Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl

by Isabel Hornibrook

  CHAPTER XX

  THE SEARCH

  No! She did not think the nickum had taken it,--that mysterious Jack ata Pinch!

  This is what the bleeding heart of Pemrose told her over and over againwithin the next twenty-four hours,--and after that, too!

  True, she had robbed him of his oars and a dance,--or had beenresponsible for the trick!

  She had not made her scout-knights return those ashen blades until themorning after the dance, when they were surreptitiously deposited uponthe opposite shore of the lake in the neighborhood of the camp near theinsects' egg-boats.

  And she had enjoyed herself hugely as the guest of the White Birch Groupat the wind-up of the June carnival, while he, twice a rescuer, a friendin a pinch, was drifting helplessly out upon the dark night-waters ofthe Bowl, trying to paddle with his hands, within hearing of the festivedance music, until some good Samaritan from his own shore rowed out andgave him a homeward tow.

  But all this, as the girl passionately told herself, was an everydaytrick,--just a paper pellet thrown at one beside the overwhelming blowof the loss of her father's record.

  And he who could quote Shakespeare upon "Something rotten in the stateof Denmark", amid the horrors of a zero train-wreck, who "liked hisexcitement 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 acquittedtoo.

  For at the first dawn after the blighted experiment some thin silk ragsof a raven parachute were found clinging, soot-like, to bushes in thespruce wood, together with a portion of a twisted and bent wire frame.

  There was not a trace of the diary, the golden egg, the littleperforated steel box, with the recording pencil and paper in it.Deprived of its wing, that could not have gone on alone,--without somehand carrying it.

  So the weary and despondent searchers were forced to accept Andrew'sassertion that "mon or deil" had robbed them; and it was plain from thesolemn shake of the "true-penny's" gray head in its up-to-datechauffeur'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 shebelangs," he told the two girls, "not go outside o' her ain bitatmosphere--be sending muckle messages outside it--it's na canny."

  He even respectfully delivered himself of this opinion to theinventor--to Toandoah, with the hungry look of loss in his eye, whichoccasionally wrought Pemrose to the point of choking sobs and toclenching her fists at the mysterious robber.

  And he repeated it, with elaborations, did Andrew, on the second Junemorning after the loss when Professor Lorry, declaring that it wouldtake a year to search every foot of Greylock Peak, and that he was notgoing to waste time in crying over spilt milk, went down the mountainwith his young assistant and Mr. Grosvenor, who had business in thevalley, to procure materials for another experiment--although not on thesame scale as the first--the girls being left behind with the landladyof the little mountain inn where they were staying.

  The chauffeur wore a "dour" look as he saw them depart, Una's fatherdriving 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 ontwo "daft lassies", who refused to go down to the town, because theywanted to search some more--or Pemrose did.

  So he sat on a bench outside the little mountain house, thirty-sixhundred feet above sea-level, where there were no visitors at this earlyseason, with the exception of the experimenting party, and, betweenwhiffs of his pipe, discoursed upon the folly of simple earth folk in"ganging beyant themselves, thinking o' clacking wi' the Man in theMoon, forbye"--and, in tones seemingly bewitched, of the black shape hehad 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 partof the parachute, too--spirited them away," said Una, with fancifulrelish, having not quite grown beyond the fairy-tale age, herself.

  "If that's so, girlie," said the mountain landlady--alas! for AndrewTrue-penny, alias Campbell, now came the evil chance over which hesulked--"if that's so, and you could only find the mountainwishing-stone, stand on it and wish three times--wish har-rd--maybe, thegood fairies would give you back what you're looking for!"

  "Where--where is it--the wishing-stone?" The little fixed star in Una'seye was never so bright--a twinkling star of portent. "The wishing stoneon Greylock! Oh! I never knew there _was_ one."

  "Havers, woman! Dinna ye ken that ye hae a tongue to hold?" muttered thegrizzled chauffeur, in a stern aside.

  But the motherly New Englander--who, with her old husband, could not fora moment be suspected of the theft--had her heart full for two sorrowinggirls.

  "Why! it's a little over a mile from here, I guess, down the Man Killertrail, the third flat slab you come to. I'd go with you myself--thoughit's rough traveling, the steepest trail on the mountain--only my man islaid up with the rheumatiz, hangin' on to him like a puppy-dog to aroot."

  "Oh! we can find it for ourselves--hurrah!" shouted Una, almostsquinting with anticipation. "I've never stood upon a real mountainwishing-stone before. Who--who knows what may come of it?"

  In her young blood, as in Andrew's, was the extravagant excitement ofthe whole experiment,--this first step in the ladder of demonstrationwhich was by and by to reach the moon--lending to all an unearthlytouch.

  "The--the Man Killer trail! Why! that's _one_ place where wehaven't searched--yet!" A moping Pemrose suddenly awoke.

  To her, who had grown up amid the mathematical realities of aninventor's laboratory, who had "plugged" so hard at her elementaryphysics that she might be able to grasp the first principles of herfather's work, some day--some day to work with him,--to her, the littlegirl-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, wasenough to draw her restless feet anywhere, against any deadlock ofdifficulty.

  "Ha! The Man Killer trail!" she whooped again. "Oh-h! we could easilyfind 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 asstickit teeth!" groaned Andrew, who saw his own doom fixed, in vainprotesting.

