrying down a flight of stairs to the workshop which her father had +fitted up in his own house--not his University laboratory with the tall +spectroscope--sat down to a table and began industriously to weave. + +Turning from a bench where he sat fiddling with a steel chamber, part of +the anatomy of a fledgling Thunder Bird, of one of those small model +rockets which he was fitting up for experiments on a mountain-top, the +inventor watched her listlessly. + +"Hullo! What's the charm now, the thing of beauty? That--that looks such +stuff as dreams are made of." Toandoah drew a long breath. + +"No, it isn't dream-stuff, father; it's history, the history of your +life and mine, all told in symbols, woven into a chain, a stole--see--to +wear with my ceremonial dress. It--it's my masterpiece." Pem looked up, +all girl, all Rose, now. "I didn't want to show it to you until it was +finished. But now--now--don't you want to see it?" + +Listlessly, still, her father drew near, his tall figure in its long, +drab laboratory coat looming like a shadow behind her shoulder. + +"See there--there's where it begins with the Flag I was born under, the +Stars and Stripes," excitedly. "And look," softly, "that gold star +stands for Mother who died when I was two. And there you are, Toandoah, +with that queer Indian triangle having the teeth of a saw, the emblem of +invention." + +"What! That funny, squat figure, with something like a three-cornered +fool's-cap on my head and the moon above it, looking through a tube!" +There was a laugh in the inventor's throat now; the grim "Get thee +behind me, Satan!" look, with the cloud of that codicil to a will, were +melting away from him. "Well, go on!" he encouraged smilingly. +"Artistic, anyhow! I believe you Camp Fire Girls would weave magic +around a clock pendulum." + +"And here--here am I--Wantaam, a Wise Woman. There's the Thunder Bird, +see, the symbol of the great rocket. Here are you and I, Dad, upon a +mountaintop, watching it tear--oh! tear away." + +He laughed again at the two stiff, woodeny figures, the comet-like +streak of fire above them. + +"And this--the quill fluttering down attached to a kite! Humph! That +stands for the Thunder Bird's diary, I suppose, otherwise the golden +egg--the little recording apparatus coming down on the wing of its black +parachute." + +The inventor laughed amusedly again, glancing sidelong at _his_ +masterpiece, the little five-inch openwork steel box, having in it two +tiny wheels with paper wound, tapelike, on one and a pencil between +them. This carried in the head of the Thunder Bird, big or little, would +keep a record of as high as it went by the pencil automatically making +marks so long as there was any air-pressure, like a guiding hand, to +move it. + +"Yes." The weaver nodded. "And here--here is the Will being read!" + +The girlish voice was lower now, the girlish feet treading doubtful +ground, as she pointed again to those two quaint, stubby figures, with a +third one reading from a parchment. + +But there was no doubt at all in the young voice which presently +gathered itself for a climax. + +"And see--see there--those little yellow dots I'm weaving in now; those +are gold pieces, father, the money that _is_ coming to us from +somewhere for you to finish your invention. Yes! and I'm going on to +weave in the moon, too, and the little blue powder-flash before her +face, to show the Thunder Bird has got there. For it is going to get +there, you know!" Pem's blue-star eyes were dim now, but in them was the +wisdom of babes--the wisdom oft hid from the wise and prudent. + +"Daddy-man!" She bowed her head over the pearl-woven prophecy, speaking +very low. "I could always tell you my thoughts. Somehow, at that awful +time of the train-wreck, when we were in the icy water, Una and I, +before the boy came, the big boy who saved us, through--through all the +'horripilation', as he called it, I seemed to see a light; the--the +Light of Light Eternal, as we sing--God--and I knew, oh-h! I knew-ew, at +the last, that we weren't going to dr-rown.... I know just as certainly +now that you're going to launch the Thunder Bird, to go-o where +nothing--Earthly--has ever gone before.... Father-r!" + +Silence fell upon that passionate little cry in the dim workshop. + +Only the beauty of the pearl-woven thing upon the table spoke--the +record to go down to posterity. + +Then into the silence tiptoed the voice of a man, whimsical, slightly, +yet with a touch of tender awe in it, too: + +"And none knew the Wise Woman who saved the city!" + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +A HOTSPUR + + +"Oh! I'm so glad--just so glad I don't know what to do with myself--that +those experiments with the lesser Thunder Bird, the smaller sky-rocket, +which won't make the four-day trip to Mammy Moon, but will only fly up a +couple of hundred miles, or so, and drop its golden egg, the diary, to +tell you where that blank No Man's Land of space begins will still be +carried out this spring from the top of old Mount Greylock. If they had +been given up, it would have broken my heart--so it would!" + +It was evening now, late evening, in the dining room of the professor's +home, looking upon the green University campus. + +The girl with the grafted Rose in her name, grafted on to a foreign +stem, was pouring out her father's after dinner coffee--and her own full +heart, at the same time. "Ouch!" She shivered a little. "I don't like to +think of that 'diddering' cold of empty space; not--not since the +train-wreck. I'm like the big boy who saved us then, and was so jolly; +I'm out for excitement if I'm warm enough to enjoy it, eh?" + +"Humph! Well, here's somebody who's willing to take a chance on carrying +his warmth, his fun too, with him into space." + +The professor laughed as he drew a sheet of thick letter paper, broad +and creamy, from his pocket. + +"Oh! is it somebody else ... you don't mean to say it's another hotspur +applying for a passage in the real Thunder Bird when you start the big +rocket off for the moon, eh?" + +The girl glanced over her father's shoulder. + +"Yes, one more candidate for lunar honors! And this one is the limit for +a Quixote. Young, too, I should say!" Again Toandoah's deep chant of +laughter buoyed his daughter's treble note, as he began to read: + + "Professor G. Noel Lorry, + Nevil University. + My dear Sir, + + Having learned that you are perfecting an apparatus that will reach + any height--even go as far as the moon--and that it will be capable of + carrying a passenger, I should like to volunteer for the trip. + + I have always wanted to say 'Hullo!' to the Man in the Moon, on whose + face I have often looked from an aeroplane already; and I am ready to + try anything once--even if it should be once for all! + + Yours for the big chance, + T. S. + + P. S. I respectfully apologize for not being able just at present to + give my full name, but will, with your permission, furnish it later." + +"Humph! Mr. T. S.! 'With your permission,' where do you write from?" +Pemrose bent low over the primrose sheet. "Oh! from Lightwood. Now,--now +where is that, Daddy?" + +"There's a little, one-horse village of the name among the Berkshire +Mountains, not far from fashionable Lenox." Her father smiled. + +"Lenox! How lovely! Why! that's where you and I are going to stay--stay +for a week or two--isn't it, father, _en route_ for Greylock and +the experiments. You know the Grosvenors have invited us--and they have +a wonderful old place up there. Una's mother is carrying coals these +days--" Pemrose winked--"coals of penitence in her heart for ever having +sneered at your invention, Daddy." + +"Hot ones, are they? Well! I wish she'd hasten and spill them out before +she reaches Lenox." The inventor chuckled. "Let me see, she was born +there, I believe, at their mountain home--yes, and one or other of her +brothers, too." + +"Ho! Was it--was it the unicorn; I--I mean the oddity; the Thunder +Bird's rival for all-l that money?" The girlish hand shook now as it +wielded the coffee-pot. "Oh, dear! wouldn't his horn be exalted if he +never came back?" With a droll little catch of the breath. "Una and I +are as friendly as ever now, Dad," ran on the girlish voice, hurriedly +leading off from the neighborhood of the will. "And she's to be taken +out of school early, when we go, because she has been so nervous since +the train-wreck. So chummy we are--oh, as chummy as in the old days when +we measured eyelashes and she laughed at my 'chowchow' name!" The +speaker here shot the bluest of glances through those twinkling lashes +at their reflection in a neighboring teapot, older than Columbia +herself. + +"Chowchow, indeed! It just suits you, that compound. There's a vain elf +in you somewhere, Pem, that sleeps in the shadow of the Wise Woman." + +"Maybe--maybe, there's a nickum! That's Andrew's word, Andrew's word for +an imp, a tomboy. He's the Grosvenors' Scotch chauffeur, you know, who +talks with a thistle under his tongue. Well! nickum, or not!" the girl +was a rosy weathercock again. "I--I'm just dying to get up to the +mountains, to climb the Pinnacle, the green Pinnacle, that rough, +pine-clad hill, with Una--and sit in the Devil's Chair!" + +"_What!_ My Wise Woman sitting in the Devil's Chair! Why! 'twould +take a daredevil nickum, indeed, to do that." + +The inventor threw up his hands, laughing again, as he beat a retreat to +his hardware den, his laboratory, where there was ever a magnet, potent +by night or day, to draw him back. + +Yet when still another six weeks had passed and Pemrose, with all the +green world of spring in her heart, stood, breathless, upon that Lenox +pinnacle--a pine-clad mountainette some thirteen hundred feet above +sea-level--lo and behold! there was a nickum sitting coolly in the +Devil's Chair. + +A brazen feat it was! For that Lucifer's throne was a curved stone seat, +a natural armchair, rudely carved out of the precipice rock, more than a +dozen sheer feet beneath the crest where she stood with Una--Andrew of +the thistly tongue having driven the two girls up to the foot of the +peak on this the third day after their arrival, with the May flies, amid +the mountains. + +"A nickum--oh! a nickum, indeed--a daredevil nickum--sitting in the +Devil's Armchair, with his feet dangling down--down over the deep +precipice! Look!" + +Pemrose pirouetted in excitement at the sight. + +"Yes, and, goodness! he seems to be enjoying it, too. Not turning a +hair. Oh! if 'twere I--I should be so-o dizzy." + +With the more timid cry in her pulsing throat, and that little appalled +stand, a star of mingled consternation and admiration beaming, +bewitched, in one dark eye, Una turned from the spectacle--turned, +shuddering, from the hundred-and-odd feet of unbroken abyss extending +from the nickum's knickerbockered legs, nonchalantly swinging, to an +awed grove of young pine trees, rock-ribbed and bowlder-strewn, far +below. + +"Oh! I don't want to look at him," she cried cravenly. "How will +he--ever--climb back up here again?" + +"Tr-rust him--" began Toandoah's daughter, then suddenly clutched her +throat, her widening eyes as round, as bright, as staringly blue as the +mountain lupine already opening upon the world's surprises, in sunny +spots, among the hills. + +Those eyes were now fastened to the back of the nickum's close-cropped +head, to his broad shoulders in a rough, gray sweater, noting a certain +"bully" shrug of those shoulders at the surrounding landscape, as if, +monarch of all he surveyed, he yet felt himself a usurper in his present +seat. + +"Something rotten--something rotten in the State of Denmark!" crowed +Pemrose softly. "I wonder if he's getting that off now? Una! Una! It's +He ... He!" + +"Who? Who?" + +"The man--the boy--who saved us after the train-wreck ... without whom +we mightn't be here--now! Ah-h!" was the softly tremulous answer, as the +blue eyes danced down the rock, with frankest recognition, friendliest +expectation, to that daring, nonchalant nickum figure, now coolly +drawing up its toes for a climb. + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +THE PINNACLE + + +It was an exciting situation. + +Pemrose, who like the enthroned daredevil liked excitement, if she was +warm enough to enjoy it, had not hoped for quite such a tidbit when she +came to the mountains,--at least, short of the little Thunder Bird's +record-breaking flight. + +"Oh! I did so want to run across him again. I do so long to thank him! +Why--why! we might never have escaped from that awful wreck, got out of +the zero water, but for him, Una." The blue eyes were wet now, frankly +wet, bluebells by a mountain brook--the little bursting brooklet of +feeling within. + +"I--I'd like to thank him, too!" gushed Una, with that little fixed star +twinkling most radiantly in one dark eye, the slight stand which +characterized it only at intense moments when feeling reached indefinite +altitudes. "Oh! how glad I am now," she ran on breathlessly, "that we +made Andrew leave the car down in a garage at the Pinnacle's foot and +bring us up here for a sort of picnic supper," sending a sidelong glance +scouting round for the tall, capped figure of the grizzled chauffeur +who, a brief ten years before, had been driving his "laird's" car upon +Ben Muir, a heathery mountain of his native Highlands. + +Trustworthy as day, a capable driver and zealous Church Elder, he was +one to whose guardianship Una Grosvenor, the apple of her parents' eye, +might safely be intrusted with her visiting friend while her father +golfed and her mother lunched and played bridge in complacent peace of +mind. + +"Oh! she's all right with Andrew; he's such a true-penny!" was her +father's dictum. "Safer with him, up here, than she would be with maid +or housekeeper! And, after that shock in the winter, the doctor wants +her to be out of doors among the hills morning, noon and +night--practically all the time, if she can!" + +Ah! so far, so good. But just at this unprecedented moment of excitement +Andrew, the true-penny, had encountered another Scot, who emigrated +before he did, and was breezily "clacking" with him at some distance +from where two breathlessly expectant girls gazed down upon the black +top of the nickum's head--and at his wheeling shoulders in the great +armchair. + +"Oh--oh! there he goes--see--curling up his legs, drawing up his feet +carefully, turning in the seat--standing up!" cried Pemrose, all Rose at +this crisis, prematurely blooming, as if it were June, not May, as she +stood on tiptoe to meet a dramatic moment, reveling in the thought that +the daredevil did not know what a surprise awaited him on top here, what +a welcome--heart-eager gratitude. + +She bit her lip, however, upon the impulsive cry, for she saw two girls, +younger than herself, with a ten-year-old boy, who had been watching the +climber's feat from a near-by mound, turn and look at her curiously. + +They were evidently acquainted with the daring usurper of the Devil's +Chair. + +For, having drawn up his legs until his knees touched his chin, then +raised himself to a standing position on the grim stone seat, cautiously +turning, his strong fingers gripping the granite chair-arms, when his +back was to the precipice beneath and his face almost touching the +twelve-foot, well-nigh perpendicular rock which he had to climb, he +actually had the hardihood to wave his hand to them. + +"Now--now comes the 'scratch'!" he shouted laughingly. "I'm going to +hook on to that 'nick' in the rock, there, just over my head, and draw +myself up. Had to 'shy' it coming down--for fear it would catch in my +clothing." + +"Didn't I--didn't I t-tell you it was him?" burst forth Pem, with all +the vehemence of a little spring torrent, in Una's ear as she caught the +ring of the chaffing voice which had railed at the Fates for "wishing a +wreck on" to unoffending youth, and was so boldly challenging them now. + +And just as free and frank in her girlish gratitude as that torrent +bubbling impulsively out of the earth, when the nickum reached the crest +again, she sprang forward, hand outstretched, to meet him. Her eyes, +blue as the little fairy blossoms of the star-grass now, were breeze +blown in the meadow of her gladness. + +It was nothing--nothing not to know the name of one who had saved you +from death, she thought. + +By the rescue you knew him! + +And he knew her! + +Those eyes, those keen, girlish eyes which had looked through the +spectroscope a hundred times, in her father's laboratory, into the +remote mystery of that far-away upper air could not be deceived. + +By the sudden, startled heave of his shoulders, whose defiant shrug she +remembered so well, by the quick intake of breath, as its climbing hiss +sharpened to a whistle--almost a rude whistle in the excitement of the +feat he had just performed--by the little stare of breathless surprise, +of quandary, in his dark eyes, glowing like Una's, he recognized her ... +and passed her by. + +Recognized her as the girl whose "pep" he had complimented for putting +another's life before her own--and didn't want to have anything more in +life to say to her! + +Well! the Heavens fell upon the Pinnacle as Pem drew back--annihilated. + +Snubbed for the first time in all her blue-sky life--and by a boy, too! + +To be sure, indeed, the nickum, his glance darting past her to Una, had +gone by with a slight inclination of his bare head that was a stony bow. + +To be sure, when one of the girls of his acquaintance questioned him +about the view from the Devil's Seat, there was a sort of creak in his +voice as he answered: + +"It's--a--corker! You can see away off: far-rms, lakes, all the other +mountains--Mount Greylock, too, in the distance! But--but it's a +cat's-foot climb down--there!" breaking off breathlessly, as if feeling +were making a cat's-paw of him. + +"Oh! you can really see Mount Greylock! As far away as that! Well! I'm +going to try-y it, too," ventured one of his girlish companions whose +age was fourteen. "Summer and winter, I've done a lot of climbing, up +here!" + +"You try it! Any girl try sitting in the Devil's Chair! Why! there isn't +a girl living who could do it," crowed the gray-shouldered youth: and +now his tones were lordly, as if he were picking himself up after an +inner tumble. + +"Hey! Is that so?" Pem--over-hearing--ground the words between her +teeth. + + "Have you never heard of Camp Fire, + What a shame! What a shame! + _If_ you've never heard of Camp Fire, + You're to blame! You're to blame! + Then don't take a nap, + For we're on the map, + Ready to prove it with s-snap!" + +She hissed the last word at the nickum's back, as he halted at some +distance with his companions. + +"Una! I'm going to do it," she panted. "I'm going to slide down that +rock there, turn round and sit in the Chair--then draw myself up again, +as he did. I've got on sneakers. I know I can! I've done some breakneck +climbing with father--yes! and with my Camp Fire Group, too." + +"I--I'll give you all my marshmallows that we brought with us to toast +at an open fire, if you do!... Yes! and one of my two little thistle +pins--pebble pins--that Andrew and his wife brought me from Scotland, +when they went home last year, _if you do_.... Wasn't he just +hor-rid? He didn't want to speak to us--to know us!" + +Una's face flamed upon the bribe, and was so pretty lit by that fixed +star in the eye, that it must have been a zero-hearted nickum who could +turn his back upon it. + +"Hold my hat," said Pem: if she had been a boy, the tone would have +meant: "Hold my coat while I thrash him!" + +Unhesitatingly she stepped to the precipice-brink and measured the +distance to that Devil's Chair very coolly and critically with her eye. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +A USURPER + + +Gathering her short, green skirt about her, for she wore, as on that +February day in her father's laboratory, what he called the "nixie +green", the sylvan Camp Fire uniform, the inventor's daughter stretched +herself breast downward, upon the flat ledge of the Pinnacle's crest. + +Working her body carefully backward, without another glance at the +precipice beneath, she slid warily over the edge, her face to the rock, +and down the dozen feet of almost smooth, nearly perpendicular slab, +until her feet touched the stone seat of that curved armchair, a deep +embrasure in the mountain granite. + +It was not such a wildly difficult feat then for a girl on her mettle to +turn cautiously until her tingling back was pressed hard against the +slab, and thus to lower herself to a sitting position on the rocky +throne. + +For that Devil's Chair was a spacious one--fairly so! The seat extended +outward at least three feet and was roomy enough to allow of two people +standing upright on it at the same time. + +And what a view old Lucifer must have from it, was Pem's first +thought--provided he didn't, as an Irishman would say, reside away from +home! + +Off to the right and left stretched the wonderful landscape of the +Berkshire Hills, Massachusetts' Highlands--the Berkshire mountains in +May where, afar, a summit snow-cap vied with the driven snows of +blossoming fruit trees, lower down; where the pink-shot pearl of a lake +gleamed, opal-like, from an emerald setting, and many a silver thread +winding, expanding, showed where some madcap river or brook had become +with spring a wild thing. + +"Oh, hurrah! I can really see off to Mount Greylock--old King +Greylock--even the steel tower upon it--oh! so plainly," murmured the +madcap in the Chair, and nestled triumphantly against its rocky back. + + "Greylock, cloud-girdled, from his purple throne, + A shout of gladness sends, + And up soft meadow slopes, a warbling tone, + Of Housatonic blends." + +Yes! she felt as if they were two throned dignitaries, she and Greylock; +for she wore the crown of derring do, and King Greylock, still wearing a +thin diadem of snow, was enthroned for ever in her imagination as the +favored peak from which the first experiments with her father's immortal +rocket were to be made. + +Upon Greylock's crest within a week or two, maybe--at all events before +summer dog-day heat clogged and fogged the air--her transcendent +dream--or the first part of it--would come to pass: her yearning thumb +would press the button and start the little Thunder Bird off, to fly up +a couple of hundred miles, or so, with its diary in its cone-shaped +head, and send back that novel explorer's log, the little recording +apparatus, attached to a black silk parachute--the first, the very first +record from the outer realm of space. + +No wonder that old Greylock sent her back a shout of gladness now, as, +squirming in the Chair, she turned her gaze away from the distant +mountain to green meadow slopes, to the right, where the broadest silver +ribbon, intertwined with the matchless landscape, showed where the +Housatonic River, the blue Housatonic, flowed and sang. + +"Oh, dear! I wouldn't have missed this for anything," she exulted +silently. "But the idea of that perfectly horrid boy actually daring me +to do it! He didn't mean to, but he did--strutting off, like that, +crowing about his climbing! As if a girl were--gingerbread! Well--" +indignantly--"that was just one with his passing Una and me when we only +wanted to thank him, felt as if we naturally must thank him, +for--for.... Bah! I won't think of the horrid wreck now! Or of him, +either! I'll be taken up with the view! Isn't it exquisite--sublime? Not +interrupted as it is up there on the--Pinnacle's--crest!...