Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl Part 24

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 pa.s.s, 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 surpa.s.sing moving picture reel, more telling than any they had ever witnessed, in which--oh, queer double-headed feeling--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 sc.r.a.pes 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 pa.s.se 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 to say--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 pa.s.sionately.

"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 pa.s.s--contributed of the dead 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 pa.s.sionately 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 two la.s.sies up here on the lonely trail, with a badly hurt man. 'Woman!' says he, kind o'

fierce-like, 'if they were yer own bit la.s.sies, 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 bit la.s.sies'!" 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 for _him_!"

"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,"