Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl Part 21

True humor is never without a sense of proportion.

It knows where to stop.

But if the nick.u.m was not the thief,--who then?

Ta-te, the tempest--otherwise the mountain gusts--had to be acquitted too.

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

There was not a trace of the diary, the golden egg, the little perforated steel box, with the recording pencil and paper in it.

Deprived of its wing, that could not have gone on alone,--without some hand carrying it.

So the weary and despondent searchers were forced to accept Andrew's a.s.sertion that "mon or deil" had robbed them; and it was plain from the solemn shake of the "true-penny's" gray head in its up-to-date chauffeur's cap that he, himself, was disposed to lay the blame on a "deev."

"It's plain to me, noo, that this auld Earth should bide where she belangs," he told the two girls, "not go outside o' her ain bit atmosphere--be sending muckle messages outside it--it's na canny."

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

And he repeated it, with elaborations, did Andrew, on the second June morning after the loss when Professor Lorry, declaring that it would take a year to search every foot of Greylock Peak, and that he was not going to waste time in crying over spilt milk, went down the mountain with his young a.s.sistant and Mr. Grosvenor, who had business in the valley, to procure materials for another experiment--although not on the same scale as the first--the girls being left behind with the landlady of the little mountain inn where they were staying.

The chauffeur wore a "dour" look as he saw them depart, Una's father driving his own car; for the first time in all his well-trained service, the true-penny was inclined to sulk over being told to keep an eye on two "daft la.s.sies", who refused to go down to the town, because they wanted to search some more--or Pemrose did.

So he sat on a bench outside the little mountain house, thirty-six hundred feet above sea-level, where there were no visitors at this early season, with the exception of the experimenting party, and, between whiffs of his pipe, discoursed upon the folly of simple earth folk in "ganging beyant themselves, thinking o' clacking wi' the Man in the Moon, forbye"--and, in tones seemingly bewitched, of the black shape he had seen jump forth from the woods.

"Pshaw! I do believe you think that it was some bad fairy, Andrew,--fairy or mountain 'deev', who stole the little record, and part of the parachute, too--spirited them away," said Una, with fanciful relish, having not quite grown beyond the fairy-tale age, herself.

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh! we can find it for ourselves--hurrah!" shouted Una, almost squinting with antic.i.p.ation. "I've never stood upon a real mountain wishing-stone before. Who--who knows what may come of it?"

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

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

To her, who had grown up amid the mathematical realities of an inventor's laboratory, who had "plugged" so hard at her elementary physics that she might be able to grasp the first principles of her father's work, some day--some day to work with him,--to her, the little girl-mechanic, a wishing stone was no golden magnet.

But the very fact that there was one spot, not so far from the summit, either--wildest spot on the mountain though it be--still unexplored, was enough to draw her restless feet anywhere, against any deadlock of difficulty.

"Ha! The Man Killer trail!" she whooped again. "Oh-h! we could easily find it; we saw a sign directing to it, as we came up the mountain."

"It's na a trail; it's just a hotch-potch o' rocks--some sharp as stickit teeth!" groaned Andrew, who saw his own doom fixed, in vain protesting.

He felt rather like a man who had been left behind to hold a wolf by the ears when, in the teeth of every remonstrance he could offer, he found himself, a little later, starting out in the rear of two adventurous girls, in quest of that third slab of a wishing stone--and the breath-racking Man Killer trail.

But those girls were, to some degree, seasoned climbers, both,--sure-footed as venturesome!

Through the dim limelight of fringing pine woods, across oozing mud-beds, soft from spring rains and freshets, over a babbling brook spanned by an elastic bridge formed of the interlacing roots of giant trees--where Una found much delight in bouncing up and down in antic.i.p.ation of the magic stone--they stubbornly held their way, and came at last to the chaos of rocks crowding a steep gorge which marked the head of the lonely Killer trail.

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

"What--what do I care if they shouldn't leave me a pinch if only I could find something--even a few more rags of the parachute!" gasped Pemrose, in stifled tones of pa.s.sion, as she climbed, hurry-skurry, over a piled capsheaf of bowlders.

Indeed, that battling breath was at a low ebb in all three when, following the tangled skein of a sort of trail which the feet of daring climbers had beaten, here and there, amid the rocks, they reached in due time the third slab which, like the invisible running water in Tory Cave, was supposed to bring "piping times" of luck to whoever should brave the difficulties of the wild pa.s.s, to stand on it and wish.

"Oh--oh! there it is, at last," cried Una, her hand to her breathless side, "a nice 'squatty' slab--almost as smooth as gla.s.s--an' shaped like a mud-turtle. I wonder if there is a fairy underneath it--lurking under the rim. Now--now for the wishing cap!"

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

"Easy there, la.s.sie! Ye dinna want to mak' o' that auld flat slab a tombstone, eh?" murmured Andrew, laying a great hand upon her shoulder, with a little smack of laughter upon his long, smooth-shaven upper lip.

But immediately he winced as if his own words hurt him, and Pemrose--herself in an aching mood--knew what he was thinking of, that grizzled chauffeur.

Una, her balance recovered, jumped upon the stone.

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

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

The serio-comic pa.s.sion in the green-framed face, the fervor in the one little clenched fist drooping at Una's side, might well have won over all the good fairy-hosts that ever landed in the wake of the Pilgrims, and set them to scouring Greylock for the missing record from on high.

"Now then! Pemrose, it's up to you! Turn your backbone into a wishbone."

The wreathed figure stepped from the pedestal,--a laughing June spot against the wintry grimness of the Man Killer trail.

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

But, as suddenly, the eyelids were flung up, like shutters from the blue of day. The uncurling fists were outflung pa.s.sionately.

"I can't! I _can't_!" cried Pemrose Lorry, choking upon her own wishbone. "I--I'm not in the humor for it--for foolery! I must go on--right on--and search! This--this is the shortest trail down the mountain, if it's the roughest--I know that!" She looked desperately at old Andrew. "If any mean thief--anybody--stole that record, there could be only one--one motive for it, my father-r says--curiosity; to be the fir-rst to see that very first record man has ever got from so high up--high up in the earth's thin atmosphere, where the air ends--and s.p.a.ce begins!"

She seemed to have that whole zero void in her heart now, its light, stifling gases in her distended throat--Toandoah's little pal--as she looked distractedly down the gorge.

"Oh! it's pos-si-ble--just barely possible, that after he had satisfied his cur-ios-ity--or mischief--or whatever it was--he might have thrown away the little steel box, dropped it somewhere on the trail," she panted extravagantly. "Or--or we might even come on some more rags of the parachute and track him--track him to a camp! My father-r--"

It was the pa.s.sionate break on that word, even more than the spice in the blue eyes, that went straight to the shadowed spot in Andrew's heart and found the little sprig of memorial heather, hidden there, the mountain heather, the tiny, pinkish blossoms, with the faint, wild tang, which he plucked whenever he went home to Scotland from a small grave in a hillside "kirkyard" on whose granite marker was printed: "Margery Campbell, aged fifteen!"

It had been as much the restlessness of bereavement as a desire to better their fortunes which had brought his wife and him to the New World, for she had been their only child, with the exception of one son, old enough to be in the American Army.

The fragrance of that imaginary heather-bloom tucked away in the impa.s.sive chauffeur's breast was occasionally apparent in a furtive glance thrown skyward, or in a momentary glisten of mist in the gray sh.e.l.l of the mechanical eye.