--Ah-h!" + +The little pinched exclamation came when--all too suddenly--she changed +the point of view, and looked down. + +Beneath her yawned the precipice over which her feet dangled--treading +air, with never a break between them and that grove of dwarf pine trees +more than a hundred feet below, pointed by their glinting rocks. + +The little trees bowed to her, now, like servants--green pages. + +But, somehow, their homage made her feel uneasy; it put too great a +distance beneath her and them. + +The crown of daring which she wore did not fit quite so easily. + +She began to feel like a usurper whose head might at any moment be taken +off. + +And, with that, she decided to vacate! + +Drawing up her feet much more gracefully than her predecessor had done, +she curled her body in the seat and raised it slowly until she was in a +standing position, grasping the stone arms of the chair, turned--turned +rather sickeningly, to be sure, until her breast was against the broad +rock down which she had slid, then reached upward for a handhold by +which to climb--to draw herself up. + +There was one. The nickum--churlish climber--had pulled himself up by +it. Like him, she had fought shy of it, sliding down, for fear it should +catch in her clothing. + +A little spur it was, projecting from a slight fissure, what he called a +"nick," in the rock, rather more than half-way up,--a good seven feet +from the rocky armchair. + +Breathlessly she reached upward, to grasp it. + +And, lo! her lips fell apart--like a cleft stone. + +At the same time her heart slunk out of her body and dropped into the +precipice behind her. + +Her fingers just missed that spur--fell short! + +They touched it; they could not curl over it--and grip. + +Flattening herself to a green creeper against the rock which seemed +spurning her, wildly she stretched every tendril--every sinew. + +In vain! Make as long an arm as she could, this daring Pem, her five +feet three of slim girlish stature would not become the five feet nine +of the daredevil who preceded her! + +Emergency balks at extension. + +That right arm, racked, fell limply back. + +The blue of her eyes, hooking to the spur, if her fingers couldn't, grew +glazed like enamel. + +She felt as if she were tumbling backward already, the daring essence of +her, to break her too spunky backbone among those glowing pine-dwarfs +far beneath. + +Spread-eagled against the rock's cruel breast, she turned a blanched +face, a convulsed face, upward! + + + + +CHAPTER IX + +JACK AT A PINCH + + +"Keep cool! Don't stir! I'll reach you in a moment!" + +As the cry, the reassuring cry, came ringing down to her, Pemrose felt +the blood start again from where it was frozen at the back of her neck +and surge through her flattened body, which, greenly spread-eagled +against that gray rock, the head turned slightly aside, was not unlike +the quaint Indian figure of the Thunder Bird upon a pedestal,--the +emblem of her father's invention. + +As the first blind moment of terror passed--the blankness of the +discovery that, strain as she might, she could not reach that spur of +the rock, the nearest hand-hold, and draw herself up to safety--she saw +two rescuing figures loom out on high. + +[Illustration: "Keep cool! Don't stir! I'll reach you in a moment!" Page +86.] + +The first was that of the chauffeur, Andrew, summoned by a piercing cry +from Una--Una whose delicate face was white and square now as the +marshmallows in the box under her arm, with which she had bribed her +friend to the madcap feat of sliding backward down a twelve-foot rock +and sitting in the Devil's Chair. + +And Andrew the Scot saw the danger, heard it skirling in his ears, for +he had been brought up among mountains. + +He did not quite see what good he could do, that staid Church Elder, by +joining the girl in the Devil's Seat. + +But he came of a Campbell clan which never flinched. + +He was preparing to slide down, himself, when an arm--a left elbow +rather--thrust him rudely back. + +"T-take hold of this rope-end. Throw yourself flat on the ground there. +Sit on him, you girls, so that he may not be drawn over!" cried a voice, +pointed, vigorous. + +Pem knew that it was the fiery voice of the nickum, the broad-shouldered +youth, who had sat in the chair before her, whose crowing had been +responsible for her feat. + +Her colorless face was turned upward then and she had seen him push up +the lower folds of his sweater with his left hand--even while its elbow +sent the chauffeur back--and while his right, lightning-like, uncoiled a +rope, a lariat, worn under it around his waist. + +It was then that he shouted to her to "keep cool"; and that she, turning +her head aside against the rock, became a living effigy of the Thunder +Bird. + +Not waiting to make the rope fast around his own body--or his body fast +to it--he slid down. + +The next moment he was standing beside her in the chair. + +"Ha! So the 'pep' was in the wrong box that time," he said coolly. + +"Yes. Last time it was in the ice-box," snapped she, as coolly, not to +be outdone. "So you _did_ remember--know me--us!" + +"How could I help--remembering--that icy train-wreck?" He was slipping +the rope in a noose under her arms. "Perhaps, some day.... Well! I'm +glad to be 'Jack at a Pinch' again, anyway." + +"R-ready!" he shouted then. + +And Pem was drawn up, to face a Highland squall from Andrew. + +"Hoot! lassie, an' air ye sech a fechless tomboy that a mon mun keep his +een sticket on ye a' the time?" the Scot angrily demanded. "How cud ye +be sech a nickum as to try sitting in yon--Deev's Chair?" + +"Ask--ask the other nickum; he did it first," flung back the rescued +one. + +But under cover of the broad scolding, the other, the Jack at a +Pinch--friend in need for the second time--had again slipped off, +without a word from either of the girls. + +"Bah! he is a nickum--a mysterious imp," snapped Pemrose, the fire that +smoldered behind her white face leaping up. "Can't be shyness with him; +he doesn't look the least bit shy! Oh-h! what a fool I was to give him a +chance to help me--save me--in a 'pinch', again." + +Tears were springing to her eyes now,--tears of reaction. + +She felt that an eighteen-year-old youth, privileged to save her life +twice--it seemed a privilege at the moment--might, at least, have had +the manners to let her thank him for it. + +"Oh! he's the nicest and the--hor-rid-est--boy I ever saw," wailed Una, +in tribute to the train-wreck, still a nightmare on her mind. + +Both girls were dumfounded, as well they might be. + +Pemrose, with her blue eyes under jet-black lashes--girdled, moreover, +with her father's growing fame--Una, with lighter eyelashes and hair, +and that little fixed star of angry excitement blazing in one sweet dark +eye, they were the kind of girls whose good graces a boy would be the +last to spurn, fair even for daughters of Columbia who, democratic in +beauty, as in all else, never hatches out an ugly duckling. + +They gazed in stormy bewilderment now after Jack at a Pinch walking off +with his party whom, indeed, he had herded away. + +Andrew was looking gloweringly after him, too. + +"An' so he's the loon that sat in the Chair first!" grumbled the still +angry chauffeur. "Aw weel--" the "dour" expression upon the speaker's +long upper lip softening a little--"weel! he may be ill-trickit, but +he's a swanky lad, for a' that. Aye, fegs! an' braw, too." + +"Oh! he's 'swanky' enough--swaggering--but I don't think he's 'braw', +handsome--not with that little stand in his eye--just like Una's, only +more so." Pem added the last words under her breath. "But, oh! for +goodness sake! let's get away from here," she cried wildly; "over to the +other side of the Pinnacle, anywhere--anywhere--so that we won't see him +again, before his strutting over what he's done, makes me--makes me--" + +"Yes--it's pretty on the other side of the hill, easy climbing, much +smoother--green and spring-like," assented Una soothingly, pouring balm. +"It's all covered with young pine trees and just a few, very few, tall +silvery birches. Not rough and rocky as it is this side!" glancing +shiveringly down the precipice. + +"Not another Deev's Chair in sight, I'll be hoping--fegs!" muttered +Andrew, picking up a basket which he had carried from the automobile up +the low mountainside, and in the late emergency had set down. + +It contained cocoa, sandwiches, fruit and other toothsome dainties for a +picnic supper. + +"We have permission to make a fire, a Pin-na-cle blaze, to--to boil +water and toast our marshmallows. Oh! of all things, all-ll things on +this planet--I don't know what we may find on any other--that's +'banner', it's a marshmallows toast out-of-doors--isn't it?" chanted +Una, intoning her delight to the trees, the low spruce and pine scrub, +as she skipped among them, an evergreen sprite, herself, for she, too, +now wore the "bonnie green", the Camp Fire short skirt, middy blouse and +captivating Tam-o'-shanter--most nymph-like note in dress for daughters +of the woodland. + +"And--and I just know the dear-est, loveliest pin-ey nook," she went on +in a choir-boy sing-song; "half-way down the Pinnacle's softer side it +is, where we may build our fire. Halleluiah! I suppose I'll have to get +busy and gather fagots, as in Camp Fire rank I'm a Wood Gatherer. Oh, +dear! Will you listen to old Andrew. Now what is _he_ singing?" + +The Scot, indeed, relaxing from prim silence and chauffeur ceremony here +upon the Pinnacle's height, with only two young girls to marshal instead +of the mechanism of lever and brake--although the former, as he had +found to his cost might prove the worse handful of the two--was +alternately whistling, with lips drily pursed, and crooning in the +burr-like accents which adhered like a thistle to his tongue, his +version of a very old song: + + "Young lassie! Daft lassie, + I tell ye the noo, + I'm keepin' some fagots, + An' a stick, too, for you! + + "Singing whack fol de ri do! + De ri do! + + "A lassie, a dog, + And an auld rowan tree, + The mair that you thwacks 'em, + The better they be!" + +"'Thwacks 'em!' Pshaw! he's flinging that in my direction--having a +fling at me--for sitting in the Devil's Chair," laughed Pem, but the +laughter was bitter, two-edged. "Oh! Una," she burst forth shakily, "as +long--as long's ever I live, I'll wish I hadn't done it, +letting--letting that Jack at a Pinch, as he called himself, that big, +boorish boy, play friend in need to me-e again. Ugh-h!" + +Her stung lips quivered and were twisted, partly upon the after-taste of +terror. + +"Humph! forget it--oh-h! forget it," caroled the younger girl. "See that +you don't make a trouble out of it, for trouble is a hor-rid +kettle-o'-fish for the troublers--see!... But--listen! Listen! Surely +that's singing--singing from somewhere--_other_ singing!" + +She paused on tiptoe, a green dryad, one little hand, fair as a +flower-petal, curled about her startled ear. + +But Pem was for the moment comfort-proof. + +"Bah! 'Tisn't quite so easy to forget," she murmured, bitterly. + +Her less fragile fists were mounted one upon another under her chin as +if to hold her head up. For the first time in her life she felt as if +she were being asked to drink a cup of humiliation--she, Toandoah's +little pal--and she made wry faces over even a sip. + +"Humph! Doesn't it seem queer--queer--outlandish?" she snapped, +bolstering the piqued head higher with each passionate adjective. "Here +for three months, ever since February--since I recovered consciousness +after that freezing wreck--I've been longing, oh! longing to meet again +the boy whose chaff, whose very chaff, warmed one amid the horrors.... +You didn't hear it; you were too far gone. And, _now_!" The little +fists lashed out. "Bah! Who could ev-er dream that he'd turn out such a +'chuff', as the boys say--an un-civ-il chuff?... Una! it's never--it +isn't, it can't be Camp Fire Girls?" + +"It is! It is! I told you I heard singing." + +The answer was shrill with delight as the wiry note of the little +black-poll warbler, nesting near. + +"Why! Why! Goodness! That's what I hurled at _him_; at his crowing, +cock-a-hoop back!" + +The older girl's face softened, melted into whimsicality now,--into a +freakish surprise that encircled, like a golden ring, her wide-open +mouth. + +Up--up from the Pinnacle's softer side, its tender, heavenly side, the +chant came ringing, the merry chant and challenge: + + "Then--then don't take a nap, + For we're on the map!" + +"Camp Fire Girls! Camp Fire Girls! Here on the Pinnacle 'map'!" + +Pem caught her breath wildly. Never--oh! never was a turn of the tide +more welcome. + + + + +CHAPTER X + +CAMP FIRE SISTERS + + +Never was a diversion more welcome! + + "We're on the map, + R-ready to prove it with snap!" + +Snap was in the very sunset as the evening breeze learned the song. + +As for the inventor's daughter, her joyous relief was now a hop and now +a dance, anon a pine-caught hullabaloo, as she gleefully turned her back +upon the Devil's Chair and nickum memories--her face to the glowing sun +of sisterhood. + +"Camp Fire sisters! Camp Fire sisters! Was ever such luck?" she cried. +"Oh! come, let's find them--let's join them." + +"Oh--let us!" assented Una, her excitement, too, running like wildfire +through the wood. + +And, presently, the two city girls, wafting themselves airily over +bowlders, threading their way in and out among pigmy pines, with here +and there a needled patriarch among them, came upon a forest scene that +might well have wakened Queen Mab from her sleep in a cobweb net and +made her think that some, at least, of the fairy dreams with which she +inspired mortals had come true. + +A dozen, and more, of sylvan figures, the green tassels of their +Tam-o'-shanters waving like the tasseled green of the cinnamon fern +flitted busily in and out among their passive brothers, the trees, not +pines here, but a few beautiful stripling birches planted in a sunny +spot. + +To these white-stemmed saplings, tall and taper-like, some of the +nymphs, maidens from thirteen to seventeen, were playing fairy +godmother, affixing to their slender trunks placards proclaiming the +exaction of dire forfeits from any wanton human churl found guilty of +mutilating a silver birch tree, stripping it even of an inch of tender +skin, thus entailing upon it decay and death. + +Other of the maidens were gathering fagots for an outdoor fire to the +tune of a version of Andrew's song, not without humor in the present +crisis: + + "Singing whack fol de ri do, + 'Twill comfort their souls, + To get such fine fagots, + When they've got no coals!" + +One, brisk spoon in hand, was busily stirring some fairy brew, batter +rather--an older figure superintending, Queen Mab herself maybe, having +a golden sunburst embroidered upon the heaving emerald of her breast. + +Now! to these came forth two other maidens, emerging, breathless, from +the Pinnacle pines, and made the hand-sign of fire. + +Up went gracefully a dozen green arms, in charming tableau, as the +woodland nymphs paused in their work, their curving fingers typifying +the warmth of the curling flame behind the finger--the Camp Fire welcome +to heart and hearth. + +A genial flame which the Guardian--she of the golden maturity--put into +winsome words, as she approached. + +"Welcome--thrice welcome,--Sisters!" she cried. "We are the White Birch +Group of Lenox, at present engaged in protecting our younger brothers, +the little trees which we planted ourselves. I am Tanpa--signifying +Birch--Guardian of the Group; in everyday life just Myra Seaver." + +"And my name is Lorry--Pemrose Lorry--my ceremonial name Wantaam, a Wise +Woman." Here the spokeswoman for the two strangers had the grace to +blush, remembering the Devil's Chair. "And this--this is my friend, Una +Grosvenor, who has just been initiated into 'Camp Fire.' We belong to +the Woo-hi-ye--Victory--Group of Clevedon which, you know, is only a +hundred miles, or so, from here; and we--" + +But Tanpa's face had become suddenly fascinated--illumined--to rival the +sunburst upon her breast. + +"'Pemrose!'" She echoed the words softly, with transient glow. "How +novel--and pretty! But--Lorry! Oh-h! you don't mean to say--you don't +tell me--that you're anything to the great inventor, of whom the whole +world is talking: the professor who has invented an apparatus to--to +travel anywhere through the air, through space--even to reach the +moon?... Ah-h, there she is now! I wonder if she's listening to us!" + +It was, indeed, at that moment that Yachune herself, the Silver Queen, +showed her placid face above the Pinnacle pines, pale on the rim of the +waning sunset. Did she dream of the Earth-valentine in store for her, +mild old Mammy Moon? + +No knowing! The Pinnacle, the green Pinnacle, towered until it seemed +very near to her with the mounting pride in one girl's breast. + +"Toandoah, the inventor, is my father--oh! Professor Lorry, I mean. The +Thunder Bird--the record-breaking Thunder Bird--is his invention. I call +it that; an ordinary rocket he says it is." + +Well! the sky was in Pem's eyes, of a truth, now, enough blue to make a +Blue Peter, the flag of embarking, the flag of adventure; no rudeness of +"nickum", earthbound, boastful, could ever humiliate her again, with +Toandoah's emblem in her heart. + +Yet, as she felt the Guardian's saluting kiss upon her young forehead, +so starred by fate, as she was introduced, one by one, to her sisters of +the White Birch Group and was invited, she the center of a flattering +fuss, to sit with them by a Pinnacle blaze, instead of being at the +pleasant pains to build her own fire, her thoughts would turn back--turn +back every now and again, to Jack at a Pinch! + +To the quick-witted, surefooted youth, so daring, if so unmannerly--such +a chuff--who had not even waited to make the rope fast around his own +body before sliding down the rock to the Devil's Chair a second +time--and who had, a second time too, climbed, unaided. + +But she said nothing of him--or of her recent escapade. + +And she was glad that Una didn't! + +Instead, she bathed every sore spot left by the experience in the glory +of telling her new friends all that she might tell of the romantic, +space-conquering Thunder Bird, while, above, the Man in the Moon, +eavesdropping, learned of the surprise in store for him. + +Perhaps he cribbed some hint, too, from the excited girlish tongue of +the demonstration so soon to take place upon Mount Greylock, when the +invention would be tried out; and lastly of the thrilling invitation to +the White Birch Group to be present--not then--but on that Great Day, +far ahead, when the real Thunder Bird, full-fledged with magic, +red-eyed, fiery-tailed, would embark on its hundred-hour flight +moonward, as Pem was sure it would start, no matter where the gold-mine +to equip it came from. + +"Well! we seem, truly--truly--to be treading the 'margin of moonshine +land', don't we?" said the Guardian dreamily, enchantment in her voice. +"I--almost--feel as if, some day, we might be inviting the Man in the +Moon to supper with us here on the Pinnacle, to shoot himself back in +the small hours. Joking apart, it does draw the Universe very near +together, doesn't it--open the road to such wonderful possibilities!" + +Her hands came together as she gazed, that graceful, green-clad woman, +speechless, transfigured, along the aerial high-road on which the +Thunder Bird would first pay toll by dropping its golden egg, its +record, off--off beyond the low night-clouds to the mysterious sky-ways +where daylight now mated with dusk and the lunar lamps were being softly +lighted, even to the gateway of Mammy Moon herself. Throbbing, she +flushed from head to heel, as she thought of the two hundred and thirty +thousand miles to be traversed before the first barrier between the +heavenly bodies had been let down--and the Thunder Bird had won home. + +"It's--too--gr-reat for words," she said, a break in her voice now. +"Well-ll! if we are not playing hostess to the Man in the Moon--quite +yet--at least, we seem to be entertaining angels unawares, with the +latest rumors from the sky," laughingly. "How about supper now? Later on +maybe we can show you two dear girls that we--as a Group--can do +something with red fire, too, a very earth-bound something, mere child's +play compared to the future of your celestial Bird. Ha! +But--what's--that?" + +And then, for the first time in its yet unwritten story, the Thunder +Bird had its nose put out of joint by a modest little earth-bird--a +hermit, too, as it would be among the starry spaces--by a little, +brown-backed evening thrush singing its good-night song in a thicket of +scrub near by. + + "O wheel-y-will-y-will-y-_il-l_!" + +it caroled, as a naturalist has translated the wonderful, silver-sweet +prelude of the master-singer of the woods, the nightingale of America, +rising, trilling until--now--with the voice-throwing magic of the +ventriloquist, its song seemed to come from quite another corner of the +thicket, while girls' hearts melted in their breasts, as, climbing a +maypole of ecstasy, the notes trembled--fluted--upon a gossamer pinnacle +of gladness at the close of a perfect day. + +"Oh-h!" + +There was no breath in girlish bodies for more than the one answering +note of passion. + +No wonder the Thunder Bird's nose was out of joint. + +Earth has a magic all her own. + +But was it ventriloquism at large? Had the hermit power to throw his +melody right into the center of the ring of girls--so to answer himself? + +It was the visitors' turn now for a stupendous sensation. + +Almost as airy and flute-like, though not as liquidly sweet and soaring, +were bird-notes which answered back from within the very halo of Pemrose +herself; and she turned, with her heart in her throat, to see who--who +had the thrush in her pocket. + + + + +CHAPTER XI + +MOTHER EARTH'S ROMANCE + + +Surely, it was the sweetest grace ever said. + +A duet between a hermit thrush and a Camp Fire Girl! Pinnacle vespers! + +If gladness did not flow freely now, then human hearts were a desert! + +Instead, they were enchanted ground, those girlish hearts, carried away +by a sense that Mother Earth did not, after all, have to go outside her +own atmosphere for her fairy-land,--her golden crown of romance. + + "Wheel-y-will-y-will-y-il!" + +preluded again the little brown hermit-lover, with the rufous tail and +ruffled, speckled breast, from an evergreen twig of the low pine-scrub. + +And, once more, the aping response, the counterfeit thrush-note, came +from some little branch of that goodly green tree known as the White +Birch Group. + +"Who's doing it? Oh-h! who's doing it--answering?" breathed Pemrose +Lorry, feeling thrown into the shade with her Thunder Bird; which wasn't +altogether bad for her, either. "Oh! it's _you_, is it? Where's the +whistle--the bird-caller's whistle?" + +"Here. Look!" A maiden shy as a hermit-thrush herself, with rufous +lights in her sleek brown hair, and tiny, red-brown specks flecking the +iris of her eyes--corresponding to the many freckles upon her small +face, with a luminous quality added--opened a volunteering palm. + +In its concave hollow, also marbled with sun-spots, lay the magic +whistle, the two gleaming tin disks about the size of a fifty-cent +piece, joined one upon another with an eighth of an inch distance +between them, through whose simple medium the music in the heart of a +fourteen-year-old girl had so attuned itself to a little of the melody +in the breast of the thrush as to draw--actually draw--the hermit +himself forth on to a rock on the edge of the thicket, looking eagerly, +a trifle doubtfully, for the raw singer--the mate, who had answered him. + +"Romeo and Juliet!" laughed the Guardian. "Such a dear little feathered +Romeo, with a beak lined with pure gold--and a fairy oboe in his breast! +Juliet--" she lightly touched the brown-plumaged maiden--"Juliet +answering from her balcony, this mound!" + +"Only a parrot Juliet who can coin such shabby notes to answer him +with!" breathed the girl, shyly nursing her whistle. "No doubt he's +saying to himself: 'Shucks! Where's that hermit--or hermitess--'" +merrily, "'with the frog in her throat, or the great, big worm?'" + +"Oh! do-o try it again, anyway?" pleaded the visitors together. "It's +won-der-ful! We'll be as still--as still as a nun's chapel!" + +And obligingly, once more, the human thrush lifted up her notes of +speckled sweetness compared to the silver purity of the strength which +answered, the hermit fluting passionately upon his rock: + + "the song complete, + With such a wealth of melody sweet, + As never the organ pipe could blow + And never musician think or know!" + +Carried beyond himself--perhaps after all, he was a lonely hermit--he +actually hopped from his rock, unalarmed, towards the firelight, +when--when the concert was suddenly interrupted by a woodland gorgon! + +By Andrew who, rearing his six feet two of gaunt, hurlothrumbo length +from a fern-bed, hooking stick in hand, suddenly lifted from the embers +a boiling kettle. + +"Fegs! 