CHAPTER XXII
A JUNE WOMAN
"I feel as if I was in the pictures!"
"Oh! I feel as if I was in the pictures."
It was the wild thought in each girl's breast, as minutes went on.
The loneliness of the mountain pass, nearly three thousand feet abovesea-level, the rigors of the wind sweeping up it, chill now, June notyet being ten days old, the frowning crags, the remote heads of othertall mountains peeping over their shoulders, the two green dots of girlson either side of a broken man, they took it all in, to the full, mostdramatically too--and felt as if they were in the pictures.
A surpassing moving picture reel, more telling than any they had everwitnessed, in which--oh, queer double-headed feeling--they were bothactors and spectators!
But pain--pain left no atmosphere of unreality about it for thesuffering man, for the sufferer who monopolized both their softsweaters, while they shivered convulsively, until if it came to a beautycontest between the two now, the old Man Killer, awarding the palm,would not have made it dependent on a mere matter of eyelashes, but onwhich little nose was the least blue bitten.
Pain released something in that sufferer too,--a fire that was not allwild-fire! For suddenly he dragged Una's green sweater-roll from underhis head and thrust it towards her with an imperious: "Put it on,child!"
"I shan't!" replied that child of luxury, as arbitrarily, slipping itback under the pallid cheek, above which the stand of agony in the stonyeye 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 wordsbetween her chattering teeth. "She's shivering--yes! and frightened andtrying 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 hefought the groans reverberating behind his clenched teeth, like a bee ina bottle, only breaking out now and again in a yearning prayer for thecoming of his son.
"If he were only here--here!" he moaned; it was evident that theyouthful daredevil who liked excitement, but "knew where to stop", was atower of strength to the less balanced father.
Pem was longing uncontrollably for his appearance, also--for the rowerwhom she had robbed of his oars, while the sufferer seemed to find hisonly relief in talking about him.
"My son and I have been in bad scrapes before among--mountains," hepanted, feverishly. "Once high up in the Canadian Rockies, we missed ourguide who had gone back for provisions. Bad plight then, but the boydidn't 'cave'! He was only fifteen when he shot his bear in Arizona. Heloves the West. But the East's in his blood. Just went wild over theseBerkshire Hills, this spring, over his first sight of mayflowers! Theyseemed more of a treasure than the fortune he wanted to part with._Hiff-f!_"
Before the eyes of both girls rose the clamor of color "blooming round"in old Tory Cave--the armful of passe blossoms flung down at the"rattler" scare.
"Yes--his Mother Earth has been good to him," muttered the whimsicalvoice. "Very good! Yet--yet such are earth-sons that he'd turn his backon her to-morrow--go off on a wild-goose chase after some otherworld--even a dead one--if only that moon-storming Thunder--Bird--"
"What! You don't mean to say--oh! did he write to my father aboutit--write to my father and sign himself 'T. S.'?" broke in Pemrose,glancing back along the trail which she had traveled these past fewmonths and finding it stranger, more baffling than the Man Killer's.
"May--may--have done so," came the answer, with a faint chuckle. "Iasked him when pressed for a name to give his mother's--his middleone--Selkirk. But he a lunar can-di-date! Not if I know it! With me, themoon may have the money--but not the boy!"
"The moon may have the money!" Pemrose Lorry glanced at the mud-stainedknapsack lying by the sufferer,--the knapsack tucked away in which wasthe golden egg, the precious record; she would not unearth it and glanceat 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, atleast, 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 ofinspiration.
"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 sprucechit, the birch stripling, the pine urchin--all the hop-o'-my-thumbtimber that flourished in this wild pass--contributed of the dead limbstorn from them by last winter's blasts, to burn up the chill in the oldMan Killer's heart.
Una's little nose, piquantly tiptilted, warmed from a fashionableorchid-color to a cheery rose pink, with the excitement, the pressingadventure of trailing firewood among the rocks and dragging it captiveto the new-born blaze which Pem was fanning with her breath and with thebreezy bellows of her short green skirt.
As for the sufferer, hope stirred anew in him as he turned his headtowards the flaming pennons of good cheer, while the fire, prosperinggayly, feathered its nest with scarlet down.
He saw, too, that the fire-witch was preparing something in that rednest for him.
Raking out the first glowing embers, she filled her little aluminum cupat the rill and set it among them; when it steamed she shook into it afew drops from the little vial--the aromatic spirits of ammonia--andheld it to his lips.
"It's the best I can do," she murmured, but her eyes stretched that bestinto an indefinite blue of longing to capture the pain even for a shorttime and bear it for him--for him who was making the Thunder Bird'sfortune.
As before, the stimulant set the racked heart to sending strengththrough the freezing veins--and with it a touch of the whimsicalitywhich Death alone could quench.
