CHAPTER XXIThe Man Killer

That was the moment when Pemrose Lorry shook as if the old Man Killer were devouring her.

Was there–could there be somethingfamiliar, 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!”

“Wemust 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 blightingcodicil 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, CampFire 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 toraise 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 slightlyupon 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 Andrewdevoutly, 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.

The man looked up at her, some dash of whimsical fire mastering weakness.Page268.

The man looked up at her, some dash of whimsical fire mastering weakness.Page268.

“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 knapsacktoo; 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-toryto 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-larnight 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, ofSpace, 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 thelook 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–whichthe 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.”

“I feelas 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-headedfeeling–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 passë 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 tosay–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 thedead 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 twolassies 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 bitlassies’!” 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 forhim!”

“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 relationat 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 intomyworld 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 thatchurlish 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 themute 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 knapsackbeside 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!”

A yearfrom 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 asmade 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 getthere–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 manwho 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.”

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 straitened 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

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