'twas like to scald somebody wi' its daffy simmer," he explained +apologetically to the Guardian, being, in his capacity of chauffeur, +used to camping emergencies among these picturesque hills--so like, in +many respects, the wilds of his Scottish Highlands where the Lady of the +Lake, an original Camp Fire Girl, shot her skiff across the blue-eyed +loch. + +"My certy! but 'twas pretty to see yon _merle_, though!" he +murmured, having restored the kettle to sanity. "Fine it minded me, +ma'am, o' the time when I was a boy, huntin' like a nickum for the nests +o' mavis an' merle--blackbird an' thrush--when I'd rise 'wi' lark an' +light!' Fegs!" Scotch humor ripping chauffeur silence, "yon was a thing +to make a sober body young again; a while agone I don't know but I was +feelin' like the last o' pea-time; an'--an', noo, I'm a green pea +again,... or I would be but for the one sair memory," added Andrew, the +true-penny, under his breath. + +"Yes--yes, and you had to go jumping around like a parched pea, and +frightening the beautiful merle, the thrush, away!" complained Una, +aggrieved. "Oh! how did you ever learn to mimic its call, at all?" she +cried, catching at the wrist of the human merle, now very practically +engaged in toasting bacon-strips on the end of a stick. + +"My brother taught me; my only brother, Stud--Studley--Studart they +nickname him in camp--I don't know why," was the fluttering response. + +"A corruption of Stoutheart, I should say!" supplied the Guardian, now +busily frying flapjacks. "Of all the Boy Scouts in my husband's troop, +he's the lion-heart," laughingly. "So I understand!" + +"Yes, oh! yes, but he's so-o nice, with it," cooed the merle's +brown-eyed "mate." "He has never--oh! never--squeezed me out of +anything, just because I was a girl; always said that two--two--could +hunt together and make good headway!" softly. + +"And so they can: and so they will, when it comes to the grandest quest +of all, the hunt for truth and justice at the polls, voting side by +side! Girls! Dear--girls!" The eyes of Tanpa, the Guardian, were ablaze +now with more than the firelight's glow, as she tossed her browned cakes +on to a platter. "_Dear_ girls! In the new, the wider future before +us--soon to confront all of you--let us bring to it our Camp Fire +hall-mark: the hall-mark of the woods: purity of the Pinnacle's breath, +the 'pep' of the outdoor dawn--tenderness of the twilight, when we feel +that God is near!... And now--and now! let us sing our grace, not for +this food alone, but for the new manna which has fallen for us--the +glorious manna of opportunity." + +"If we have earned the right to eat this bread, happy are we, but if +unmerited Thy blessings come, may we more faithful be!" + +On wings of faith the moved chant floated forth, led by the girl-thrush +in a sweet soprano, supported by the sonorous roll of the Pinnacle +organ, the murmuring pine trees; and the voices of the slender tree +choir, the slim, white-tunicked boy-birches, bore it aloft--aloft to +Heaven. + +"So you're not only gifted as a 'merle', you sing as a girl, too!" said +Pemrose presently, nestling nearer to the maiden with the whistle in her +green breast-pocket. "You must love birds very much in order to imitate +a thrush-song like that." + +"Well! my ceremonial name, as a Camp Fire Girl, signifies a little brown +bird of the woods; so I thought it was 'up to me' to learn to converse +with my kind!" was the half-shy, half-spicy answer. "My brother Stud and +I have no end of fun, now in the early summer when the birds have just +arrived, and are mating, calling them around our camp." + +"Here--here, let me explain that we have a sort of Community camp for +boys and girls about three miles from here, on the wooded shores of The +Bowl, that lovely, egg-shaped lake among the hills," put in Tanpa, an +air-drawn picture in her glowing tones. "There are two big bungalows, a +couple of hundred yards apart, one for the Troop, one for the Group! Of +course, we can't occupy them all the time, at present, not until school +is closed, but we constantly go out there over night--to watch the +summer coming--and for week-ends." + +"Oh! the lake and the woods around it are more wonderful now than at any +other season of the year," put in one of the older girls, an +Assistant-Guardian. "And we can always keep warm, you know, even if +there is a cold spell in May, because the boys chop wood for us." + +"Yes, and we do their mending; oh! and quite often the shoe pinches--the +stocking, I mean--when the holes are just haggles!" The eyebrows of a +fair-haired, pretty girl of fifteen were ruefully arched, over eyes of +merriment. "But we do--do have such fun at our Get Togethers--our +picnics and parties," went on she, whose ceremonial name was Aponi the +Butterfly of the mountain group. + +"Hur-ra-ah! There are two such Get Togethers coming off quite soon +now--one the day after to-morrow--Saturday--a picnic at Snowbird Cave, +to explore some other caves afterwards upon the further side of the +river, the blue Housatonic." + +This contribution came, piecemeal, from several feasting mouths +together. + +"Oh! the Housatonic--blue--Hous-a-tonic!" Pemrose bent demurely over her +flapjack and cocoa, curling her toes under her as she recalled her view +of it from the Devil's Chair. "And what about the second Get +Together--when is that to be?" she asked. + +"A week from Saturday: _Jubilate!_ It's our anniversary day as a +White Birch Group when we hold a sort of carnival in he afternoon in +honor--in honor of the de-ar birch trees just bursting into leaf." Aponi +fluttered like green tree-hair, herself. "And that's to be +followed--whoopee!--by a party: a real, full-blown June dance in the +evening--to which all the boys are invited. And--and, maybe, some girls +not of our Groups will find an invitation tucked into their stockings, +too," slily. "But for the picnic this week the Boy Scouts are hosts." + +"I guess, if they knew there were two strange girls in camp--such +girls--they'd scuttle to 'come across' with an invitation, too!" laughed +the one slangy member inseparable from every group, whose talk is the +long stitch in the thread of conversation. + +"Do you think they would? Oh! I don't know about that. Boys are +such--such griffins, sometimes." + +Wormwood was in the eye of Pemrose, pointing the accusation, a new and +gloomy pessimism born of the Devil's Chair and Jack at a Pinch. + +"_Ours_ aren't!" It was the voice of the little girl-thrush lifted +in blue-jay belligerence now. "Our boys aren't queer fish--not a bit!" +rising to hot defense of Stud, the Stoutheart, who even in callow youth, +was of opinion that Life in every phase was a game for two--in which +two, of differing sexes, could hunt together and make good headway. + +"To be sure, they do love to get off jokes on each other--and +occasionally on us," went on Jessie, the brown-haired merle in maiden +form. "They have a society of older boys in their camp called the Henkyl +Hunters' Brigade. My brother Stud--he's a patrol leader--belongs to it. +And they go on the war-path occasionally--and publish a bulletin about +their doings." + +"What's a henkyl?" Una's mouth was wide open; upon its gusty breath rode +horned toads and plated lizards, in imaginary solution. + +"A henkyl! Oh! if you ask _them_, they say it's a freak of an +animal that they hunt up and down in the woods, trying to get its scalp, +or--or catch it alive. Which they seldom or never do!" Jessie's eyes +sparkled. "Stud says a whole 'henkyl' is hard to capture; it's so sure +to shed its horns or its teeth just as you pounce upon it." + +Pem was staring intently at the speaker, her black brows drawn together +over eyes as speculatively blue as ever they had been in Toandoah's +laboratory when grasping, or trying to, grave problems of the air. + +"Oh! I know. I know!" she cried suddenly, the blue breaking up in the +firelight into a harlequin patchwork of merry gleams. "A henkyl! Why-y! +it's a joke. A joke that they're forever chasing up and down, trying to +get a laugh against somebody,--that absurd brigade!" + +"Companionship with a Thunder Bird has sharpened your wits," smiled the +Guardian. "A practical joke it is, that most elusive thing to pull off +whole, point and all, with the laugh entirely on one side! Well! we +mustn't give them any occasion to turn the chase against us, air their +wit in our direction, by failing in our demonstration presently--the +signaling practice to which we challenged them; eh, Tomoke?" + +"No, indeed!" A sixteen-year-old girl, gray-eyed, vibrant with energy, +mobile as the Lightning, the mettlesome Lightning, from which she took +her Camp Fire name, spoke up spiritedly. "We're going to flash a message +right across the valley, over to old Round-top, that sleepy, dark +mountain, a couple of miles away, just as soon as the daylight is all +faded out," she explained. + +"Oh, ho! That's what the Guardian meant when she spoke of showing us +something--a display--with red fire, eh?" gasped Pemrose. "How are you +going to signal--with what code?" + +"Morse code--and a good, fat two-foot pine-knot, oozing with resin!" +smiled the Lightning, vivid with inspiration. "How--how about sending +over this message: 'Two strange girls in camp; you ought to meet them'?" + +"Lovely! That will hit the mark!" came the appreciative chorus, to the +song of logs. "Then--then you'll see old Round-top wake up, quick's a +wink and 'come across' with an invitation--an invitation to that banner +picnic the day after to-morrow!" + + + + +CHAPTER XII + +OLD ROUND-TOP + + + "C. F. G.! C. F. G.! + We are the Camp Fire C. F. G.! + Oh! none with us can compare, + For we looked over + And picked the clover, + And the World's lit up + With our Camp Fires everywhere!" + +"And, fegs! wi' an aging, sober body like mysel', if he isn't a-picking +o' the clover blossoms, he's a-smelling o' them the night," softly +soliloquized Andrew, the chauffeur, as he listened to that halcyon song +around the Pinnacle blaze--feeling barred out of Clover Land himself, as +he lay among the ferns, because of the "one sair memory", the whiff of +heather ever and anon wafted to his nostrils, as it seemed, from the +grave of a fifteen-year-old lassie away back in Scotland. + +"Hum-m! if 'tweren't for that, I could maist fling out an' dance the +'Rigs o' Barley' a-watching o' those happy lasses," he whimsically +confessed in the ear of a king fern. "I could, for sure, same's we used +to dance it in the glen around a bonfire!" + +But if the heather in his heart, reinforcing chauffeur primness, checked +even the first lashing kick of a Highland Fling, it did not restrain +him, that grave Church Elder, from taking part later in something fully +as giddy; a wild and storming torchlight procession. + +"Now! what we need, girls, is a good r-rich pine-knot, with a juicy, +resinous knot in it, that will burn ten minutes, anyway, for signaling +purposes," said Tomoke, the personified Lightning, as the "C. F. G." +proclamation over, the magic moment came for the flashing of the light +of this particular camp fire in speaking fire from mountain to +mountain--across the mile and a half of intervening valley. That +inflammable knot was not hard to find. Split with the toy axe which the +girl who had won an honor bead for signaling carried at her belt--a +modern Maid Marion, at home in all woodcraft--it blazed, transplendent, +a foot-long flambeau, searching the Pinnacle's darkest nooks, winning +sleepy birds from their slumbers, calling upon them to follow too, as +Tomoke, nimble of foot as her aerial namesake, presently dashed up the +hill, with it held high! + +Brilliant as a starshell--where near-by objects were concerned--it +counted the needles upon the little, awed pine trees. It painted the +wild excitement upon leaping girls' faces, lit dancing Jack-o'-lanterns +in their eyes as, scrambling, they followed the light-shod +leader--gold-slippered by the torch--in a breathless tumble-up over rock +and needled carpet, amid scandalized bough and shamefaced crag and +little, blinking torrent. + +It turned to nocturnal dewdrops the bright eyes of the +birds,--scandalized, too, yet resolved, at all costs, to come in on the +fun! + +Robins, flame-breasted in the glow, a black-throated green +warbler--blossom of the night--a purple grackle, its boat-tail stiff as +a fan-shaped rudder, and, "leggeddy-last," a cawing crow, they circled +on low wing after the brilliant torch,--all pecking at the wonder in the +air! + +It caught the whooping amazement on Andrew's smooth-shaven upper lip, +shimmering through a veil of anxiety lest, somewhere, there might be +another "Deev's Chair" around, or a madcap lassie to sit in it, as, with +an irresistible "Hoot mon!" he brought up the rear of the fantastic +revel; the rush of green-clad maidens, the elfin tassels of their +Tam-o'-shanters waving, and of demented birds for the Pinnacle's tallest +crag. + +Poised upon that gray rock-shelf, high above the ground, her slight face +with the shining eyes, framed in the radiant torch-light as in a golden +miniature, the signaler's right arm held the blazing knot with its +ragged, foot-long flame at arm's length above her head, then described a +brief quarter circle to the left with it, quick, snappy--once, +twice--the arm being extended on a level with the young shoulder so +slim, so stiffened! + +"See!--See! That stands for I: two dots! I, three times repeated, gives +the call," breathed the Guardian at Pem's elbow, her mature face a +gold-set miniature of excitement, too. + +"Oh--oh! I wonder if they'll 'get us', those boys--those joking Henkyl +Hunters?" The throbbing question was on every girlish lip. Eyes burned, +like the torch, across the valley. + +The mountains were falling asleep in their night-caps of mist. + +But suddenly one of them, far away, grim and dim, lifted an eyelid--and +responded. + +The drowsy valley caught its breath--as old Round-top winked back. + +Caught its breath with many a waking scintilla of light in the pointed +flash of pool and stream! + +A momentary, broken arc, a shattered rainbow dividing the flood of dusk +above from the gulf of darkness below; and then--and then the triumphant +cry in each gasping throat: + +"They've got us! They see us! Now--now for the message: 'Two strange +girls with us. You....'" + +But there the Lightning's lore suddenly gave out, her signaling memory, +as the news was vivaciously transmitted by staccato dot and lengthier +dash, the latter being the same quarter-circle once described in a +single movement to the right. + +Over the valley the message was hung up. It was hung up in Pem's heart, +too,--and the honor, the fair grace, of boyhood with it. + +If old Round-top unhesitatingly played up, "came across" with an +invitation--an invitation to that alluring Get Together at the winter +palace of the Snowbirds, then she would feel that a nickum's rudeness +was atoned for--and Jack at a Pinch might go his graceless road, never +to prove a friend in need to her again--not if she knew it! + +"Invite them to the picnic ... and don't forget the cocoa!" + +The valley fairly bristled with the promptness of it--the skilled +directness of the message, so rapidly, so spontaneously given that the +poised Lightning on the crag was hard-pressed to keep up with the +meaning--to read the handwriting of fire and give the interpretation +thereof. + +Old Round-top had seized the shining hour. The Henkyl Hunters were no +"chuffs", no conundrums, with the strange riddle of incivility up a +sleeve. + +"'Invite them to the picnic--and don't forget the cocoa!'" Tanpa +laughed. "Just like them! We did promise to lay in a fresh supply of +sundries, as we pass through the town to-night--if there's still a store +left open. And that reminds me, girlies, that it's getting late. We have +no right to keep the birds out of bed any longer, demoralizing the +feathered world." + +But the Lightning had recovered its morale, its memory, prompted by a +Morse code-card excitedly snatched from a green breast pocket and +explored by the light of the dwindling torch. + +"Invite--your--friends--to--our--d-a-n-c-e," slowly spelled out Tomoke, +giving back diamond for diamond. + +She was beginning upon the word "A-ll", but the pine-knot winked itself +out in a dazzlement on "dance,"--in an effulgence of sparks that fell +like golden rain upon the hearts of the visitors. + +"Will it--will it be an outdoor affair--a piazza dance?" gasped Una. +"Oh-h! I do love.... Now! Andrew!" She broke off suddenly at the +chauffeur's declaration that it was "magerful" show, "yon fire-talk", +that he never expected to see the like carried on by "tids o' lassies", +but that it really wasn't in him to stand there any longer rolling his +eyes over it, like a duck in thunder. "Now, Andrew!" reasoned his +employer's young daughter. "You know that you've driven my father and +mother, and Professor Lorry, too, to a dinner-party, where the professor +is to give a talk about the Thunder Bird--and oh! may its fiery tale be +a long one to-night--you won't have to fetch them home for another two +hours yet." + +"Hoot! It's saft as peppermint. I am wi' ye, Miss Una, but it's time for +all lassies to gang home," returned the other with paternal insistence, +lifting his cap in questioning appeal to the Guardian. + +"He's right, dear. _We_ must be starting for the home camp, +too--just as soon as we've seen that our fire is thoroughly +extinguished," said Tanpa. "Our paths don't lie in the same direction, +but we hope they often will in future. As to the dance, it will be a +piazza affair, if the evening is fine--the festive wind-up of an +exciting day, our White Birch anniversary which we celebrate with rites +and symbolic dancing, in honor of our patron, our woodland lady, the +leafing birch tree." + +"How lovely; per-fect-ly love-ly!" flowed from the visitors, both, in a +silvery ripple. + +"Well! how about your spending a few days in camp with us then--at our +camp on the Bowl--if your elders are willing?" went on the gracious +grown-up woman, with warmth as golden as the sunburst on her breast. +"We'll let Pemrose Lorry plant the tallest birch sapling in honor of the +Thunder Bird. Long--long before it's a full-grown tree, let us hope, the +Bird will have made its great migration, crossing, not a continent, but +space! And now, dears, _au revoir_! to meet again at Snowbird +Cave." + + + + +CHAPTER XIII + +COBWEB WEED + + +"Well! you certainly are the laziest bunch; you'd carry a whole bakery +in your knapsacks rather than do any cooking--especially if there are +girls around. Lazy as Ludlam's dog you are! Next time--next time, I'll +set you to peeling potatoes." + +It was the chaffing voice of the Scoutmaster, Malcolm Seaver, which +spoke, addressing some twenty scouts who were scattered about the +vine-draped entrance to Snowbird Cave, where, yearly, the little +gray-white junco birds--otherwise snow-birds--fluffy balls, with no +heads to speak of, wintered among the low hemlocks near the cavern's +mouth and fed upon the spicy hemlock bark. + +"I--I wonder if you could tell me of what breed Ludlam's dog was, sir? +If he could burn up daylight chasing his tail any better than this crowd +can, lolling around on a picnic, he must be the limit." + +The answer came with the low, drawling laugh of Stud Bennett, otherwise +Studart, brother to Jessie, the "merle's" calling mate, who was himself +playing fiddle-faddle in the sunshine, after a four-mile hike. + +"Humph! Well, _I'm_ off to locate a spring--where's the blue +bucket? When I get back you'll _have_ to turn to, you dummies, +build a fire and unpack the commissariat--otherwise rolls by the dozen. +The 'duff' and Frankforts are in the 'Baby', I guess." The Scoutmaster +shot a glance at a big, brown duffle bag reposing on a mound, capable of +containing ten bags of rations, each pertaining to individual scouts on +a long hike, yet hardly sufficient to transport the "cates", the +luncheon for eighteen Camp Fire Girls and twenty scouts, plus a couple +of invited guests, on a Together picnic. + +"Are there any boys and girls who are dying to come with me, to prospect +for water?" he put forth alluringly, to the rhythmic swing of the big +water bucket in his right hand, painted bright blue. + +There was an instant volunteering flutter among certain green-clad girls +and lads in khaki, breezing up from the grass where they had languished; +others held back. + +"I'd rather explore the cave--I love creepy caves--and we haven't been +half through it yet," said Pemrose Lorry. + +Forthwith Stud, the Henkyl Hunter, decided that cave-exploiting was the +pastime for him; there was rarely a younger boy--Studart was barely +fifteen--who did not become the captive knight of this older girl with +the sky in her eyes under jet-black lashes! + +Jessie, sister of Stoutheart, she of the thrush-song in her heart, +wanted to be near to the girl who was mate to a Thunder Bird, too; and +others were drawn by the same abstract birdlime--or else the bat-stirred +cave had lures. + +"There--there's a secret lobby in it," said Stud, "a dark, rocky passage +leading off from that queer black, three-cornered fissure in the right +wall, ten feet from the ground--I guess nobody has ever explored it; +nobody has cracked the nut of what's behind that triangular crevice, so +high up!" + +"Come--come; that sounds exciting, very exciting!" remarked Tanpa, the +Guardian, remaining behind too, as chaperon. + +But her husband wheeled upon his jog-trot off after water, swinging his +galvanized iron bucket after a manner to give the air the blues. + +"Well! I wouldn't try to crack the nut, solve the riddle, of what's +behind that queer-shaped crevice, Stud," he said. "It's black--black as +a tinker's pot in there. You wouldn't know what you were heading into!" + +"Aw, gammon! I wouldn't be afraid to tackle that fissure--find out +what's back of it--although I'm not a Tin Scout--ha! ha!--out with the +whole toyshop to-day; all my monkey trappings," exploded a rough voice +suddenly from among a trio of clownish-looking boys who hovered, +vulture-like, on the edge of the picnic ground, transfixing with a +sanguinary eye the Baby, whose soft heart was of blueberry "duff." + +"An' I tell you what's more, if I were to climb up an' in there, I'd +trust to my own 'bean' and a few matches, 'thout any gimcracks," craked +the boastful voice further, the special gewgaw on which the braggart +fixed his eye, at the moment, being the little Baldwin safety lamp, four +inches high, which Stud was just lighting, attached to the front of his +olive-green scout hat. + +"Tr-rust to your own 'bean'--your own head--an' what's inside it! Well! +I'll admit it's fiery enough," flouted the Henkyl Hunter, piqued even in +the presence of girls into giving back tit for tat. "But you're carrying +too many eggs in one basket, let me tell you, and you're likely enough +to take a leap in the dark an' smash 'em all." + +"Ha! Am I now," snarled the other, resenting the implication that his +brick-red head was a brash basket into which to pack all his chances of +safety, such as were not anchored to the poor stay of a few fickle +matches. + +"Am I now-ow?" he chortled, very red in the face--and tongue-tied--as he +shadowed the picnic party through the cave. + +At his wits' end for a verbal retort, he presently proceeded, after the +manner of his kind, to throw a stone in his own garden. + +"See here! you kids, if you'll let me stand on your shoulders, you two, +I'll give those Tin Scouts an eye-opener," he said, retaliating after a +manner to hurt only himself, as he addressed the two younger boys with +him, his eyes cast up to that mysterious fissure, outlined, a rocky +tripod, above his head, of which the Scoutmaster had remarked that all +behind it was black as a tinker's pot. + +Into that ebony pot, forthwith, climbing by the willing step-ladder of +his companions' bodies, Ruddy, the rashling, presently thrust his +head--that flaming head with all his chances in it! + +His body followed, finding entrance through the crevice amidships, so to +speak, where it broadened out to some three feet across from the +tapering point of the lowest corner. + +"Oh-h! look at him. Do look at him!" panted the girls, held up in their +search for pale-faced cave flowers and strange fungi by the "derring-do" +act. + +"Gracious! some of you scouts ought to stop him--re-al-ly ought to stop +him," shrilled Jessie, catching her breath at the shock of darkness +visible in the yawning fissure's mouth, where the brief flicker of a +match now chased bogies. + +"Humph! We can't head him off, Jess." Her brother disclaimed +responsibility with a shrug--while the little lamp winked sarcastically +from his hatbrim--but in the heedful tone of the boy who had been +trained to feel--as Toandoah did with his little petticoated pal--that +Life was a game in which two could hunt together, even upon the trail of +a Thunder Bird, and make good headway. "We can't turn him back!" Stud +shrugged his khaki shoulders. "But he'll strike a blind bargain in +there. Ha! There goes another 'niggling' match!" + +A frippery flame, indeed, its reflection flickered a moment, a gold +tooth in the fissure's grinning mouth--darkness followed! + +Two or three of the boy scouts--those who did not, like Stud, show +incredulity, sarcasm gleaming, hawk-eyed, from a ruby lamp hooked to a +hatband, and from a level eye beneath it--held their breath, dazzled; +for the moment beaten at their own brave game of exploring. + +So did the girl who had been piqued and dared into sitting in the +Devil's Chair--with a sheer abyss beneath her! + +Again did her wide-open, staring eyes, under their black lashes, sport a +Blue Peter, the flag of adventure. + +"Oh! he's plucky, anyhow. I wonder what he'll find in there?" her palms +were laid together upon a spicy filling of excitement. "He really is +daring--awfully daring, you know!" + +"Ha! Courage cobweb-weed!" muttered Stud laconically. "Well--well, he'll +have tears in his eyes before I go after him!" + +And--with that--there was the rasp of a third "niggling" match, +faintly-heard, far in, a momentary reflection, a tiny glance-coal, in +the fissure's leering mouth! And--and, following that, a shriek! + +A shriek, headlong, sinking and pitching--dying like a falling star, as +if some clutch were stifling it. + +"Hea-vens!" The girls, blanching, shrank against the opposite cave-wall, +which shuddered behind them. + +A bat, flying low, a winged Fear, brushed Tanpa's cheek, as she stood, +transfixed,--and her cry was almost as hysterical as theirs. + +In the blackness of that Tinker's Pot behind the looming fissure, were +there other things--other things besides a boy, a broken braggart of a +boy? + +Was Death in the pot with him? Had he sipped of its mystery--only to +perish? Death--it seemed a raving possibility--in the shape of some wild +animal, perhaps--a live, a clutching claw! + +Tales were always current among the mountains, trappers' tales--and most +of them airy "traveler's yarns", too--of strange tracks seen in lonely +spots, of lynx and bobcat; and even of the young and roving panther. + +To be sure, a three-cornered tunnel, the second floor back of a lofty +cave, would be the last place to look for such an ambush, unless there +was some fly-trap opening to it from above. But there might be! + +Boys and girls, both, their blood flamed upon the fear, then +froze--until the silence, the bat-churned cave silence, was hung with +icicles above them. + +Then, once more, it was ripped from on top by that perishing +shriek--passing strange, remote--but now it was as if the fissure's +three-cornered mouth filled with it, faintly gibbered the one word: +"C-caught!" + +"'_Caught!