  He felt rather like a man who had been left behind to hold a wolf by theears when, in the teeth of every remonstrance he could offer, he foundhimself, a little later, starting out in the rear of two adventurousgirls, in quest of that third slab of a wishing stone--and thebreath-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 oozingmud-beds, soft from spring rains and freshets, over a babbling brookspanned by an elastic bridge formed of the interlacing roots of gianttrees--where Una found much delight in bouncing up and down inanticipation of the magic stone--they stubbornly held their way, andcame at last to the chaos of rocks crowding a steep gorge which markedthe head of the lonely Killer trail.

  "Noo--I gang first!" said Andrew--a true-penny still, though the stampwas reversed. "My word!" he added sourly, "this is na trail--juist ascratch on the mountainside--an' the muckle rocks they're a flail forbeating the breath out of a puir body."

  "What--what do I care if they shouldn't leave me a pinch if only I couldfind something--even a few more rags of the parachute!" gasped Pemrose,in stifled tones of passion, as she climbed, hurry-skurry, over a piledcapsheaf 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 daringclimbers had beaten, here and there, amid the rocks, they reached in duetime the third slab which, like the invisible running water in ToryCave, was supposed to bring "piping times" of luck to whoever
shouldbrave 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 breathlessside, "a nice 'squatty' slab--almost as smooth as glass--an' shaped likea mud-turtle. I wonder if there is a fairy underneath it--lurking underthe rim. Now--now for the wishing cap!"

  But before she could don Fortunatus' cap by breaking a wee branch from adwarf cedar growing amid the crags and wreathing it, like a greencottage bonnet, around her head, she slipped upon the wet moss girdlingthe stone where a tiny spring bubbled, and almost pitched headlong downthe trail, at this point particularly steep.

  "Easy there, lassie! Ye dinna want to mak' o' that auld flat slab atombstone, 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, andPemrose--herself in an aching mood--knew what he was thinking of, thatgrizzled chauffeur.

  Una, her balance recovered, jumped upon the stone.

  Surely, no wishing-cap ever before was so bonnie, so becoming as thefine, emerald needles of the little cedar branch gripped together underthe dimpled chin, fringing the sweet, saucy, girlish face, the star inthe bright dark eye so intently fixed.

  Pem smiled; in the present crisis of her young life she didn't care ifher friend's eyelashes were longer than hers by a whole ell. And Andrewsighed because of that one "sair memory" which had oppressed him on thePinnacle.

  The serio-comic passion in the green-framed face, the fervor in the onelittle clenched fist drooping at Una's side, might well have won overall 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 spotagainst the wintry grimness of the Man Killer trail.

  Obligingly the inventor's daughter stepped up, closing her eyeshalf-humorously, doubling the drooping hands at her panting sides.

  But, as suddenly, the eyelids were flung up, like shutters from the blueof day. The uncurling fists were outflung passionately.

  "I can't! I _can't_!" cried Pemrose Lorry, choking upon her ownwishbone. "I--I'm not in the humor for it--for foolery! I must goon--right on--and search! This--this is the shortest trail down themountain, if it's the roughest--I know that!" She looked desperately atold Andrew. "If any mean thief--anybody--stole that record, there couldbe only one--one motive for it, my father-r says--curiosity; to be thefir-rst to see that very first record man has ever got from so highup--high up in the earth's thin atmosphere, where the air ends--andspace 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 shelooked distractedly down the gorge.

  "Oh! it's pos-si-ble--just barely possible, that after he had satisfiedhis cur-ios-ity--or mischief--or whatever it was--he might have thrownaway the little steel box, dropped it somewhere on the trail," shepanted extravagantly. "Or--or we might even come on some more rags ofthe 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 inthe blue eyes, that went straight to the shadowed spot in Andrew's heartand found the little sprig of memorial heather, hidden there, themountain heather, the tiny, pinkish blossoms, with the faint, wild tang,which he plucked whenever he went home to Scotland from a small grave ina hillside "kirkyard" on whose granite marker was printed: "MargeryCampbell, aged fifteen!"

  It had been as much the restlessness of bereavement as a desire tobetter their fortunes which had brought his wife and him to the NewWorld, 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 theimpassive chauffeur's breast was occasionally apparent in a furtiveglance thrown skyward, or in a momentary glisten of mist in the grayshell of the mechanical eye.

  It had made the whole family of his employers very sympathetic towardsAndrew, as to a friend. And now a whiff of that heather memory stoodPemrose in good stead.

  "I reckon if leetle Margery were livin', she'd feel in the verra sameway gin anny misfortune happed to me," he told himself.

  "Aw, weel, lassie!" Thus he spoke aloud. "Since ye're set on gaeing on awee bit further, we'll gang; but dinna get yer hopes stickit on findingonything!"

  "Andrew--Andrew, himself, has found something! Look--look at him!"

  It was barely twenty minutes later that the wildly startled cry burstfrom Una as the trio struggled on--on down the fitful path, between therocky jaws of the Man Killer, where beetling crags loomed, fang-like, oneither side of them and, here and there some swollen rill made of agreen moss-bank a slimy mud-bed.

  "He--he's hearing things, if he isn't seeing them. Oh, look!... Look athim!"

  Una's hand was at her jumping heart--pressing hard as if to hold it inher body--as she beheld the tall figure of the chauffeur, motionless asarrested mechanism, upon the trail, ahead.

  "I heerd a--skirl." Andrew's face was stony as that of the Old Man ofGreylock--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, wherethe 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 Killerwere devouring her.

  Was there--could there be something familiar, half-familiar, about thefaint, volcanic shout: some accent she seemed to have heard before? Andyet--and yet, not quite that, either!

  "My word! Some puir body's hur-rted bad--ba-ad--like a toad under aharrow," grunted Andrew, and scrambled hastily on over a gray barrier ofrocks,--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!_"