“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 hername, 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 aëroplane 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.”
“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 aëroplane 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 routefor 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 girlishhand 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 feetof 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 Pemrosesoftly. “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.
Itwas 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 startwinkling 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’sdictum. “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 knowwhat 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, justover 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 thegray-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!
Ifyou’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.
Gatheringher 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 turncautiously 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 buttonand 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 tumblingbackward 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!
“Keepcool! 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.
“Keep cool! Don’t stir! I’ll reach you in a moment!”Page86.
“Keep cool! Don’t stir! I’ll reach you in a moment!”Page86.
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 notbe 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 youdidremember–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 littlefixed 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 ishesinging?”
The Scot, indeed, relaxing from primsilence 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–othersinging!”
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 oneupon 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 athim; 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.
Neverwas 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, herexcitement, 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 theexaction 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 theWoo-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, herthoughts 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 thrillinginvitation 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 aërial 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 formore 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.
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’syou, 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 anotherwith 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 yonmerle, 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–couldhunt 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. “Deargirls! 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 wehave 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 afair-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 BirchGroup 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 gloomypessimism born of the Devil’s Chair and Jack at a Pinch.
“Oursaren’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 askthem, 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 mostelusive 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-footpine-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!”