_' Oh! Stud, you warned him; it's his own doing. Let +those other two boys--his friends--climb up to him! Well--if you +feel--you--must?" + +Jessie's cry gibbered in agony in her throat, too, liquid as the +thrush-tone in terror for its mate. But it struck a high note at the +end. + +For Stud's hand was groping mechanically for the bright little lamp +above his forehead, as if for inspiration, his left for the lariat at +his waist, in defiance of his threat that the desperado in the "pot" +might have tears in his eyes before he would help him. + +But there was something worse than cave-tears in question now--of that +Studart felt sure. + +And Pem, watching,--Jessie, too--caught from an entering shaft of +day-light which shivered as if aghast, the reflection of the tightening +glow upon his young face--the waggish features of the Henkyl Hunter! + +And she recognized it, by the feeling of her stiff, cold cheeks, as she +clapped her hands to them--did Toandoah's little chum--for the glow +which had electrified her own when she fought her way out of a swamped +Pullman, saving her friend, driving it into the teeth of the flood, and +of the World, too, that neither her father's honor, nor his +invention--nor anything he ever turned out--was a Quaker gun; letting +fly with it faintly at a rescuing youth, too, when she bade him "take +Una first." + +For by that glow as by an altar-lamp, in whose gleam she had worshiped +before she saw as the strong boy's hand went automatically to his +equipment that lamp and lariat were nothing--nothing--"without the heart +of a Scout!" + + + + +CHAPTER XIV + +STOUTHEART + + +"W-wedged!... Wedged!" + +Now--now it was another word which jabbered faintly in the dark +fissure's mouth! A girl caught it--or thought she did. + +"_Wedged!_" she echoed wildly. "Caught! Oh, maybe--maybe--there's +nothing in there but Ruddy himself!" + +"Maybe--so!" Stud panted heavily while, across an inner, gaping hollow, +the next words took a giant stride to his lips: "Anyhow--I'm going up!" + +"Oh--Studley!" But beyond this one faint cry, Jessie, stanch little +partner,--the girl behind the lines,--said no more to hinder him now, as +she watched the scout detach his little lamp from his hatbrim and hook +it on to his khaki breast. + +With it glowing there, a headlight for his gallant heart, Stud set +himself to climb. Standing upon the shoulders of two brother scouts, in +his belt a club snatched from one of them, he reached the lowest point +of the tapering fissure. + +"Ha! There he goes, in spite of his teeth," tremored a younger boy. + +"His teeth aren't chattering!" Pem's eyes--lightning-blue--hurled back +the charge. + +The denial rang in Stud's ears as he thrust his head into the black +opening, entering, amidships, as the former muddle-headed explorer had +done. + +"That girl's a trump--the girl with eyes the color of the little +'heal-all', that blue flower we pick up here in May! A trump! But so's +little Jess, too!" + +Thus did Stoutheart, a knight of to-day, pay tribute to the world he +left behind him, when he felt in his exploring knees, now creeping along +the bottom of the Tinker's Pot, that there was a chance of his leaving +it behind forever. + +"I don't see what else he _could_ have done," said Tanpa, the +Guardian, her fingers hysterically interlocking. "Somebody had to go up; +and he's the oldest boy--a Patrol Leader. But, oh! I wish my husband +were here. Run and meet him, a couple of you!" She glanced appealingly +at the scouts. "Oh! do--and hurry him back--back from the spring." + +Meanwhile Stud had forgotten even his backers in the feminine hearts +below and was banking all on just one trusty ally--the headlight on his +breast. + +"Without the light, the little safety lamp, I couldn't do-o it," he told +himself. "Gee! but it is as black in here as Erebus, a Tinker's Pot, +indeed--the blindest passage--blindest bargain--I ever struck! So--so +sharp underneath, too!" + +Yes, difficulty masked was in the "bargain", yet he crept on over +tapering ridges of rock that now and again buckled like teeth. But he +knew by the parched sound of his own voice, as he shouted a question, +that his courage might have ended in smoke, there and then, if it +weren't for the little lamp at his breast. + +So rosily it burned now, in here, that its feeding oil seemed the red +blood of his heart! + +"Anyhow--anyhow, with it, I'll be able to see which way the cat jumps!" + +Here, Stoutheart more tightly gripped the club; the last words might +prove more than mere figure of speech. + +From ahead came strange, gurgling, choking sounds, rising from +somewhere--growing weaker. + +"Where--where are you, Ruddy? Answer! R-rap--rap out something, if you +can!" he adjured. + +And it was--truly--a rapping reply that reached him; a queer, hollow +knocking at the door of some throat that semed shutting. + +"My word! What on earth ... what in thunder's got him?" Stud felt his +own breath blow hot and cold together, but--this crucial moment it came +back to him--the eyes of a girl out there had driven it home, with blue +lightnings, that he did not _have_ to defy his teeth. + +"Humph! I'm no quitter," he told the piloting breast-ray, blazing its +ruby trail ahead. "Well-ll! for the love of Mike! Well! what do you know +about that?... What have we h-here?" + +In answer to his gasping snort, as he gaped and gasped there in the +darkness, the little safety lamp told him what it made of it--of the +staggering sight--it made a pair of big feet in rough cowhide boots +tightly wedged by the ankles in a buckling switch of rock where two +sharp, narrow ridges that formed the bottom of the Tinker's Pot +dovetailed into each other,--after the manner of rails at a switch. + +Ruddy, the slipslop explorer, had gone in heels over head, so to speak. +He was hanging by the heels now. Nothing visible of him but those +pinioned feet! + +"_Hea-vens!_ he did strike a blind bargain. S-such a snag! The +passage ends here. A drop! A--blank--fall of rock! Gee-ee!" + +Dank--dank as cave-tears now was the moisture upon Stud's forehead. For +the first time his teeth almost chattered. What would he see when he +held the lamp over the edge of the Tinker's Pot into the horror of that +empty space beyond where the passage broadened into blankness and the +rock shelved sharply down? A dead boy? Or one so far gone from hanging +that he could not be rescued? + +At the first sight of those wedged feet he had felt inclined to laugh. +Now he was laughing at the wrong side of his mouth, as he peeped over +the brink. + +"Oh-h! the rock _isn't_ perpendicular; it slants down, though, +pretty sharply--down into an inner cave--by gracious! And Ruddy, the way +he's hanging his nose, is within an inch or two o' the floor of that +other cave!... And, yet, he's helpless! Helpless as if he had a halter +round his neck! Oh-h! if some of the other fellows were here." + +But Stud did not seem to be quite alone; he was one and a half; for the +hearts of two girls were pendent from _his_ neck; outside he knew +they were backing him,--praying for him. + +Also, that frenzied gurgle from the victim's throat, his choking cry as +the light struck him, the squirming body and up-rolling eyes told the +boy scout that he was just in time; although the foam was pink upon +Ruddy's lips and his congested head was a fire-ball, indeed,--that brash +head with all his chances in it. + +"Ha! + + "No Loyal Scout gives place to doubt, + But action quick he shows!" + +The song, his own, the original march-song of his troop, sang itself +through Stud's brain, seethed in the low whistle upon his lips, as, +guided by his ruby breast-eye, he slid down into that strange and secret +dungeon in which the black passage ended and, thrusting his sturdy +shoulders under the pendent body of the victim whose convulsed hands +clutched vainly at the bare slab, raised it so that the choking boy +could breathe freely again--and in due time shake off the dizziness of +his awful plight, hung up by the heels by the rock itself. + +But not until the Scoutmaster came to his patrol leader's assistance +could those pinioned feet be really freed and their owner brought to +daylight again, not by a return via the fissure route, but hoisted in a +rope-noose, as Pem had been from the Devil's Chair, through a +grass-covered opening discoverable in the roof of that inner cave. + +"Goodness! after all, he wasn't so much more foolish--headstrong--than I +was. But Una! Una! If you ever-r tell them!" Thus did the maiden of the +chowchow name spill her spice into her friend's ear,--burning spice, +for, privately, she was shocked at seeing her own folly, parodied, +vulgarized, as it were. + +"Well! I should say! He was hanging between hawk and buzzard--if ever a +fellow was," happened to be Stud's moved comment as, clinging to that +lowered rope, he was hoisted, too, through that covert opening, the +loyal little lamp upon his breast paling now into a penny candle held +towards the sun. + +But the rescuer's halo did not pale. + +It burnished the picnic luncheon which followed, encircling, +rainbow-like, little Jessie who basked in it more than did the +rebellious hero, pelted with wild flowers by the girls--as symbolic of +other bouquets. + +"Oh! let up--let up--will you? Those big fellows will take me for the +'goat'--somebody's 'goat'!" protested Stud helplessly, striving to +direct attention from himself by training it upon a straggling group of +distant youths, really too far off to take stock of what was going on +among the merry picnic party. + +But Pemrose was taking stock of them. Her widening eyes, her reddening +cheeks, the little piqued shiver that electrified her chin, told that +one figure--one figure--called for recognition; called for it, indeed, +so loudly that it couldn't be denied him. + +Every member of that group--a canoeing party, a wading party, it was, +just landed from the near-by river, the blue Housatonic--was a blaze of +color. + +But the sturdiest among them was simply barbaric. The warm sunlight of +May dripped golden from his nickum shoulders, bronzed to the hue of a +statue, bathed his bare knees and feet, his khaki shorts, the flame of +an apricot jersey, the black and yellow cap,--the sheaf of mayflowers +within his arm. + +"Oh! how boys--big boys--do revel in color. A girl--any girl I ever +knew--is demure in her taste beside them," murmured the Camp Fire +Guardian, with amused, motherly tolerance. + +"Pshaw! I think it's hor-rid. So flashy!" snapped Pemrose; Jack at a +Pinch had made gorgeous his incivility and was parading it before her +eyes. + +"Oh, boy! Look at that middle fellow. He'd have a grosbeak 'skun a +mile'!" gasped Stud, following the direction of her glance, with a +virtuous consciousness of his own cave-soiled khaki, moderately lit by +merit badge and service stripe. + +"'Grosbeak!' Oh, but I love grosbeaks! And all that color--why! it +paints the landscape," came flutteringly from Aponi, the White Birch +Butterfly, least Priscilla-like in her tastes of the Group, when she was +not in Camp Fire green, or soft-toned ceremonial dress. + +"Maybe 'twill paint the blues in old Tory Cave, if we run across them +there," put in Tomoke, maiden of the flambeau and the fire-talk. "They +certainly are a perfect 'scream', those big boys," her eyes merrily +following that clamor of color now wending back towards the canoes. + +"Humph! they'd have to 'go some' to leaven the blues of Tory Cave," +remarked the Scoutmaster, laughingly addressing himself to a roll. "The +biggest bonfire on earth wouldn't half dry the cave-tears there." + +"Yes, that's the den of the Doleful Dumps--their diggings!" laughed a +younger scout, flourishing aloft a mess-mug, the gray of his rolling +eyes. "Bats--bats as big as saucers--no, soup-plates! And, far in--far +in--the sound of running water, like a weak wind!" + +"Running water! Invisible running water! A--weak--wind! Oh-h! do let us +hurry and go on there. We have to cross the river; haven't we?" The +gurgle of that cloistered brooklet was already in Pem's heart as her +dilating gaze spanned the Housatonic, broad and open, "warbling" amid +its soft meadow slopes, as she had looked upon it from the Devil's +Chair. "But, goody! I hope we _won't_ run across him there--Jack at +a Pinch! Flaunting round like a grosbeak!" She bit the thought into an +olive. "Stud's no grumpy riddle--if he is a Stoutheart, like the other!" + + + + +CHAPTER XV + +AIRDRAWN AEROPLANES + + +Running water! Invisible running water! The voice behind the scenes +prompting the play,--the grim play of bat and rat and reptile in old +Tory Cave, where the rocks wept, the little strolling sunbeams clapped +their hands, and the great fungi, primrose-skirted, drooped over a drama +never finished! + +It was even more romantic than the girls had hoped for,--such romance as +clings, cobweb-like, to melancholy. + +Like a weak wind, truly, a sad wind blowing from nowhere, was the purl +of that hidden streamlet whose mystery no man had penetrated--nor ever +seen its flow--mournfully as cave tears it dripped upon the ears and +hearts of the girls. + +"Pshaw! Who cares for weeping rocks, though they look as if they were +bursting with grief and ready to tear their pale hair--that queer growth +clinging to them. Humph! Only crocodile tears, anyhow, like 'Alice in +Wonderland!'" cried Ista, the laughing Eye of the White Birch Group, +whose everyday name was Polly Leavitt. + +"It's _not_ the tears and it's not that horribly sad lake with the +little, blind, colorless fish in it, that I mind--it's the Bats!" +screamed Una Grosvenor. "Oh-h!" as the mouse-like head of the cave +mammal and its skinny wing almost brushed her face. + +"Well! They're not brick-bats," came reassuringly from one of the boys, +as the Togetherers ranged through the outer part of that vast Tory +Cave--once the hiding-place of a political refugee, whose spirit seemed +flitting among them in the filmy cave-fog which, dank and mournful, +clung about the margin of that strange lake of fresh water where blind +fish played. + +Presumably fed by that cloistered brooklet, whose cell, far in, in an +impenetrable recess, no human foot had ever trod, the lakelet had the +floor to itself, so to speak, so that in places scouts with their lamps, +and girls pairing off with their exploring brothers, one piloting eye +between them, had difficulty in skirting it--without a ducking. + +"Whew! a ducking in the dark--a cave-bath--horrible!" cried Pemrose. +"Oh, mer-rcy! what--what is it?" + +"Bah! Only a garter snake--a pretty fellow," laughed Studley, picking +the slim, striped thing up from a corner of the blind lake where it was +amphibiously basking, and letting it curl around his khaki arm, +investigating the merit badges of the patrol leader. + +The green and red of the life-saver's embroidered badge, the crossed +flags of the expert signaler, the white plow of the husbandman, they +enlivened the gloom a wee bit, winking up at the safety lamp hooked to +his hat-band, as he bent over the illumined reptile. + +But they did not challenge it as did the flash of an apricot sweater, +blood-red in the ruby lamplight, of a black and yellow cap, several +yellow and black caps, suddenly--eagerly--thrust near. + +"He's big--big for a garter, isn't he, Buddy?" remarked a voice that did +not come from the ranks of Togetherers, of Boy Scouts and Camp Fire +Girls, excitedly scrutinizing Stud's novel armlet. + +Neither--neither was it the voice of the nickum, so much Pemrose knew, +as she edged coldly a little away,--a little nearer to the dim and +sighing lake-edge. + +Yet he was among them, those gaudy big boys, whose flare of color merely +striped the cave-dusk, like the dingy markings upon the snake's +squirming back. + +He actually had his armful of mayflowers, too, the nickum, not the +snake; _passe_ mayflowers, with the tan of decay on them, was +nursing them carefully, as if they were part of a long lost heritage +into which he had lately come--as if he were afraid to lay them down +lest some alien should snatch them from him. + +"He doesn't look like a 'chuff'--a boor. He looks like a really nice +college boy, one with a hazing imp in his eye though, lur-rking in that +little star--almost a squint; so--so like Una's," thought the inventor's +daughter, familiar with the student brand of boy. "Yet how could he be +so uncivil to us, really--actually--snub us, after all he did, too? +Goodness! wouldn't I like to get a chance to snub him?" It was the Vain +Elf which slept in the shadow of the Wise Woman in the breast of Pemrose +Lorry, that stored this wish, laid it up, a vengeful arrow in the blue +quiver of her eyes, now shooting piqued, sidelong glances at those +flaunting big boys. "Why-y _should_ we run up against them here? +Well! he'll never get a chance to play Jack at a Pinch--friend in +need--to me again. Watch me--watch me pick my steps!" She picked them so +at random, at the moment, moving off, that she came near slipping in for +that eerie ducking, with the blind fish--pale as phantoms, swimming +round--and Stud, flinging the striped garter away, hurried after +her--Jessie, too! + +"Gee! this is a peach of a cave; isn't it?" effervesced the scout +sarcastically. "Melancholy so blooming thick that you could almost sup +its sorrow with a spoon, eh?" + +"It's a regular cave of despair." The lonely trill of the feathered +hermit was in Jessie's answering note. "That sad voice of water, a +cascade--a stream--far in, which nobody ever saw!" + +"I'd give worlds to see it!" said Pemrose. + +"So would I!" Stud's voice was pitched high. "If it weren't for the +Scoutmaster.... Tradition says that whoever drinks of that hidden water +will have luck." + +"Well! I'd let somebody else have the piping times if I were you, +Buddy--if they depend on a draught from that mysterious spring." + +Now, it was the nickum who answered; the same scintillating tones they +were--how bully they sounded then--which had quoted Shakespeare on +"Something rotten in the State of Denmark", amid other depressing +waters, half hidden, half liberated by their ice-cloak. + +"I can look out for my own 'piping times'--thank you! And I'm not going +to buy any pig in a poke--take any leap in the dark." + +The scout's reply was bristling. To a fifteen-year-old patrol leader, a +Henkyl Hunter, who went up and down upon the trail of a joke, there was +a smack of condescension about that "Buddy", used twice by those big +boys; perhaps he, too, at that moment, laid up something against the +youth of the flaming tone and rig. + +"Humph! hasn't he the nerve, butting in?" he muttered. + +"He has--has all sorts of nerve," agreed Pemrose readily, glancing +sideways after the boy whose courage she knew to be as high as his +colors. + +"The Scoutmaster wouldn't hear of our venturing in so far as to +investigate that running water, anyhow," said Studley. "My eye! What's +the rumpus now--the kettle o' fish?" + +It was a shriek from one girl--half-a-dozen girls. It was a loud hiss, +almost a whistle, from some pallid vegetation near the lake-edge. It was +a black snake rearing a blue-black head and glittering eye within three +feet of Una Grosvenor, novice among Camp Fire Girls, whose scream tore +at the very stones of Tory Cave until they cried out in echo. + +It was a dozen green-clad girls scattering wildly this way and that, +olive-green aspen leaves tossing in a whirlwind, shuffling from pillar +to post--from rock to darkling rock. + +It was--it was a powerful reptile form, in armor of jetty scales, +trailing its six-foot length away, the noise of its mighty tail-blows +against the earth and flying pebbles calling all the Dumps--the Doleful +Dumps--out of the dens where they hid here, making them take strange and +shadowy shapes, gigantic shapes, of threat. + +"Let me get out! Oh-h! I want to get out, away--anywhere!" shuddered +Una. "This is no-o fun." + +"Yes! it is--once you get used to it," laughed Pemrose, who--together +with the Jack at a Pinch still hovering near--liked her excitement warm. +"Look--_look_ at him crimp himself along! Ever--ever see anything +so crooked?" as the great muscle in the reptile's body contracted and +relaxed upon its hasty retreat. "When we girls had our War Garden, a +year ago, an old farmer said we planted our potato rows so straight that +he 'vummed 'twould make a black snake seasick to cross from one to the +other.'" + +"Ha! Because he just naturally has to go ajee!" laughed her scout +knight, estimating the length of that scaly corkscrew, if uncoiled, with +his eye. "Pshaw! I've tamed 'em--and killed 'em, too," he added. + +"Yes! a black snake wouldn't harm you, even if he did bite." Pem was +still reassuring her friend. "Did you hear him whistle?... But--but +what's that?" It was just half a minute later that she put the question. +"He isn't making that noise with his tail still; is he?" + +She looked at Stud. Under the ruby eye of the lamp his face--the face of +a Stoutheart--had turned suddenly pea-green. + +His eyes were fixed upon a gleam of bloated yellow dimly seen, under the +lee of a rock, not very many yards away--the venomous, pale yellow of +the dropsical cave fungi. + +"Why--why! it's only one of those horrid, blowzy, mushroom things. But +_what's_ the noise--like--like somebody rattling little marbles, +dry peas?" + +The girl felt her own breath go ratatat as she put the question. + +"Oh-h! only some fellow rattling--rattling--beans in his pocket. Let's +get away--quick!" + +And then Pemrose knew what it was to look upon a Stoutheart "rattled." + +But, with that, a voice, a cry, not loud, but strong, exploded like a +spring gun in the cave,--suddenly halting advance. + +"What's that outside? What's that outside?" it whooped. "Is it an +aeroplane? _Two_ aeroplanes? Oh! hurry out--and see." + +"A dozen aeroplanes! A corps of aeroplanes!" boomed back those flaunting +big boys, of whom the nickum was leader, playing up to the cue of the +Scoutmaster who had started the concentrated cry. "Oh, hurry--hurry!" + +She saw him fling his mayflowers on the ground, that strange youth, and +snatch at Una's hand, to drag her along towards the low cave entrance. +He made a wide, circling movement to catch at hers, too. But she dodged +it. Never more should he play Jack at a Pinch to