"Little girl!" Treffrey Graham's eye winked upon a mote of fun thatsoftened to a mist. "Your fa-ther's invention is the gr-reatest thingyet; it's a Success--I know that from the one glimpse I had at therecord--" Pemrose winced--"but--but you may tell him from me that Idoubt if, after all, his Thunder Bird is the best thing he's turnedout."
"Some-somebody coming! Oh-h, some-body--coming!" cried Una, at thatmoment, so that the man started up, with a heyday exclamation--andtumbled back, a wreck of groans.
For it was not his son. Neither was it the long-coated figure of thechauffeur, at sight of which each girl would have passionately huggedherself--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 itsheart of American gold, the climbing flash in her hazel eye, Una justtumbled into sobs, herself, that little fixed star in her eye blazingpathetic 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, runningforward with childish confidence.
"That I be--girlie!" responded the mountain woman, throwing a warm armaround her. "The man that borrowed our little aut'mobile truck and setoff in it at a score down the mountain, the man with a queer blowpipe atthe roots of his tongue, he told me that he had left two lassies up hereon 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 onthe 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 ofclimbing--the old Man Killer is--so-o--fierce."
Her eye, at that, went to the fire, now bri
lliantly painting the trail,to the pillowed figure upon the moss, with the sweater-roll in thehollow 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!" shecried, 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 ofthemselves in a pinch--and of somebody else, too!... And--and, see here,what I've brought you, honey, rolled in the blanket for _him_!"
"Cake--choc'late cake! C-coffee!" Una gasped feebly, confronted by theghost of her everyday life.
She grasped the reality, though, of that normal life, somewhere waitingfor her, with the first bite into the brown-eyed cake, while her sweaterwas restored to her thinly clad shoulders as the mountain woman spreadher 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 ashort one in the case of an awkward gulf to be crossed! She saw that herfriend Pemrose, no relation at all to this extraordinary uncle, couldcare for him and welcome him without embarrassment, while, with everydoubtful glance in his direction, she felt, still, as if she did notquite know whether she was on her head or her heels.
She crept, for reassurance, very close to the mountain woman, thetypical June woman, with the normal rose in her cheeks, and the goldenbuttercup 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 youbefore. But I'm so glad you're in the world!" she murmured gratefully.
"And I just wish you could come into _my_ world often, girlie," wasthe cuddling answer, "for it's lonely as old Sarum here on themountainside--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 mistsstreaming, tress-like, about its crown, from which Mount Greylock takesits name; then her anxious glance returned to the sufferer. "Ha! therehe 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 soncan get here."
It was a long age anyhow; although, in reality, little more than anhour--a wild, wind-ridden, fire-painted hour--before three haggard mencame 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 thelast bleak hurdle of rock, one, the youngest, dropped his end of it,which the doctor, shifting his bag, took up.
Jack at a Pinch rushed forward.
And ever afterwards Pem liked that churlish nickum because he ignoredher then; because he had no more consciousness of her presence, or ofUna's, or of the June woman's, than if they had been rocks--blankrocks--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 hisbaseball flannels. "Oh-h! Dad, what have you been doing toyourself--now?"
"The biter bitten--Treff! Joker pinched!" came the answer in tonesalmost 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 murderis 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 acrossinto the blue eyes of Pemrose Lorry.
"You must have thought me an awful 'chuff'," he said.
"I'm sorry about the oars," was the mute reply of the girl's eyes, butthe least little tincture of a smile trickling down from herlip-corners, said: "But I'm glad I got even with you, somehow!"
However, there was too much "getting even" just now in this wildspot--Life grimly settling accounts with the dragon who had so often"hazed" others--for the boy and girl to spend any more consciousthoughts upon each other.
There was the terrible trip--the worst mile ever traveled--down the ManKiller trail, for him, strapped to the stretcher, after the doctor hadexamined the injury and found the delicate kneecap both slipped andbroken.
"I guess if--if I pull through this, I'll be a--reformed--character; nomore--no more eccentricity for me," he murmured dizzily to Pemrose who,when the trail permitted, walked beside him, stroking his hand,--and herolled his eyes faintly, through the veil of the opiate which the doctorhad given, at the knapsack beside him, wherein lay the golden egg.
And with his own hands, the Man Killer at last conquered, as they laidhim in an ambulance, he took the five-inch, open-work steel box, theprecious record, from that knapsack's depth and handed it to her.
She could not look at it, the little Thunder Bird's log of thattwo-hundred mile trip aloft, she could only jealously clasp it to herbreast,--Toandoah's little pal.
"T-tell your fa-ther from--me," said the broken voice, "that TreffGraham is the same old Treff; that he m-may be a pirate, but he isn't apig--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 Birdwill fly!"
Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl Page 23