her! Never! + +Through old Tory Cave there surged the noise of a rising wind, silencing +that weak gust afar off, now baleful, the sound of the hidden water; +reverberating among the rocks, it might be taken for anything, for the +hum of aircraft--for a perfect onslaught of sky cavalry! + +And the Scoutmaster's cry was convincing. + +Yet--yet, when boys and girls tumbled tumultuously through the cave +entrance--the girls by some mysterious understanding, first--not a +remote sign of a biplane, even a meager _one_, decorated the sky +overhead. + +No flying wires sent down their challenge. And the hum resolved itself +into what it was: the rising, random mockery of Ta-te, the tempest, +laughing at their searching looks, going north, south, east and west, +aloft, skirmishing in bewilderment to all points of the horizon. + +"Hum-m. There isn't a _sign_ of a buzz-wagon! Who pulled off that +stunt--on--us?" bleated a few of the mystified younger boys, while Stud +silently brushed moisture like cave-tears from his forehead. + +So did the tall Scoutmaster, heavily breathing relief. + +"Not an aeroplane in sight! Not a single one!" breezed the girls, all +ready to be angry. "Who--who put that hoax over?" + +"Varnish right--and aeroplane wrong!" It was the freakish voice of a +nickum which answered. "No! No buzzer, as the boys say, but there was a +rattler, in there, beside that rock. If some of you girls had gone +ahead, you'd have stepped right on him!" + +"A 'rattler!' A big rattlesnake! And--and you started the cry, to get us +out quietly--quickly!" + +"Not we! The Scoutmaster had the presence of mind to launch an +aeroplane. We boomed it," came the laughing reply, as Jack at a Pinch, +second fiddle now, marched off with his companions. + +"Who--is he?" Pemrose caught wildly at the arm of Stud, who was wishing +that he and not those patronizing big boys had caught the Scoutmaster's +cue and created airdrawn aeroplanes by the corps. "Do you--do you know +who he is; that biggest--that gaudiest--one among them?" + +"Yes! No-o! I do--an' I don't!" stammered the boyish Henkyl Hunter. +"I--we--" indicating his scout brothers--"have met him a couple of times +in the woods; I guess his father an' he have a camp on the opposite side +of the lake from ours. We've talked with him--tried to be friendly. And +he--he's always jolly, you know--like now! But--but when it comes to +finding out anything about either of them, gee, you might as well +whistle jigs to a milestone--so-o you might!" + + + + +CHAPTER XVI + +THE COUNCIL FIRE + + + "Across the lake in golden glory, + The fairy gleams of sunlight glow. + Another day of joy is ending, + The clouds of twilight gather low." + +Another day of joy, indeed! Without peril of rattlesnake--or marplot +nickum to spoil it! + +"'Varnish right--and aeroplane wrong!' That's what _he_ said when +they laid that trap to get us out of the cave, without any fuss. But I +say it's: 'Varnish right--and puzzle wrong!' All wrong!" snapped Pemrose +to herself again and again, repeating an old saying during the week +following that first Get Together. "Nobody--nobody has a right to drift +around as a puzzle, these days! If ever I get a chance, see me snub him +har-rd--though he did rescue me twice! Well, thank goodness! it was the +Scoutmaster, not he, who played Jack at a Pinch in Tory Cave." + +And it was the Scoutmaster, in days gone by, with the help of his boys, +who had built the great stone fireplace in the girls' bungalow in which +a brilliant Council Fire was now blazing. Across the lake the golden +glory stole, and girls came tip-toeing to the hearth-flame in soft, +ceremonial dress, fringed and beaded, the firelight, like dawn, flushing +the pearl of their headbands,--and Pem forgot the enigma of that +eighteen-year-old youth who seemed to have a trick of bobbing up, now +and again, under the lee of a summer holiday, like some menacing spar to +leeward of a vessel in fair sail. + +Well! to recall Stud's figure of speech, nobody was "whistling jigs" to +his milestone heart now--or trying to. The fire was the fiddler; and wax +was not softer or more responsive than the pliant breasts on which its +music fell. + +"I watched a log in the fireplace burning." + +They whispered it one to another and under the spell of its +transfiguring lay, bent forward, they witnessed the last act in a +pine-tree pantomime. + +A dazzling transformation scene it was: in the glow they could see, +summed up, each transition of light and heat that went before: dawn's +tender flame, the fierce blaze of high noon, ruby rays of evening +streaming now across the Bowl--hill-girt lake without--gathered, all +gathered, in a golden age behind them to feed the sap of a noble tree, +here poured forth, amid a radiant ballet of flame and spark, to furnish +life, light--inspiration--to a Council Fire. + + "I watched a log in the fireplace burning, + Oh! if I, too, could only be + Sure to give back the love and laughter, + That Life so freely gave to me!" + +Tanpa, the Guardian, softly breathed it. And in the eye of more than one +girl the wish was transmuted into a tear,--into something more tender, +more transported, than a laugh, as the log, in a final spurt, gave all, +and fell, like a tired dancer, upon the broad hearth, its rosy chiffons +crumpled and fading into the pale gray of wood-ashes. + +"There it goes!" The eyes of Pemrose were a patchwork now, flame +embroidered upon their shining blue; oh! if she were to give forth what +Life gave to her, which of her Camp Fire Sisters would have such riches +to reflect? + +It had been hers--hers--to share the dream of a great inventor, to look +forward with him to the pioneering moment--the beginning of that which +would surely, in time, draw the Universe visibly together--the moment +when the Thunder Bird should fly. + +She never qualified that dream by an _if_, wherever the funds to +equip it might come from--or even if it had to wait a dozen years, +Toandoah's triumph, like that fortune "hung up--" for the great Bird to +make its new migration to the moon, in proof that space was no +barrier--when the Thunder Bird, giving all, as the log had done, would +drop its skeleton upon the desert of that silent satellite. + +But there were steps to be taken in the meantime--exciting steps in the +ladder of success. Those patchwork eyes, looking into the flame now, +counted them, one by one, and hung in breathless anticipation upon the +first: upon the moment, so soon to come off, when old Greylock would +really send back a shout of gladness, for on his darkling summit the +hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America would press the button and loose the +lesser Thunder Bird to fly up the modest distance of a couple of hundred +miles, or so, with its diary in its head, and send back the novel record +of its flight. + +"I--do--believe that my father sleeps with one eye open, thinking of +that golden egg, as he calls it--the little recording apparatus," she +said, when the White Birch Group, as one, asked that the special program +for this ceremonial meeting should be a talk from an inventor's daughter +upon this most daring enterprise of the age. "He says that if +_that_ does not drift back to earth safely with the crow-like +parachute--if anything should happen to it, to the two little wheels, +with the paper winding from one on to the other, all dashed with pencil +marks--the world would call him a fool's mate.... If it did!" Pem's +teeth were clinched. "But, of course, without the record, there would be +nothing to show how high the little rocket had really flown--showing the +bigger one the road," with an excited gasp. + +"Yes, I can understand how anxious he must be about the safe return of +the egg--or the log--whichever you choose to call it--the first record +from space, anyway." Tanpa's tone was almost equally excited. "And of +course the wind may play pranks with the parachute--drift it away down +the mountainside!" + +"So that we'd lose it in the darkness--oh-h!" Pem shivered upon the +thought. "But we'll all be on the lookout to prevent that, as many of us +as are there--and that won't be more than a picked few, Dad says, to +witness this first experiment.... When--when the real Thunder Bird +flies, though--" she turned those patchwork eyes now, sky-blue, +flame-red, upon her companions--"you'll all--all-ll be there. And, oh! +won't it--won't it be a sight to watch--it--tear?" + +Drooping towards the fire-glow, lips parted in entranced assurance, the +slight figure became lost in the same dream which had held it months +before in a February Pullman, while a daring flame, like a red-capped +pearl diver, plunging into the mystery of that fairy thing, that +gleaming stole about her neck brought out milky flashes of +luster--together with those New Jerusalem tints, jade and gold and ruby. + +Finished now it was, the pearl-woven prophecy--fair record to go down to +posterity! + +In faith--such faith as had inspired Penelope, faithful wife, of old, to +weave and unravel her endless web, steadfast in the belief of her +husband's return, so the girlish fingers upon the loom had wrought the +transcendent story to a finish. + +To a finish even to the sprinkling of gold pieces, the yellow bonanza, +coming from somewhere, to gorge the Thunder Bird, for its record flight; +to a finish even to the celestial climax, the little blue powder-flash +lighting up the dear, fair face of Mammy Moon! + +But of one climax, more celestial still, Pemrose Lorry could not speak, +not even to these her Camp Fire Sisters: of the evening of the second +wreck--the wreck of hope after that third installment of a disappointing +will had been read--when she had taken the four feet and a half of pearl +poem to her father's workshop, the grim hardware laboratory, and out of +the home of light, which she herself hardly understood, in her young, +young heart, had told him, doubtful of the future, that she knew the +invention would win out--the Thunder Bird go where nothing earthly had +ever gone before. + +And he had whispered something--something surpassing--about a Wise Woman +who saved a city. + +It made sacred every thought now, and humbled it, too, in the breast of +this little sixteen-year-old girl, with the mingled yarn in her +nature--the mingling spice in her name. + +Others had these fair stoles, too, the history of their girlish lives +woven in pearls of typical purity, crossed by vivid representations of +events. Drooping to their knees, in symbolic beauty, finishing with the +soft leather fringes on which a breeze sweeping down the wide chimney +played, they flashed here and there in the high colors of adventure--the +quaintly symbolized adventure tale. + +But none could match the theme of the two little primitive figures upon +the mounttain-top, the inventor looking through a tube, the comet-like +streak of fire above them: the opening of a highroad through Space,--the +first step towards a federation of the heavenly bodies. + +The record to go down to posterity! + +Yet old Earth had still her individual romance of seedtime and harvest, +sun and storm, peril and deliverance. + +Emblematically depicted these were in the pearl strip of a girl, with a +winsome reflection of Andrew's thistle-burr in her speech. Born "far +awa' in bonnie Scotland", the thistle and America's goldenrod blent +their purple and gold upon her young shoulders; there was an idealized +plow, representing the peaceful agricultural calling of her father,--and +a jump from peace to peril in the primitively symbolized scene of a +shipwreck through which she had been with him when crossing the Atlantic +in a sailing vessel. + +"We had all to take to the boats, you see," said Jennie McIvor, "for the +ship was leaking so badly that she couldn't keep afloat but a wee bit +longer; and we had a verra rough time until we were picked up." + +A rough time, indeed, typified by the wildly driven little canoes--the +most primitive form of the boat--tossed upon stiff water-hills, brooding +above them the quaint, corkscrew figure, with the eye in its head, of +Ta-te, the tempest. + +Somehow, this eye--the spying wind's eye--haunted Pemrose that night, +curled up in a previous suggestion of the Guardian's which, momentarily, +had twisted itself, snake-like, around her heart. + +Suppose Ta-te should prove cruel to her, as to Jennie whom she had +eventually spared! Suppose, on the great night of the first experiment +with Toandoah's little rocket, Ta-te, jealous of a rival in the small +Thunder Bird which could out-soar all the winds of Earth--out-soar even +the air, their cradle--should meanly seize upon the black, silk +parachute, light as soot, anchored to the golden egg, the little +recording apparatus! Suppose it should whirl both off, away from the +eager hands stretched out to claim them, hide them in a dark recess of +the mountain side, maybe, where they could not be found for +days,--possibly never! + +Ta-te _could_ play fast and loose with her father's reputation, she +knew; at least, with the witness to his success as an inventor. + +"If the wind should do that," she thought, "then the World, some part of +it--the horrid World--will say that Mr. Hartley Graham's last thoughts +about that mile-long will were wise ones: that it was better--better to +leave all that money 'hung up' awaiting the possible return of that +madcap younger brother--who'll make ducks and drakes of it, most +likely--than--than to turn it over to a Thunder Bird," with a faint +flash of a smile, "in spite, oh! in spite of the fact that daring +volunteers--skilled aviators--are wild to take passage in the far-flying +Bird." + +Yes! even that youthful hotspur who used the cream of rough-edged paper, +and was willing to try anything once, though it should be once for all. + +The girl's thought reverted to him now as she gazed into the bungalow +fire, seeing in the gusty flicker of every log that menacing +spiral,--the brooding wind's eye. + +It claimed her, that wild, red eye, even while her companions of the +White Birch Group were excitedly discussing their picturesque plans for +the morrow; for the celebration of their annual festival in honor of the +birch trees bursting into leaf, for the odes, the songs, the dances, the +planting, each, of a silvery sapling. + +It mesmerized her, did Ta-te's eye, with its setting of flame, even to +the exclusion of enthusiasm about the big dance--the joyous Together--in +the evening, of which Una raved in anticipation now and again, and for +which these two friends and rivals in the matter of eyelashes had +brought their prettiest party dresses. + +The elders presiding over the destinies of both had given a happy +consent to Tanpa's invitation, and the two were now the guests for a few +days of the mountain Group at their camp on the egg-shaped Bowl. + +The sigh of the mountain breeze came soothingly across the lake to lull +their slumbers as they lay down to rest, side by side, in the little +bungalow cots of which a dozen ranged the length of the great water-side +dormitory half-open, half-screened. + +Yet Pem fell asleep imploring Ta-Te--and lost the little record +altogether in her dreams! + +Up and down old Greylock she plodded, looking for it, hand in hand with +Toandoah,--but ever it eluded them! + +Muttering, bereft, she tossed; then for a moment awoke, blinkingly sat +up, to see the moonlight flickering--Mammy Moon's own smile--upon the +pearl-woven prophecy beside her, from which she could hardly be parted +by night or day. + +Sleep again! And now it was not only the diary but the Thunder Bird, +itself, that was lost,--astray in space, and she with it! + +She was trying to catch it by the fiery tail-feathers when, all of a +sudden--all of a sober sudden--those feathers became soft, flopping, +buffeting,--real. + +They brushed her parted lips. They flopped against her cheek. They even +mopped the dews of slumber from her eyes. + +"Hea-vens! W-what is it-t?" + +Wildly she sat up--a second time--to see the dawn poking at her with a +pink finger and the lake shimmering without, a great pearl found by the +morning in an iridescent oyster-shell of mist. + +And, within, a bumping, buffeting something, soft as moss, dun-gray as +terror--blundering into every sleeper's face, as if testing its warmth, +bowling its way along the line of cots. + +"Cluck! Cluck! Flutter! Flutter! Awake! Awake! I'm lost! I'm lost!" it +said. + +"What is it? _What is it?_" + +Never was such an exciting reveille as girl by girl bounded +up--elastic--fingering a brushed, a tickled cheek. + +The answer was a screech that made the morning blush, as if a ghost had +invaded the Tom Tiddler's ground of open day light. + +Una shrieked in echo. + +Morale was undermined. Cots were vacated. Maiden jostled maiden, all +colliding upon a gaping question that fanned sensation sky-high--until +the bungalow fairly rocked upon a hullabaloo. + + + + +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! + + + + +CHAPTER XVIII + +REPRISALS + + + "Her tunic is of silver, + Her veil of green tree-hair, + The woodland Princess donning + Her pomp of summer wear. + + White arms to heaven reaching, + Shy buds that, tiptoe, meet + The kiss of June's awaking, + The season's hast'ning feet! + + Oh, sure, a laugh is lisping + In each uncurling leaf; + The joy of June is thrilling + Some sense to transport brief! + + Sister of mine, White Birch Tree! + That sense my own sets free, + For in thy dim soul-stirrings + My Father speaks to me." + +It was Tanpa, with the sunburst upon her right breast, general symbol of +the Camp Fire, and the birch tree in grace of green and silver +embroidered above it upon emerald khaki, who read the verses which she +had scribbled in the skiff's stern under cover of the general interest +in water-snails, eggboats and "fresh-water sheep." + +"Most beautiful of forest trees--the Lady of the Woods!" came the +responsive hail from eighteen green-clad maidens, tiptoeing around the +Silver Lady, the emerald tassels of their Tam-o'-shanters skipping in +the June breeze that peeped under her fluttering veil, still tucked with +buds, to kiss those white limbs lifted to the skies, with surely, some +bud of conscious joy. + +It was June! Upon the cliff-brow, above the lake, wild roses were +budding, too; and the girls' cheeks painted themselves with their +reflection--even as did the blushing minnows in the lake. + +But the lady of the woods had the best of it so far as decoration went. +Never new-crowned head wore in its coronet Life as hers did,--fledgling +life. + +For amid the heart-shaped leaves, so brightly green, was the cap-sheaf +of summer wear: + + "A nest of robins in her hair." + +The poet who penned that line would have gloried in the sight of her, +that bungalow birch tree, a tall, straight specimen, radiant as a silver +taper from the black, frescoed ring about the foot to the topmost ivory +twig, and here and there amid the fluttering, pea-green tresses a little +tuft of conscious life--a nestling with open beak and craving, coralline +throat. + +He would have joyed in the sight of the tree-loving Group, too, as the +earth was turned and the first silver sapling rooted deep to the music +of Tomoke's voice, softly proclaiming: + + "He who plants a tree, + He plants love. + Tents of coolness spreading out above + Wayfarers he may not live to see. + Gifts that grow are best, + Hands that bless are blest, + Plant! Life does the rest." + +And Life would do the rest--oh! surely--in the case of her father and +herself, was the dewy thought of Pemrose Lorry as she planted her baby +tree in honor of that novel Wayfarer, that would first traverse space +and conquer it--bridge the gulf which made Earth a hermit amid the +heavenly bodies--of the great invention, whereof poets in future ages +would sing, that daringly took the first step towards linking planet +with planet. + +And the tender sapling was rooted in the hope that long before it was a +mature tree that comet-like Wayfarer would start,--the Thunder Bird +would fly. + +Well! star-dust never blinded the eyes. But it certainly dazzled +those of Pemrose, that young visionary, as she pressed earth around +her sapling's root: would there ever come a time when the Camp +Fires of Earth would hail the Camp Fires of some other planet +across that illimitable No Man's Land of Space, first--oh! thought +transcendent--first bridged by her father's genius? + +But with the high seasoning of that thought came the salty smack of +another! All unseen in the planting excitement a tear dropped upon the +spading trowel as she thought of that whimsical "Get thee behind me, +Satan, but don't push!" plea of the inventor sorely tempted to +commercialize his genius, thwart its inspired range, because of the +difficulties about bringing his project to fruition--and of that money +hung up, idle, for the next twelve years. + +"Daddy-man thinks he'll be--well! not an old man, but that his best +energies will be spent by that time, even if--" + +But here the trowel dug vigorously, burying head over ears the thought +of the possible return within that time of the "zany" who had been such +a mad fellow in youth that, according to her father and others, it was +like sitting on a barrel of gunpowder to have anything to do with him, +so sure were you to come to grief through his explosive pranks. And yet, +and yet--perhaps it was the dash of spice in her name--Pem could not +help feeling an interest for his own sake in that "hot tamale", the +Thunder Bird's rival in the will! + +So she spaded away, watering her sapling for the first time, herself, +with that little tributary tear; and then, propitiating it, after the +manner of the Indians, in the graceful Leaf Dance, capering around it, +around the Queen Birch, too, with her companions, upon the lightest +fantastic toe, their green arms outstretched and waving, to imitate the +leaves above them, blown by the wind. + +Went the phonograph upon the bungalow piazza, as it threw off the music, +the quaint Indian accompaniment to those stamping, shuffling, skipping +feet, to the queer little half-savage syllables, borrowed from the Creek +Indians, upon the lips of the chanting, dancing girls, to the coconut +hand-rattle wielded by Aponi, the Butterfly, most fairy-like of the +green dancers, as she led and led, in honor of the new _idlwissi_, +or tree-hair, the listening leaves--ethereal partners overhead. + +[Illustration] + +Containing little pebbles picked from the lake-side, with a stick +running through the painted coconut-shell for a handle, its gleeful +rattle fairly turned girls' heads with the joy of June. + +"I think we'll have to ask you to repeat that dance to-night for the +benefit of the boys, your guests," said the Scoutmaster, who was +manipulating the phonograph. "Fairyland wouldn't be 'in it' with the +human leaves tripping in pink and gold and green and--no ordinary man +knows what!" + +Fairyland, indeed, seemed beaten hollow as "across the lake in golden +glory" the waning sunbeams of early June bathed the little floating +pier, wreathed in laurel and daisy chains, then climbed with flagging +feet, like a tired angel, the sod-steps cut into the side of the steep +cliff, and, gaining the top, joined their rose-colored brothers skipping +among girlish forms in every fair hue imaginable, claiming partners in a +dance as of Northern Lights before ever their human brothers, the scouts +in gilded khaki, got a chance at a reel. + +"Oh! I feel it in my toes that this is going to be a won-der-ful party," +said Toandoah's little pal, kicking lightly, impatiently with those +satin toes of her party slippers at the tufted grass, as she sat +enthroned upon the sod of the cliff's brow, with two knights beside her, +Stud of the stout heart, and a bright-eyed luckless tenderfoot, whose +parents, in a fit of dementia surely, had named him Louis Philip Green, +which, as he used only the initial letter of his second name, had of +course entailed a nickname. + +"You promised you'd dance the Lancers with me, although I'm only a +tenderfoot," said Peagreen, nibbling a blade of grass as he lay prone +upon the sod and shooting a glance, bright and eager as a robin's, in +the direction of the black-haired girl with those skybeams in her eyes +under inky lashes. + +"Humph! The cheek of some kids who ought to be tucked up in their +Beehive when--when that dance comes off!" grumbled the fifteen-year-old +Stud, with the arrogance of a Patrol Leader, directing his glance at a +brown, conical bungalow flanking a large one, where the younger boys +turned in at what seemed to them unseemly hours, while scout veterans +sat up overhauling the day's doings for an occasion of a laugh against +somebody, practical joke, of course, preferred, to be published in the +Henkyl Hunter's typewritten Bulletin and hung up in the porch next +morning. + +"Well! I'm safe for the Grand March, anyhow--and the Virginia reel, too, +eh!" Stud dug congratulatory fists into his brown sides, wriggling +aggressively upon the cliff-brow, like Peagreen figuratively hugging the +ground with an impatient nose. + +Privately he was inclined to the opinion that the blue-eyed girl's +friend who had that little nearsighted stand in one of her dark eyes, +and two dimples to Pemrose's one, was the daintier "peach" of the +two--and that his own sister, Jess, was as pretty as either; but think +of the distinction of leading off with a girl whose father would lead +off amid the dance of planets, in sending a messenger to the moon, Mars, +too, maybe! + +"Whoopee!" He kicked the sod as if spurning it as common or garden +earth--although there were moments when, like others--elders--in a +skeptical world, he told himself that the Thunder Bird would prove, +after all, a Flying Dutchman,--just an extravagant dream. + +"So--so you were out on the lake this morning, studying pond life with +the professor," he said, alluding to the Scoutmaster. "He's instructor +in a college and each year he gets us started on something; last summer +it was astronomy--he brought a small telescope along." + +Pem's heels drummed more excitedly on the sod--the starry heavens were +_her_ scope. + +"But we have a good deal of fun with the big compound microscope, +too--and more without it," acknowledged Studley. "Fancy last week we +caught a huge pike which had jumped clear out of the water, on to the +bank, after a water-hen!" + +"Where was that? How--how big was it?" The girlish questions mounted +helter-skelter. + +"The pike? Oh! he weighed about fifteen pounds. It was right over there, +on the other side of the lake," pointing to the spot where the party +interested in egg-boats had landed that morning. "He--he gobbled the +hen, too." + +"_Did_ he?" But he might have been threatening to gobble her, +judging by the start which the girl gave at the moment. + +Her heart jumped down to the water's edge as abruptly as did the cliff +beneath her. + +Her eyes were on a boat rowing out of the sunset's eye directly across +the lake from that very spot. + +There was but one individual in it and he--he was rowing by instinct, as +the birds fly, for his gaze was glued to a newspaper sheet, the sun's +own evening edition, gorgeously printed by the painted rays in every hue +of the spectrum. + +He was heading straight--straight for the floating wharf with its +plank-bridge running out ashore. + +Jack at a Pinch again! + +"Do--do you know who he is?" Pem flashed the question upon the older of +her two boy-knights. + +"Well-ll! I guess so." Stud's joy in the recognition floundered a +little. "He--he's the fellow--one of the fellows--who boomed the +aeroplane, the other day, to get you girls quietly out of the cave, when +there was a 'rattler--'" + +"As if we'd have made a fuss, anyhow!" The girl's eyes blazed, again a +patchwork, drawing their red center from the sun. "You said--you said +that it was so hard to make friends with him, like whistling jigs to a +milestone--ah!" Her own voice was suddenly stony. "Have you--oh! have +you made any headway since?" + +"Humph! Yes. I've found out something about him." + +The patrol leader's preoccupied eyes were on the boat edging vaguely +nearer to the wharf, with its one "nickum" figure, so nonchalantly +rowing, so absorbed in the rainbowed sheet upon its knees that at this +moment it awkwardly "caught a crab" and almost suggestively lost an oar. + +Simultaneously, however, the phonograph on the piazza struck up, as a +prelude to festivities, the Virginia reel, the notes tripping gaily out +across the painted lake; and the rower shot one glance upward, as if to +say: "I'll be there in time!" then bent his hungry nose to the paper +again. + +"What--what did you find out about him?" Pem's interest was equally +hungry--positively famishing. "His name--eh?" + +"Ha--that's the question! Over on Greylock the farmers' sons call him +Shooting Star', alias 'Starry'," with a boyish laugh, "because when they +were awf'ly hard up for a player in the last ball game of the series +against Willard College, having lost their second baseman and substitute +too, by gracious! he breezed along, an' the captain, hearing he had +played on a college team, roped him in ... an'--an', what do you know, +but he won the game for that mountain team with a home run! A home run +over the left field fence! Bully!" + +"But, surely, _they_ know his--real--name!" Pem's aloof absorption +in that fell like fog-drip even upon the glow from that left field +fence. + +"Maybe they do--and maybe they don't! He refused it to the fans. And +when the Greylock coach cornered him he palmed it off as Selkirk. But my +cousin who's pitcher on the team says in his opinion that was just +'throwing a tub to a whale'--something fishy about it, see?" Stud +winked. "For 'Starry' an' his father--who's a queer fish, if ever there +was one--had a camp then up on Greylock peak, and the postmaster in +charge o' the Greylock mail owned that he received letters for them +addressed to another name--only he couldn't--wouldn't--give it away." + +"_Wha-at!_" + +Pem's hand suddenly smote her lips. + +Her wide eyes were no patchwork now. Stud had not thought that a girl's +eyes could be so blue. It almost gave him the "Willies", their remote, +peculiar sky-glow, as if afar--afar--they were seeing things. + +"What!" she gasped again, while that vivid glow faded, became bluish, +blank, the tint of "Moonshine"--of a strange, wild, nondescript dream. + +Moonshine that seemed flooding her whole being! + +And yet--although she was a quick-witted girl--it was too vague for her +to draw from it one clear thought--only an uneasy, unreal, absolutely +breathless feeling! + +And then the queer, air-drawn sensation as suddenly passed--and with it +the blue moon which had momentarily turned her world to +nothing--"shooed" off by a very real, very tangible, quite pressing +apprehension: + +"He--he's not coming to the da-nce?" + +She sprang up hurriedly, pointing to the boat below; to its one +preoccupied figure, clad neither in rough sweater nor May-fly gaudiness, +now, but, if the sunset didn't exaggerate, in a very becoming dark suit. + +"Humph! I don't know! I guess he is! Didn't think he could pull it off +for some reason or other--" Stud's shoulders were shrugged. "But, maybe, +he's found where there's a will there's a way." + +"Why-y?" The girl's lips were parted breathlessly, her foot +involuntarily stamping. + +"Oh! you know you told us to invite our friends to the party; not you, +but the other girls did, when they signaled across that night from the +green Pinnacle--gee! and it was some signaling, too." The scout's glance +was teasing now as it shot up from the grass. "So--so one of the older +boys he ran across that bunch o' fellows who were blooming round in the +cave the other day--they're all from camps on the lake--and invited the +whole five. This one thought he couldn't accept, but I guess he's making +a dash at it--at coming just the same!" + +"Oh!... Oh, _dear_! I wish he wasn't!" + +"Why?" Now it was the scout's turn to hang, breathless, upon the +interrogation as he too jumped to his feet. + +"Because--oh! because I'd be--be ever so much more comfortable without +him--enjoy myself more." Pem caught her breath wildly. + +"Then 'twill be A. W. O. L. for him! ... A. W. O. L. for him--if I +perish for it!" + +"What--what does that mean?" + +"Absent With-Out Leave, as they set it down in the Army!" + +Mischief leaped to the Henkyl Hunter's eye. + +He beckoned Peagreen from the grass to follow him. A whisper in the +tender-foot's ear and down the winding sod-steps of the cliff they +scrambled! + +Pem knew that she ought to call them back; knew it from the white +parting at the side of her throbbing little head to the toe of her satin +slipper tumultuously beating the ground, as she sank down, an orchid +amid her chiffons, to watch. + +But it was a moment when the spice of her chowchow name had all spilled +over; when the Vain Elf which, according to her father, slept in the +shadow of the Wise Woman, was broadly--mutinously--awake. + +The boat had drawn in alongside the decked float now. + +It was gently rocking there, on and off, the rower having shipped his +oars and laid them beside him, his strong fingers now and again hooking +the wharf when there was danger of his drifting away, while his obsessed +nose was bent closer still to the newspaper sheet, catching the last +rays of daylight on it. + +He did not look up when the scouts, running out over the plank bridge, +spoke to him. + +Suddenly one of them--Stud it was--leaned down and snatched the oars, +lifted them high in the air, the nickum's evil genius having prompted +him to lay them in the boat's side nearest the wharf; perhaps it was the +demon which he had dared by sitting in the Devil's Chair. + +At the same time Peagreen gave the boat a strong shove outward to where +a current caught it and swept it further--mockingly further, towards the +darkening center of the Bowl. + +"Oh! I say--I say, you fellows, that's no stunt to pull off!" roared the +nickum wrathfully. "I'm due at the dance now!" + +"You're not coming to the dance. There's a girl here who doesn't want +you!" rang back the voice of callow chivalry in the barbarous pipe of +the tenderfoot. + +And Pem, slipping up from the grass, her hands to her burning +cheeks--for she had not meant it to go as far as this--stole back to the +piazza, to dance away from the shamefaced ecstasy of reprisal in her +heart. + +Perhaps she would have felt that this was too sore a snub to inflict for +any rudeness on Jack at a Pinch; perhaps she would have compelled her +boy-knights to put out in the camp skiff and return those oars--under +pain of not dancing with them, at all--had she seen the illuminated +column over which the victim's nose had been so disastrously bent. + +It was in every sense a highly colored description of her father's +record-breaking invention, dwelling particularly, though vaguely, upon +the experiments so soon to take place with a lesser Thunder Bird, a +smaller rocket, from the remote and misty top of old Mount Greylock. + + + + +CHAPTER XIX + +A RECORD FLIGHT + + +It had come at last, that starless night, that stupendous night of which +Pemrose had dreamed for a year, as she perched on a laboratory stool and +watched her father at work, when the little Thunder Bird, the smaller +rocket, would take its experimenting flight, its preliminary canter, up +a couple of hundred miles, or so, into the air,--and on into thin space. + +Most dashing explorer ever was, it would keep a diary, or log, of its +flying trip. + +But whereas travelers, hitherto, had carried that up a sleeve or in a +breast-pocket, it would have its journal in its cone-shaped head; the +little openwork box, five inches square, with the tape-like paper +winding from one to another of the wheels within and the tiny pencil +making shorthand markings, curve or dash, as the air pressed upon it, +until it got beyond the air-belt altogether--out into that bitter void +of space, where pressure there was none. + +No wonder that the inventor called this log the golden egg, for when the +magic Bird had flown its furthest, when all the little powder-rockets +which, exploding successively, sent it on its way, were spent, then its +dying scream would release the log from its bursting head. + +Back that would come, fluttering to earth on the wing of a sable +parachute, lit on the way, as it drifted down two hundred miles, or so, +by the glowworm gleam of a tiny electric battery,--a little dry cell +attached to it! + +And this, really, was, as Pemrose had said, the kernel of the present +experiment to her father, the only witness to prove that the baby +Thunder Bird had, indeed, "got there", flown higher than anything +earthly had ever ventured before; and that if a little two-footer in the +shape of a sky-rocket had done so much, then there was nothing to +prevent a twenty-foot steel Bird from flying on indefinitely,--even to +Mammy Moon, herself, or fiery-eyed Mars, perhaps. + +"I don't believe that Dad has slept for two nights now, thinking about +its safe return," said Pemrose to Una, as in the starless, +breeze-tickled night the two crouched together upon the mountain-top. + +"Well! that little firefly, the tiny electric lamp--the 'wee bit +battery', as Andrew calls it--will guide us to finding it when it drifts +down," panted the other girl, excitement fixing that little peculiar +stand, like a golden lamp, in her dark eye. + +"Yes, but--" perhaps her dream in the bungalow of Ta-te, the tempest, +was affecting Pemrose--"but suppose, oh! suppose, that the wind--there +is a wind--should waft it away--away from us, down the mountainside, to +where we couldn't find it in the woods--dark woods--to where somebody, +some horrid meddler, might pick it up, and get a look at the Thunder +Bird's diary before us ... the first record from so high up. Oh--dear!" + +The girl's sigh was echoed by that stealthy wind around her, in whose +every whisper there was menace, as it swept through the long grasses and +ruffled the ash trees of Greylock's summit. + +Una, to whom this "half the battle", the quick locating of the parachute +and its treasure, was not so vital, soared above all threat in this +witching-time of excitement--the transcendent hour. + +"The Thunder Bird's diary! Oh-h! the Thunder Bird's diary," she repeated +dreamily, as if reciting a charm. + +Being Camp Fire Girls of fervid imagination, the supreme invention, the +beginning of old Earth's reaching out to the heavenly bodies, gained its +crowning romance from them. + +As moment by moment flew by romance in their young breasts became a sort +of rhapsody that set every thought to wild music. + +To Pem it was as she had dreamed it would be, away back in her father's +laboratory, before the February train wreck. + +Hands seemed reaching out to her from everywhere,--she the satellite +reflecting her father's light. + +From the four quarters of the habitable earth eyes seemed trained upon +her, as she knelt in a little island of flashlight, with her thumb on an +electric button which, connected by wires with a platform about a +hundred feet away, would throw the switch and release the magic Bird to +flying. + +"N-now, keep cool, Pem! Don't get excited--too ex-ci-ted--or-r you may +miss the moment when they shout to you: 'R-ready! Shoot!'" breathed Una, +so wrought up herself that her words had a sort of little zip, a hiss, +in them, like the soft sighing of the breeze at the moment. + +Pemrose knew that her father's thoughts were taken up all the time with +that summit breeze, on how far it might affect the safe return of the +golden egg, as he hovered about the low platform, a hundred feet away, +on which the little Thunder Bird was mounted, together with his young +assistant tightening up every bolt and screw for the record flight. A +third tall figure hovered near, within the ring of distant flashlight, +that of Una's father, as transported now over the whole experiment as if +he had never hinted that the far-flying rocket was a Quaker gun. + +With the girls in their little fairy-like ring of electric light--to go +out like a will o' the wisp presently--was their usual body-guard, old +Andrew, who had driven the party up the mountain. + +"Cannily noo, lassie! _Cannily._ Dinna be fechless--flighty!" The +Scot was breathing like a Highland gust as he cautioned the girl whose +tingling little thumb touched lightly as thistledown the fairy button. +"Whoop!" he grunted sharply. "I reckon they're maist ready, noo, to gie +it its fling--let it go!" + +It was at this moment that in the distant island of flashlight an arm +was flung up. It was that of the professor's young assistant. + +He forgot to bring it down again. + +And, lo! a hush, as of a world suspended, fell upon old Greylock,--that +grim, black mountain-top. + +The long grasses ceased to whisper. The mountain-ash trees cuddled their +little pale berry-babies in awe. + +"All R-ready! _Shoot!_" + +Toandoah's battle-cry it was. + +A roar as of a small brass cannon, the first gun of the new conquest, +responded, as the hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America pressed the +button, triumphantly throwing the switch in the nozzle, or tailpart, of +the mounted rocket, a hundred feet away. + +Simultaneously the flashlights went out. + +And in the darkness--into the blackness the little Thunder Bird soared. + +Soared with the wild red eye of its headlight challenging the heavens +themselves to stop it, with its comet-like tail of red fire streaming +out full twenty feet behind it. + +At lightning speed,--fifty miles the first minute, a hundred the +next,--it leaped from its mountain platform straight up--bound for the +vacant lot of space. + +Explosion after bright explosion tore the cloud-banks as, one by one, +the innumerable little rockets, which Pem had watched her father fitting +into their grooves in its interior--far back in that quiet +laboratory--went off. + +And with each radiant roar higher--faster--it dashed, the little Thunder +Bird, with never a puff of smoke to dim the spectacle--the +transplendency of its flight. + +"Michty! Michty!... _Magerful!_" + +There was just the one skirl from Andrew, to lend it music on its upward +way; he had not thought that he came to America to witness a thing like +this. + +"Magerful", indeed! Magical, indeed! The others were silent, swept away +by the magic of it--the greater, moon-storming magic to come. + +Only--only, they breathlessly asked themselves: "What next?" + +Well! the immediate "next" would be the return of the golden egg, the +diary, the falling fruit of the experiment, without which there was no +proof of its success--of how high the fiery Bird had flown--before, its +last automatic charge expended, it sang its swan-song somewhere in +space. + +At the increasing speed with which the little Thunder Bird flew--when +miles were but a moment--the record might be expected back in a few +minutes. + +Minutes--but they seemed a moon's age! + +It was Una--Una--who saw it first: the tiny speck of star-dust drifting +down, down among the woolly clouds--dark as if the night had been shorn +and its fleece hung out to dry--alighting here and there, the little +firefly, in other words the atomy electric battery attached to the +precious record, trying so hard, with the parachute's aid, to find its +way back to earth from the lonely height it had reached. + +Another quarter of a minute, and they could trace the outline of the +black silk parachute, itself, a drifting crow with their prize in its +claws; that prize which the inventor, at least, would have given ten +years of his life to grasp--if, grasping it, he could see that the +little pencil had duly made its record markings--the proof that his +Thunder Bird had "got there." + +"Glory halleluiah! it's drifting down right into our laps--into the old +mountain's lap, rather! The wind won't carry it far, I bet! 'Twill land +within quarter of a mile of us, anyhow," shrieked the professor's young +assistant, a college boy, an athlete, who had led the quarter-mile +sprint on many a hard-won field, when the racing honor of a school was +at stake; and he ran as never before to get the better of the tricky +gusts and seize the parachute--faster, even, than the nickum, that +mysterious youth, had run, when he saved the day for the mountain team +at baseball. + +"Hoot mon! Dinna ye let it get away frae ye into the dar-rk woods!" +skirled Andrew, equally excited, and filled with awe of the raven +parachute now springing, like a great, black mushroom, out of the +night--and of the firefly which had been up so high. + +"Oh! it is--it is drifting towards the dark spruce woods--where we'll +have hard work to find it." + +In the wild chase after the prize, Pemrose made a good third, as she +thus shouted her fear. + +"See--oh! see, it _is_ landing," she cried again, "c-coming +down--touching earth." + +Yes! for one fleeting instant it did alight upon a mound, the shooting +starlet, the little electric dry cell, winking brilliantly against the +background of somber evergreens, now dark as Erebus, that girdle old +Greylock's crown. + +Then, freakish firefly, there, it was off again, the prey of the nickum +gusts, before ever a hand could touch it--the black parachute rotating +like a whirligig. + +Never--oh, never--was such a chase for such a prize since mountain was +mountain and man was man! + +Once again the steely clog, the weight of the five-inch box containing +the recording apparatus, the precious log, almost dragged it to a +standstill! But the summit gusts were strong. + +Even the college boy began to have heart-quakes and Pemrose +heart-sinkings. + +"Jove! What a stunt you're pulling off on us, you old black crow of a +parachute--you booby-headed umbrella!" groaned he. "C-can't you stay put +for just a second? Or are you bent on leading us a dance through the +woods?" + +He began to lose hope of its landing in his lap, that breezy athlete, as +it made straight for the jaws of darkness now, the inky spruce-belt--the +parachute coquetting with its pursuers, like a great black fan. + +Was--was it the wind then? + +Something--something caught it up, the golden log--the first record from +space--something snatched it up and whisked it off, off into those +blackamoor woods, while the feet of the foremost runner were still many +yards away. + +"'Twas na the wind! 'Twas mon or deil; I saw it loop out frae the +boggart trees!" roared Andrew. + +And now in his skirl there was a wild ring of superstition that turned +girlish hearts quite cold. + +"I saw it loup out frae the dark--dar-rk woods!" he insisted hoarsely. + +Ah! but those dim spruce woods were faintly illumined now with strange +little dots and dashes of light--the firefly winking passionately, as if +somebody, some thief, were running with it. + +And _they_ ran, too, its rightful owners, in full cry, calling +frantically upon the robber, whether thief, or tempest, to stop. + +And the girls kept bravely up with the men. Or one of them did! For all +the spice of her chowchow name was afire in Pemrose Lorry now; and she +would have tackled the thief, single-handed, to get back her father's +record. + +Into the core of darkness--in among the ebony spruce-boughs--the jetty, +frowning trunks, the snarling, brambly underbrush, dashed the chase, the +hue and cry, not daring to turn on a flashlight and in its glare lose +the one little piloting blink ahead, which now seemed to have +considerable odds on them, as it fled helter-skelter through the woods. + +"My word! this--this beats anything I ever dr-reamed of," gurgled the +college boy. "The Thing, whatever it is, has us nicely fooled. +There--there, it has switched off the 'glim' now--the little, telltale +battery. Now--where are we?" + +No one could tell, as they floundered about, three men, and two girls, +in the mysterious night-woods--without a clew--Pemrose clinging +desolately to her father now, Una to hers--while Andrew, the Church +Elder, muttered weird Highland curses. + +Nobody could tell where they were, indeed, figuratively, of course, +except--except that the experiment was a failure, so far as any proof to +the World was concerned! + +Except that Toandoah's hopes were dashed,--if not broken! + +The first record from Space was stolen,--or lost. + + + + +CHAPTER XX + +THE SEARCH + + +No! She did not think the nickum had taken it,--that mysterious Jack at +a Pinch! + +This is what the bleeding heart of Pemrose told her over and over again +within the next twenty-four hours,--and after that, too! + +True, she had robbed him of his oars and a dance,--or had been +responsible for the trick! + +She had not made her scout-knights return those ashen blades until the +morning after the dance, when they were surreptitiously deposited upon +the opposite shore of the lake in the neighborhood of the camp near the +insects' egg-boats. + +And she had enjoyed herself hugely as the guest of the White Birch Group +at the wind-up of the June carnival, while he, twice a rescuer, a friend +in a pinch, was drifting helplessly out upon the dark night-waters of +the Bowl, trying to paddle with his hands, within hearing of the festive +dance music, until some good Samaritan from his own shore rowed out and +gave him a homeward tow. + +But all this, as the girl passionately told herself, was an everyday +trick,--just a paper pellet thrown at one beside the overwhelming blow +of the loss of her father's record. + +And he who could quote Shakespeare upon "Something rotten in the state +of Denmark", amid the horrors of a zero train-wreck, who "liked his +excitement warm", had a sense of humor. + +True humor is never without a sense of proportion. + +It knows where to stop. + +But if the nickum was not the thief,--who then? + +Ta-te, the tempest--otherwise the mountain gusts--had to be acquitted +too. + +For at the first dawn after the blighted experiment some thin silk rags +of a raven parachute were found clinging, soot-like, to bushes in the +spruce wood, together with a portion of a twisted and bent wire frame. + +There was not a trace of the diary, the golden egg, the little +perforated steel box, with the recording pencil and paper in it. +Deprived of its wing, that could not have gone on alone,--without some +hand carrying it. + +So the weary and despondent searchers were forced to accept Andrew's +assertion that "mon or deil" had robbed them; and it was plain from the +solemn shake of the "true-penny's" gray head in its up-to-date +chauffeur's cap that he, himself, was disposed to lay the blame on a +"deev." + +"It's plain to me, noo, that this auld Earth should bide where she +belangs," he told the two girls, "not go outside o' her ain bit +atmosphere--be sending muckle messages outside it--it's na canny." + +He even respectfully delivered himself of this opinion to the +inventor--to Toandoah, with the hungry look of loss in his eye, which +occasionally wrought Pemrose to the point of choking sobs and to +clenching her fists at the mysterious robber. + +And he repeated it, with elaborations, did Andrew, on the second June +morning after the loss when Professor Lorry, declaring that it would +take a year to search every foot of Greylock Peak, and that he was not +going to waste time in crying over spilt milk, went down the mountain +with his young assistant and Mr. Grosvenor, who had business in the +valley, to procure materials for another experiment--although not on the +same scale as the first--the girls being left behind with the landlady +of the little mountain inn where they were staying. + +The chauffeur wore a "dour" look as he saw them depart, Una's father +driving his own car; for the first time in all his well-trained service, +the true-penny was inclined to sulk over being told to keep an eye on +two "daft lassies", who refused to go down to the town, because they +wanted to search some more--or Pemrose did. + +So he sat on a bench outside the little mountain house, thirty-six +hundred feet above sea-level, where there were no visitors at this early +season, with the exception of the experimenting party, and, between +whiffs of his pipe, discoursed upon the folly of simple earth folk in +"ganging beyant themselves, thinking o' clacking wi' the Man in the +Moon, forbye"--and, in tones seemingly bewitched, of the black shape he +had seen jump forth from the woods. + +"Pshaw! I do believe you think that it was some bad fairy, +Andrew,--fairy or mountain 'deev', who stole the little record, and part +of the parachute, too--spirited them away," said Una, with fanciful +relish, having not quite grown beyond the fairy-tale age, herself. + +"If that's so, girlie," said the mountain landlady--alas! for Andrew +True-penny, alias Campbell, now came the evil chance over which he +sulked--"if that's so, and you could only find the mountain +wishing-stone, stand on it and wish three times--wish har-rd--maybe, the +good fairies would give you back what you're looking for!" + +"Where--where is it--the wishing-stone?" The little fixed star in Una's +eye was never so bright--a twinkling star of portent. "The wishing stone +on Greylock! Oh! I never knew there _was_ one." + +"Havers, woman! Dinna ye ken that ye hae a tongue to hold?" muttered the +grizzled chauffeur, in a stern aside. + +But the motherly New Englander--who, with her old husband, could not for +a moment be suspected of the theft--had her heart full for two sorrowing +girls. + +"Why! it's a little over a mile from here, I guess, down the Man Killer +trail, the third flat slab you come to. I'd go with you myself--though +it's rough traveling, the steepest trail on the mountain--only my man is +laid up with the rheumatiz, hangin' on to him like a puppy-dog to a +root." + +"Oh! we can find it for ourselves--hurrah!" shouted Una, almost +squinting with anticipation. "I've never stood upon a real mountain +wishing-stone before. Who--who knows what may come of it?" + +In her young blood, as in Andrew's, was the extravagant excitement of +the whole experiment,--this first step in the ladder of demonstration +which was by and by to reach the moon--lending to all an unearthly +touch. + +"The--the Man Killer trail! Why! that's _one_ place where we +haven't searched--yet!" A moping Pemrose suddenly awoke. + +To her, who had grown up amid the mathematical realities of an +inventor's laboratory, who had "plugged" so hard at her elementary +physics that she might be able to grasp the first principles of her +father's work, some day--some day to work with him,--to her, the little +girl-mechanic, a wishing stone was no golden magnet. + +But the very fact that there was one spot, not so far from the summit, +either--wildest spot on the mountain though it be--still unexplored, was +enough to draw her restless feet anywhere, against any deadlock of +difficulty. + +"Ha! The Man Killer trail!" she whooped again. "Oh-h! we could easily +find it; we saw a sign directing to it, as we came up the mountain." + +"It's na a trail; it's just a hotch-potch o' rocks--some sharp as +stickit teeth!" groaned Andrew, who saw his own doom fixed, in vain +protesting. + +He felt rather like a man who had been left behind to hold a wolf by the +ears when, in the teeth of every remonstrance he could offer, he found +himself, a little later, starting out in the rear of two adventurous +girls, in quest of that third slab of a wishing stone--and the +breath-racking Man Killer trail. + +But those girls were, to some degree, seasoned climbers, +both,--sure-footed as venturesome! + +Through the dim limelight of fringing pine woods, across oozing +mud-beds, soft from spring rains and freshets, over a babbling brook +spanned by an elastic bridge formed of the interlacing roots of giant +trees--where Una found much delight in bouncing up and down in +anticipation of the magic stone--they stubbornly held their way, and +came at last to the chaos of rocks crowding a steep gorge which marked +the head of the lonely Killer trail. + +"Noo--I gang first!" said Andrew--a true-penny still, though the stamp +was reversed. "My word!" he added sourly, "this is na trail--juist a +scratch on the mountainside--an' the muckle rocks they're a flail for +beating the breath out of a puir body." + +"What--what do I care if they shouldn't leave me a pinch if only I could +find something--even a few more rags of the parachute!" gasped Pemrose, +in stifled tones of passion, as she climbed, hurry-skurry, over a piled +capsheaf of bowlders. + +Indeed, that battling breath was at a low ebb in all three when, +following the tangled skein of a sort of trail which the feet of daring +climbers had beaten, here and there, amid the rocks, they reached in due +time the third slab which, like the invisible running water in Tory +Cave, was supposed to bring "piping times" of luck to whoever should +brave the difficulties of the wild pass, to stand on it and wish. + +"Oh--oh! there it is, at last," cried Una, her hand to her breathless +side, "a nice 'squatty' slab--almost as smooth as glass--an' shaped like +a mud-turtle. I wonder if there is a fairy underneath it--lurking under +the rim. Now--now for the wishing cap!" + +But before she could don Fortunatus' cap by breaking a wee branch from a +dwarf cedar growing amid the crags and wreathing it, like a green +cottage bonnet, around her head, she slipped upon the wet moss girdling +the stone where a tiny spring bubbled, and almost pitched headlong down +the trail, at this point particularly steep. + +"Easy there, lassie! Ye dinna want to mak' o' that auld flat slab a +tombstone, eh?" murmured Andrew, laying a great hand upon her shoulder, +with a little smack of laughter upon his long, smooth-shaven upper lip. + +But immediately he winced as if his own words hurt him, and +Pemrose--herself in an aching mood--knew what he was thinking of, that +grizzled chauffeur. + +Una, her balance recovered, jumped upon the stone. + +Surely, no wishing-cap ever before was so bonnie, so becoming as the +fine, emerald needles of the little cedar branch gripped together under +the dimpled chin, fringing the sweet, saucy, girlish face, the star in +the bright dark eye so intently fixed. + +Pem smiled; in the present crisis of her young life she didn't care if +her friend's eyelashes were longer than hers by a whole ell. And Andrew +sighed because of that one "sair memory" which had oppressed him on the +Pinnacle. + +The serio-comic passion in the green-framed face, the fervor in the one +little clenched fist drooping at Una's side, might well have won over +all the good fairy-hosts that ever landed in the wake of the Pilgrims, +and set them to scouring Greylock for the missing record from on high. + +"Now then! Pemrose, it's up to you! Turn your backbone into a wishbone." + +The wreathed figure stepped from the pedestal,--a laughing June spot +against the wintry grimness of the Man Killer trail. + +Obligingly the inventor's daughter stepped up, closing her eyes +half-humorously, doubling the drooping hands at her panting sides. + +But, as suddenly, the eyelids were flung up, like shutters from the blue +of day. The uncurling fists were outflung passionately. + +"I can't! I _can't_!" cried Pemrose Lorry, choking upon her own +wishbone. "I--I'm not in the humor for it--for foolery! I must go +on--right on--and search! This--this is the shortest trail down the +mountain, if it's the roughest--I know that!" She looked desperately at +old Andrew. "If any mean thief--anybody--stole that record, there could +be only one--one motive for it, my father-r says--curiosity; to be the +fir-rst to see that very first record man has ever got from so high +up--high up in the earth's thin atmosphere, where the air ends--and +space begins!" + +She seemed to have that whole zero void in her heart now, its light, +stifling gases in her distended throat--Toandoah's little pal--as she +looked distractedly down the gorge. + +"Oh! it's pos-si-ble--just barely possible, that after he had satisfied +his cur-ios-ity--or mischief--or whatever it was--he might have thrown +away the little steel box, dropped it somewhere on the trail," she +panted extravagantly. "Or--or we might even come on some more rags of +the parachute and track him--track him to a camp! My father-r--" + +It was the passionate break on that word, even more than the spice in +the blue eyes, that went straight to the shadowed spot in Andrew's heart +and found the little sprig of memorial heather, hidden there, the +mountain heather, the tiny, pinkish blossoms, with the faint, wild tang, +which he plucked whenever he went home to Scotland from a small grave in +a hillside "kirkyard" on whose granite marker was printed: "Margery +Campbell, aged fifteen!" + +It had been as much the restlessness of bereavement as a desire to +better their fortunes which had brought his wife and him to the New +World, for she had been their only child, with the exception of one son, +old enough to be in the American Army. + +The fragrance of that imaginary heather-bloom tucked away in the +impassive chauffeur's breast was occasionally apparent in a furtive +glance thrown skyward, or in a momentary glisten of mist in the gray +shell of the mechanical eye. + +It had made the whole family of his employers very sympathetic towards +Andrew, as to a friend. And now a whiff of that heather memory stood +Pemrose in good stead. + +"I reckon if leetle Margery were livin', she'd feel in the verra same +way gin anny misfortune happed to me," he told himself. + +"Aw, weel, lassie!" Thus he spoke aloud. "Since ye're set on gaeing on a +wee bit further, we'll gang; but dinna get yer hopes stickit on finding +onything!" + +"Andrew--Andrew, himself, has found something! Look--look at him!" + +It was barely twenty minutes later that the wildly startled cry burst +from Una as the trio struggled on--on down the fitful path, between the +rocky jaws of the Man Killer, where beetling crags loomed, fang-like, on +either side of them and, here and there some swollen rill made of a +green moss-bank a slimy mud-bed. + +"He--he's hearing things, if he isn't seeing them. Oh, look!... Look at +him!" + +Una's hand was at her jumping heart--pressing hard as if to hold it in +her body--as she beheld the tall figure of the chauffeur, motionless as +arrested mechanism, upon the trail, ahead. + +"I heerd a--skirl." Andrew's face was stony as that of the Old Man of +Greylock--a featured rock--as he turned it upon the breathless girls. + +"A skirl! A cry!" he repeated hoarsely. "'Twas na the yap of an animal, +either! Somebody--somebody's yawping for help out here in this awfu' +spot! Dinna ye hear it, children?" + +They did. Their flesh began to creep. + +Up, upward, struggling between great rocks, it climbed, that cry, where +the stony teeth of the Man Killer bit the trail right in two. + +"Help--h-help!" it pleaded. "Oh--help!" Then feebly, but fierily: +"_Oh-h!_ confound it--_help_, I say!" + +That was the moment when Pemrose Lorry shook as if the old Man Killer +were devouring her. + +Was there--could there be something familiar, half-familiar, about the +faint, volcanic shout: some accent she seemed to have heard before? And +yet--and yet, not quite that, either! + +"My word! Some puir body's hur-rted bad--ba-ad--like a toad under a +harrow," grunted Andrew, and scrambled hastily on over a gray barrier of +rocks,--the girls following. + +Once again it limped painfully up to them, the cry, like a visible, +broken thing. "Help--h-help, I say!" Then, feebly, in rock-bitten echo: +"_Help!_" + + + + +CHAPTER XXI + +THE MAN KILLER + + +"We must lift him out of the mud! Oh-h! even if it hurts +him--terribly--we'll have to lift him to a dry spot." + +It was Pemrose Lorry who spoke. Together with her Camp Fire sisters she +had taken some training in first aid. And one agonizing accident which +she had been told how to deal with was the case of a knee-cap displaced +or broken. + +There almost seemed to be a broken head on her own young shoulders +through which wild, streaky lights and shadows came stealing, like +moonlight through cracked shutters whose chinks are not wide enough to +reveal clearly any object in a room. + +It was the same breathlessly unreal feeling--the same dim moonlit +groping, that she had felt as she sat on the cliff-brow with Stud, when +he talked of the nickum and his father--and called the latter a "queer +fish!" + +For one thing she knew at a glance! She had seen the injured man, who +lay calling for help in a miry spot of the Man Killer trail, before. +Three times before, said lightning perception! + +And it came upon her now, as emergency's stiff breeze blew the cobwebs +from her brain, the occasion of the second time, sandwiched in between +that zero day when he had dragged her up a snow-bank, the youth who +saved her addressing him as Dad, and the smiling June one when he lay on +a fernbed before his lake-shore camp, grumpily fishing. + +"I--I saw him: I know I saw him--again--crossing the street outside +Una's home on the day when the last installment of the Will was read," +she realized, her hands coming together convulsively at the thought of +the blighting codicil which hung up the fortunes of the moon-going +Thunder Bird for twelve long years. + +"He--he was wearing the same gray cap!" was the next cleaving flash of +memory. + +He was not really wearing it now. It bobbed in the rill beside him. + +As one eye turned feverishly towards it, the third thunder clap of +perception came in the staggering sense of how like he was to Una. + +She might have been his daughter--Una--with that little fixed star of +feeling set like a shining pebble now in her right, fascinated eye, +reflected, exaggerated in the glazed cast of pain in the stone-gray eye +of the man beneath her, whose climber's suit of homespun was daubed with +mountain mud,--whose tweed cap was the brooklet's toy. + +He had been trying to scoop up water in it. + +And that brought Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl, to herself again, within +quarter of a minute of her first laying eyes on him. + +For there is one gallant anchor that will hold in any pinch,--when +thought is shattered and speculation the maddest blur: the Camp Fire +law: Give Service! + +She unhooked her little camper's cup from where it hung at her green +belt, and offered him a drink. + +She dipped her handkerchief in the trickle of water and wiped the cold +drops of faintness and agony from his forehead. + +And then, when he had confided to Andrew, who knelt beside him, that he +had slipped upon the wet, slimy moss beside the rill, as he ascended the +trail, and broken his knee-cap by striking heavily against a confronting +rock, she said that they must lift him to a dry spot. + +"That's--r-right. She knows what to--do. Ouch! a--a knee-cap slipped, or +broken--is--the deuce of a rack," groaned the victim, as they proceeded +to raise him, the girls supporting, each, a knickerbockered leg, Pemrose +the injured one, while Andrew took the main weight of the writhing body, +until they laid it upon some dry moss. + +Yes! and she knew further what to do, that Camp Fire Girl who wore the +Fire Maker's bracelet upon her wrist, for plucking off her soft, green +sweater she rolled it into a wad and placed it under the hollow of the +injured knee, so flexing it, supporting it, while Una doubled hers into +a pillow for his head,--Una who moved as if in a fantastic dream. + +And then arose the question as to the next move; how to go about +obtaining further help. + +"We might--might make a stretcher with poles, saplings, with our +sweaters, your coat, Andrew, and--and carry him down to the nearest +farmhouse," Pem suggested. + +"No-o thank--you!" The injured man shifted his shoulders ever so +slightly upon one elbow and looked at her; the tiniest laugh shot the +rapids of pain in his eye. "My son said you had a whole lot of +'pep'--same that's in your inventor-father, I suppose, who wants to +bombard the moon!... My son who's play-ing baseball now down on the +Greylock field--mountain's foot!" The sufferer here appealed to Andrew. +"If you could--only--get him up here, I'd be all right! There's an auto +at the nearest farmhouse--maybe they'd let you take it. Any one--any one +can point out 'Starry'"--in a lame rush of pride--"player who made that +home run--" + +"Hadna I better bid him bring a doctor along too--a stretcher as weel?" +put in the Scotchman dryly. + +The victim nodded, looking at the other's cap. + +"You're a chauffeur," he pleaded; "you'll drive fast?" + +"Aye, fegs! Fast as God and gasoline will let me!" answered Andrew +devoutly, with an anxious glance at the two girls. + +As his tall, spare figure scrambled on down the trail, the sufferer +raised his eyes to Pemrose. + +"If--if you could t-twist my knapsack round from under me," he murmured; +"there's a restorative in it--a few drops of ammonia--I'm faint!" + +She did so--and turned for the moment as faint as he was. + +The whole trail swam, grew black--black as the wisp of thin, ebony silk, +parachute silk, with a fraction of a bent wire frame peeping out from +one corner of that roomy knapsack. + +"Well! are you going to desert me now-ow?... Now that the thief is so-o +nice-ly bagged!" + +The man looked up at her, some dash of whimsical fire in him mastering +weakness; at the girl kneeling, bolt upright, with the black rag between +her hands, and the twisted scrap of frame,--the frame which had drifted +down two hundred miles. + +[Illustration: The man looked up at her, some dash of whimsical fire +mastering weakness. Page 268.] + +"Ar-re you--going--to desert me now?" + +Again the anchor held; the noble anchor: Give Service: it was as if a +voice outside of her numbed self spoke the words. + +The raven rags dropped from between her fingers,--their reflection from +her face. + +Steadily enough, she found the little vial lying amid the top layer in +that pigskin knapsack, shook a few drops from it, into the thimble-like +glass accompanying, mixed them with water, held them to his lips. + +At the same time she dipped her handkerchief again and passed it over +his forehead. + +"Ha! Pity as well as 'pep' in you, eh? Good!" The sufferer actually +winked one eye as the stimulant trickled down. "Well! my dear, the +little recording apparatus is in that knapsack too; I--I make you a +present of it--and of the codicil to my brother's will, as well.... You +won't have to wait twelve years." + +Then, indeed, the trail seemed to double up, to wind itself around Pem's +brain, rocks and all,--only every rock was gold-edged, a nugget. + +Her eyes stared straight before her,--blue as the June violet that +caught a drop from the spring near. + +"Who--who are you?" screamed Una, forgetting that she was speaking to a +broken man. + +"How about my being your uncle, Treffrey Graham, my dear, who--who was +such a mad fellow--in--youth; s-such an oddity? Oh-h! you've heard of +him--have--you?" + +The whimsical light in the pain-reddened eyes burned to mockery now. It +showed the hippogriff, the "hot tamale", still there. Evidently +eccentricity wasn't all dead. + +"Humph! By Jove! I'm having some fun out of my broken knee, after +all--electrifying you girls," gurgled the still racked voice. "Dramatic +setting for a denouement, too, the old Man Killer trail!" + +"But why--oh! why-y did you do it?" Pem snatched up the rag of parachute +again, her eyes going wildly from the soot-like scrap of silk to a +wonderful, antique ring upon the little finger of the pale hand which +twitched so strangely below her. + +"What! S-steal the little record, you mean!" The bushy eyebrows were +twitching, too. "Well! maybe I want-ed to make sure, for myself, that +the rocket really had gone higher than anything earthly ever flew yet, +before--before I resigned a fortune to it." + +That was the moment when the nuggets all turned to rocks again for +Pemrose. He saw the change in her face. + +"Oh! I don't mean anything der-og-a-tory to your father, my dear"--pain +snatched at the man's breath--"or to his invention, either. I knew him +before you did. 'Why did I do it?' Curiosity--eccentricity, I +suppose--anything you like to call it! I always was such a 'terror'--a +regular zany, my college friends used to call me." + +A flash from those prankful days, erratic as a shooting star, shot the +glaze in the sufferer's eye. + +"And, then--and then, I really am interested in everything connected +with the conquest of the air--of space--myself," the hampered speaker +went on. "I've done a little flying, out West,--my son, too! I found out +when the experiments with your father's in-vention--" + +"We call it the Thunder Bird," put in Una, as pain again called for a +break. + +"Ha! Good name for it! Piles up the moon-going romance, eh? Well-ll," +wearily, "having found out the par-ti-cu-lar night on which the lit-tle +model rocket was to fly, I came up the mountain to a small camp that my +son and I have ne-ar the summit--east side of Greylock. I was standing +on the edge of the spruce woods, watching the whole performance. +Then--then, when the parachute dragging the little recording apparatus +blew towards me in the darkness, almost into my hand, I--why! I snatched +it up and ran with it. Why? Oh, because I suppose the boy has never died +in me: the boy that's 'part pirate, part pig!'" with a grating chuckle. + +Incredible as it seemed, the low laughter, the treacherous tinkle, was +echoed by girlish lips as that renascent urchin momentarily swaggered in +the glaze of the suffering eye! + +"And then--and then something told me--an aberration, I suppose, as my +impulses usually are--that I had some sort of r-right to see the very +first record man had ever got of that upper air, of Space, if--if I was +go-ing to turn over a couple of hundred thousand dollars, for the +pursuit of the--sov-er-eign invention." + +"I--I can't believe it," murmured Pem into the stony teeth of the Man +Killer. + +"I meant to return the record next morning, but I was a-fraid your +father might shoot me," to Pemrose. "Then, later, I heard he had gone +down the mountain--that was yesterday and a mistake--I went-down, too, +to beard him. A--a little more water, please! I could not climb again +until to-day; I took the Man Killer trail, as being the shortest. +And--here I am!" grimly. + +"Incidentally, I gave our family lawyer a shock, little niece," he went +on, as Una, plucking up courage, adjusted her sweater under his head; +she began to like this uncle with the pebble-like cast in his stone-gray +eye, she began to think that girls--Camp Fire Girls, especially, with +their love of the fanciful--might have more patience with him than +others had had. + +"Yes! you bet I gave old Cartwright the staggers!" He laughed down the +twinge of agony in his voice. "Called him up on the long distance +telephone, told him I was Treffrey Graham back; that I had been in the +East nearly six months, with my son; that I came pretty near disclosing +myself on the--on the day when the third installment of my brother's +will was read--actually walked up to the door of my sister's house, then +shied off, because ... Oh, gosh! this knee." + +The voice broke; it had really become a feverish babble of excitement +now--pain's wild excitement. + +"Well! What was I saying--yes! I didn't ring the bell because I hadn't +made up my mind whether I wanted to claim any share of my brother's +fortune, or not; you see he hadn't been very fair to me in youth--taking +away my sweetheart. None of my family had--for--that--matter! I didn't +know whether I wanted to meet them again. Although I liked the look of +my little niece; I had seen her, at a distance, with her mother. And +then, we didn't need the money, my boy and I! Had enough of our own; +Treffrey Graham may be a terror, but he isn't a failure--financially!" + +No--not by a long shot! said the flame of the pigeon-blood ruby upon the +pale little finger, now curling significantly in air,--the gem whose +fire in this wild spot seemed as erratic as his own, seeing that none +but a zany would have worn it here. + +"So--so I told old Cartwright this morning that I stepped out of that +strung-out will," a smile curled the pallid lips now; "that I authorized +him to make preparations, at once, for the turning over of the remainder +of my brother's wealth, in his name and mine, to the University of our +native city, to be used for the furtherance of Professor Lorry's +won-der-ful invention for r-reaching in-de-finite heights." + +"My father!... Oh! my fa-ther!" It was a wild little cry to which the +Man Killer rang now, as the head of Pemrose Lorry went down upon her +knees. + +"Yes, I'm glad his way is clear--though, I suppose, only a man 'whose +head grew under his arm' would have managed the thing as I have done." +The sufferer winked through the veil of pain. "Now! my son is different. +He's a dare-devil too--but he knows where to stop. You couldn't have +bribed him to steal that record--though somebody played a trick on him +the other night--robbed him of his oars and a dance--just when he had +'taken the bit between his teeth', too; said he was tired of this +camouflage business, and he was going--going whether I liked it, or +not!" + +"_Ah-h!_" That was the moment when Pem's shoulders trembled like +the needles upon the little green cedar sapling that grew by the rill: +all because the Wise Woman in her was shaking the Elf, bidding her go to +sleep for ever--which the Elf, very properly, refused to do, for, after +all, undiluted wisdom would be a colorless cloak for any young back. + +"Well! he--he wouldn't speak to us when we just wanted to thank him for +saving us in that terrible train-accident," put in Una defensively. + +"Ha! That was my fault, little niece. I made him promise, on coming +East, that he wouldn't go near any of his relatives, risk being +identified by them, until I had decided what to do about the legacy--and +whether I was going to make myself known to them, or not. Now-ow, I hope +you'll be friends. He's your own cousin--Treff junior." + +And so Jack at a Pinch at last came into his own in the shape of a name! + +"Yes, called after me, he is! Goodness! don't I wish he'd hurry up and +get here, now--with the doctor?" + +It was a hollow groan. Pain was, at length, getting the better of that +capricious spirit. + +"Can't--can't I do--anything--to make you more comfortable?" Pemrose +asked. + +Then suddenly remembering that it was he who was making the Thunder +Bird's fortune, as impulsively as the little cedar tree leaned to the +swollen rill, she bent and kissed the cold sweat of pain from his +forehead. + +"That--that's worth coming East for," murmured the man, his own eyes +growing wet. "Little niece! don't you want to--follow--suit? I suppose, +a year from now, your Thunder Bird will fly." + + + + +CHAPTER XXII + +A JUNE WOMAN + + +"I feel as if I was in the pictures!" + +"Oh! I feel as if I was in the pictures." + +It was the wild thought in each girl's breast, as minutes went on. + +The loneliness of the mountain pass, nearly three thousand feet above +sea-level, the rigors of the wind sweeping up it, chill now, June not +yet being ten days old, the frowning crags, the remote heads of other +tall mountains peeping over their shoulders, the two green dots of girls +on either side of a broken man, they took it all in, to the full, most +dramatically too--and felt as if they were in the pictures. + +A surpassing moving picture reel, more telling than any they had ever +witnessed, in which--oh, queer double-headed feeling--they were both +actors and spectators! + +But pain--pain left no atmosphere of unreality about it for the +suffering man, for the sufferer who monopolized both their soft +sweaters, while they shivered convulsively, until if it came to a beauty +contest between the two now, the old Man Killer, awarding the palm, +would not have made it dependent on a mere matter of eyelashes, but on +which little nose was the least blue bitten. + +Pain released something in that sufferer too,--a fire that was not all +wild-fire! For suddenly he dragged Una's green sweater-roll from under +his head and thrust it towards her with an imperious: "Put it on, +child!" + +"I shan't!" replied that child of luxury, as arbitrarily, slipping it +back under the pallid cheek, above which the stand of agony in the stony +eye told that the man was suffering almost to a point of delirium now. + +"Who ever thought Una would be such a brick?" Pem nibbled the words +between her chattering teeth. "She's shivering--yes! and frightened and +trying to cry--but the brick in her won't allow it!" + +There was no doubt that the uncle of her blood was a brick, too, for he +fought the groans reverberating behind his clenched teeth, like a bee in +a bottle, only breaking out now and again in a yearning prayer for the +coming of his son. + +"If he were only here--here!" he moaned; it was evident that the +youthful daredevil who liked excitement, but "knew where to stop", was a +tower of strength to the less balanced father. + +Pem was longing uncontrollably for his appearance, also--for the rower +whom she had robbed of his oars, while the sufferer seemed to find his +only relief in talking about him. + +"My son and I have been in bad scrapes before among--mountains," he +panted, feverishly. "Once high up in the Canadian Rockies, we missed our +guide who had gone back for provisions. Bad plight then, but the boy +didn't 'cave'! He was only fifteen when he shot his bear in Arizona. He +loves the West. But the East's in his blood. Just went wild over these +Berkshire Hills, this spring, over his first sight of mayflowers! They +seemed more of a treasure than the fortune he wanted to part with. +_Hiff-f!_" + +Before the eyes of both girls rose the clamor of color "blooming round" +in old Tory Cave--the armful of passe blossoms flung down at the +"rattler" scare. + +"Yes--his Mother Earth has been good to him," muttered the whimsical +voice. "Very good! Yet--yet such are earth-sons that he'd turn his back +on her to-morrow--go off on a wild-goose chase after some other +world--even a dead one--if only that moon-storming Thunder--Bird--" + +"What! You don't mean to say--oh! did he write to my father about +it--write to my father and sign himself 'T. S.'?" broke in Pemrose, +glancing back along the trail which she had traveled these past few +months and finding it stranger, more baffling than the Man Killer's. + +"May--may--have done so," came the answer, with a faint chuckle. "I +asked him when pressed for a name to give his mother's--his middle +one--Selkirk. But he a lunar can-di-date! Not if I know it! With me, the +moon may have the money--but not the boy!" + +"The moon may have the money!" Pemrose Lorry glanced at the mud-stained +knapsack lying by the sufferer,--the knapsack tucked away in which was +the golden egg, the precious record; she would not unearth it and glance +at it, because the second look, at least, belonged to her father. + +This mature madcap upon the ground, this queer, practical joker, +chastened now, if never before, had played on him a cruel prank, but, at +least, he was not the fool who loved money for its own sake. + +"If--only--I could do anything for him!" yearned the girl passionately. +"Oh! I'd want father--father--to feel that I did ev-ery-thing for him." + +And, as once before in a watery pinch, the thought of Toandoah's honor, +Toandoah's debt to this trapped March hare, was the vital breath of +inspiration. + +"Have--have you any matches?" + +Suddenly she bent to the ashen ear. + +"In my br-reast pocket, yes." It was a feebly appreciative flicker. + +"A fire! I--I a Camp Fire Girl--and not to think of it sooner! Una! Una! +Get busy! Gather wood, quickly--quickly--all-ll the dry wood you can!" + +And the friendly little cedar gave of its one brown arm, the spruce +chit, the birch stripling, the pine urchin--all the hop-o'-my-thumb +timber that flourished in this wild pass--contributed of the dead limbs +torn from them by last winter's blasts, to burn up the chill in the old +Man Killer's heart. + +Una's little nose, piquantly tiptilted, warmed from a fashionable +orchid-color to a cheery rose pink, with the excitement, the pressing +adventure of trailing firewood among the rocks and dragging it captive +to the new-born blaze which Pem was fanning with her breath and with the +breezy bellows of her short green skirt. + +As for the sufferer, hope stirred anew in him as he turned his head +towards the flaming pennons of good cheer, while the fire, prospering +gayly, feathered its nest with scarlet down. + +He saw, too, that the fire-witch was preparing something in that red +nest for him. + +Raking out the first glowing embers, she filled her little aluminum cup +at the rill and set it among them; when it steamed she shook into it a +few drops from the little vial--the aromatic spirits of ammonia--and +held it to his lips. + +"It's the best I can do," she murmured, but her eyes stretched that best +into an indefinite blue of longing to capture the pain even for a short +time and bear it for him--for him who was making the Thunder Bird's +fortune. + +As before, the stimulant set the racked heart to sending strength +through the freezing veins--and with it a touch of the whimsicality +which Death alone could quench. + +"Little girl!" Treffrey Graham's eye winked upon a mote of fun that +softened to a mist. "Your fa-ther's invention is the gr-reatest thing +yet; it's a Success--I know that from the one glimpse I had at the +record--" Pemrose winced--"but--but you may tell him from me that I +doubt if, after all, his Thunder Bird is the best thing he's turned +out." + +"Some-somebody coming! Oh-h, some-body--coming!" cried Una, at that +moment, so that the man started up, with a heyday exclamation--and +tumbled back, a wreck of groans. + +For it was not his son. Neither was it the long-coated figure of the +chauffeur, at sight of which each girl would have passionately hugged +herself--if not him. + +But it was a messenger whom Andrew had sent. + +And at sight of her, of the fresh mountain rose in her cheeks, with its +heart of American gold, the climbing flash in her hazel eye, Una just +tumbled into sobs, herself, that little fixed star in her eye blazing +pathetic welcome, for this was her first taste of emergency's pinch, +emergency's call for sacrifice. + +"Are you--oh! are you come to stay with us--us?" she cried, running +forward with childish confidence. + +"That I be--girlie!" responded the mountain woman, throwing a warm arm +around her. "The man that borrowed our little aut'mobile truck and set +off in it at a score down the mountain, the man with a queer blowpipe at +the roots of his tongue, he told me that he had left two lassies up here +on the lonely trail, with a badly hurt man. 'Woman!' says he, kind o' +fierce-like, 'if they were yer own bit lassies, ye'd scorch the rocks, +climbing to 'em.' 'Man!' says I," the Greylock woman paused, +half-laughingly, to catch her breath, "'I never laid eyes on them, or on +the broken-kneed man, either, but I'll warm the way, just the same.' +But, mercy! it took me most an hour to get here--though only a mile of +climbing--the old Man Killer is--so-o--fierce." + +Her eye, at that, went to the fire, now brilliantly painting the trail, +to the pillowed figure upon the moss, with the sweater-roll in the +hollow of the injured knee. + +"But, land sakes! I needn't ha' been in such a mad hurry getting here, +after all--giving my skin to make ear-laps for the old Man Killer!" she +cried, holding up two raw palms, flayed by indiscriminate climbing. +"For, my senses! they're no stray lambs o' tenderfoot--those 'twa bit +lassies'!" mimicking Andrew's blowpipe. "They know how to take care of +themselves in a pinch--and of somebody else, too!... And--and, see here, +what I've brought you, honey, rolled in the blanket for _him_!" + +"Cake--choc'late cake! C-coffee!" Una gasped feebly, confronted by the +ghost of her everyday life. + +She grasped the reality, though, of that normal life, somewhere waiting +for her, with the first bite into the brown-eyed cake, while her sweater +was restored to her thinly clad shoulders as the mountain woman spread +her blanket over the injured man and tucked it under him for a pillow. + +"You--you're a 'trump,' little niece--letting me have it for-r so long," +he said wistfully. + +And Una shyly forbore to answer. + +Occasionally it is easier to land gracefully after a long jump than a +short one in the case of an awkward gulf to be crossed! She saw that her +friend Pemrose, no relation at all to this extraordinary uncle, could +care for him and welcome him without embarrassment, while, with every +doubtful glance in his direction, she felt, still, as if she did not +quite know whether she was on her head or her heels. + +She crept, for reassurance, very close to the mountain woman, the +typical June woman, with the normal rose in her cheeks, and the golden +buttercup for a heart, as she picnicked, subdued, by the trail fire. + +"I don't think--oh! I don't believe I ever met anybody q-quite like you +before. But I'm so glad you're in the world!" she murmured gratefully. + +"And I just wish you could come into _my_ world often, girlie," was +the cuddling answer, "for it's lonely as old Sarum here on the +mountainside--though where old Sarum is I don't know myself!" breezily. + +"Nor I!" laughed Una. + +"Old Man Greylock doesn't talk to one, you know--only roars sometimes." +The woman lifted her eye to the dim peak above her, with the pale mists +streaming, tress-like, about its crown, from which Mount Greylock takes +its name; then her anxious glance returned to the sufferer. "Ha! there +he goes--making faces at the pain again," she murmured pityingly. "And, +mercy! I suppose 'twill be a blue moon yet--a dog's age--before his son +can get here." + +It was a long age anyhow; although, in reality, little more than an +hour--a wild, wind-ridden, fire-painted hour--before three haggard men +came stumbling up the trail. + +Two carried a stretcher between them. One had a bag in his hand. + +As they hoisted that collapsible stretcher between its poles over the +last bleak hurdle of rock, one, the youngest, dropped his end of it, +which the doctor, shifting his bag, took up. + +Jack at a Pinch rushed forward. + +And ever afterwards Pem liked that churlish nickum because he ignored +her then; because he had no more consciousness of her presence, or of +Una's, or of the June woman's, than if they had been rocks--blank +rocks--by the trail, as he flung himself on his knees beside his father. + +"Dad! _Dad!_" he cried, his face as gray-blue with hurry as his +baseball flannels. "Oh-h! Dad, what have you been doing to +yourself--now?" + +"The biter bitten--Treff! Joker pinched!" came the answer in tones +almost jocular, for the love in that boyish voice was a cordial. "Well! +I guess I haven't got my death-blow now you've come. And--and the murder +is out, boy: these little girls know all-ll: who you are--who I am!" + +Then, indeed, Jack at a Pinch raised his head and looked straight across +into the blue eyes of Pemrose Lorry. + +"You must have thought me an awful 'chuff'," he said. + +"I'm sorry about the oars," was the mute reply of the girl's eyes, but +the least little tincture of a smile trickling down from her +lip-corners, said: "But I'm glad I got even with you, somehow!" + +However, there was too much "getting even" just now in this wild +spot--Life grimly settling accounts with the dragon who had so often +"hazed" others--for the boy and girl to spend any more conscious +thoughts upon each other. + +There was the terrible trip--the worst mile ever traveled--down the Man +Killer trail, for him, strapped to the stretcher, after the doctor had +examined the injury and found the delicate kneecap both slipped and +broken. + +"I guess if--if I pull through this, I'll be a--reformed--character; no +more--no more eccentricity for me," he murmured dizzily to Pemrose who, +when the trail permitted, walked beside him, stroking his hand,--and he +rolled his eyes faintly, through the veil of the opiate which the doctor +had given, at the knapsack beside him, wherein lay the golden egg. + +And with his own hands, the Man Killer at last conquered, as they laid +him in an ambulance, he took the five-inch, open-work steel box, the +precious record, from that knapsack's depth and handed it to her. + +She could not look at it, the little Thunder Bird's log of that +two-hundred mile trip aloft, she could only jealously clasp it to her +breast,--Toandoah's little pal. + +"T-tell your fa-ther from--me," said the broken voice, "that Treff +Graham is the same old Treff; that he m-may be a pirate, but he isn't a +pig--not re-al-ly! That," faintly, "he apol-o-gizes--and steps aside; +that, with all his heart--it's there, if it is a madcap--" wanderingly, +winkingly, he touched his left breast--"he hopes that, a year from now, +the highways of the hea-vens may be opened--the im-mor-tal Thun-der Bird +will fly!" + + + + +CHAPTER XXIII + +THE CELESTIAL CLIMAX + + +A year from then it did! + +It awoke the World with its challenging roar, silencing for ever, let us +hope, the racket of guns upon this dear planet, leading man in future to +seek his conquests in more transcendent ways, even outside Earth's +atmosphere, as it took its pioneer flight again from the misty top of +old Mount Greylock. + +The World and his wife were there to see: scientists from the four +quarters of the globe--Earth's great ones. + +And other spellbound spectators, too: Una, the White Birch Group, their +Boy Scout comrades--Stud fast developing into the type of hotspur who +wanted to take passage for the moon--all massed in such a stupendous Get +Together as made the mountain seem "moonshine land", indeed, to their +thrill-shod feet. + +And never--oh! never since the history of Mother Earth and her satellite +began did such a spectacular traveler start on such a flaming trip as +when the hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America threw the switch and the +steel explorer, twenty feet long, leaped from its platform high into the +air, pointed directly for the moon, with a great inventor's mathematical +precision,--trailing its two-hundred-foot, rosy trail of fire. + +There was not breath--not breath, even, to cry: "Watch it tear!" + +Only breath enough, in young girls' bodies, at least, to gaze off at +Mammy Moon, loved patron of many an outdoor revel, and ponder upon the +nature of the shock she would get when the Thunder Bird's last explosion +lit up her fair face with a blue powder-flash--lit it up for earth to +see! + +"Do--do you think 'twill ev-er get there--two hundred and thirty +thousand miles, about, when--when an eighth of an inch out at the start; +and it would m-miss--miss?" breathed a youth who knelt by the heroine of +the evening, the inventor's daughter. + +"Toandoah doesn't miss. My father doesn't miss." The young head of +Pemrose Lorry queened it in the darkness, with a pride which made of old +Greylock, at that moment, the world's throne. "But how--how are we to +live through the next hundred hours--the next four days--the time the +Thunder Bird will take to travel?" + +Yet they did succeed in living through it and in leading time a merry +dance too, for young Treffrey Graham, junior, all old scores forgotten, +was proving a prince of chums, as spirited in play as he was prompt in a +pinch. + +And together--hand clasped in hand, indeed--by virtue of her being the +inventor's daughter, he the son of the man who had resigned a fortune to +the transcendent invention, side by side with two or three of those Very +Great Ones, they stood, four nights later, looking through a monster +telescope upon a mountaintop, and saw--saw the celestial climax, the +first of the heavenly bodies reached. + +Saw the blue powder-flash light up the full, round face of the Silver +Queen they loved, while the Thunder Bird, expiring, dropped its bones +upon her dead surface. + +"It's--got--there," breathed the youth. "What next? Some day--some day, +maybe, we'll be shooting off there--together?" + +"Yes! if only the Man in the Moon could shoot us back!" breathed +Pemrose. + +Already it had come to be "we" bound up with "What next?" for it would, +indeed, be a zero "next" in which the hands of youth and maiden would +not meet in comradeship--and love. + +But the sun and center of the girl's heart was still--and would be for +long--her father. + +The greatest moment of that unprecedented night came when Toandoah bent +to her, and said: + +"Little Pem! there was just one moment when I may have been discouraged, +you remember! None knew the Wise Woman who saved the city." + +[Illustration] + + + * * * * * + + +A story of the best type of home life, with a charming heroine. + +THEN CAME CAROLINE + +By LELA HORN RICHARDS + +With illustrations by M. L. Greer. + +12mo. Cloth 306 pages. + +Caroline was the fourth daughter in Doctor Ravenel's family of five +girls,--fourth on the list, but first in mischief, in ingenuity, in +originality, in human sympathy and democracy. The father's health made +it necessary for the Ravenels to leave their old Southern home and +migrate to Colorado. Here Caroline grew up--from ten to eighteen--her +days full of interest, her courage, as the family struggled along +under straightened circumstances, always unflagging. Sometimes the +delight and sometimes the despair of her mother and her sisters, +Caroline made friends in many quarters and met in unusual ways the +many emergencies into which her impulsiveness led her. + +This is a splendid story of the best type of home life, and the +four other girls--Leigh the unselfish, Alison the ambitious and +self-seeking, Mayre the artistic and Hope the baby--complete a +well-individualized group, alternately caressed and disciplined by old +black "Mammy," who had accompanied her "fam'bly" from Virginia. +There are plenty of boys in the story too, likable lads, such as +inevitably would gather around a group of wholesome and merry girls, +ready for a game, a dance or any other frolic. Caroline will be a +favorite with girl readers. They will enjoy the account of her running +away; her attempt to help her mother form a "social acquaintance" in +their new home; her outwitting of Alison at the party; her early +literary efforts; and the daring with which she "puts her finger" in +nearly everyone's "pie." + +LITTLE, BROWN & CO., Publishers + +34 Beacon Street, Boston + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PEMROSE LORRY, CAMP FIRE GIRL*** + + +******* This file should be named 31748.txt or 31748.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/3/1/7/4/31748 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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