CHAPTER XVII
A Novel Santa Claus

Such was the substance of the uproar as the downy ball of mopping feathers took on a beak, claws and big brown eyes, blank and round, perching upon the foot-rail of a cot!

“Oh! it’s as bad as the bats in Tory Cave. And they were so-o hor-rid!” wailed Una. “It–it just tickled my lips with its wing. Bah!”

“Bad! It’s not bad, at all; it’s dear,” cooed Jessie, the merle, feeling instant kinship with the bewildered bird. “Girls! Girls! I believe it’s blind–blind as a bat, or as the pale fish in the cave. There it goes–look–knocking its head, this way and that, against the wall!”

Yes, the fluttering thing, of a sudden taking to flight again, was now playing shuttlecock, feathered shuttlecock, to the battledore of a broad sunbeam which batted it wildly hither and yon.

“Oh! keep back–quiet–maybe, ’twill settle down again,” pleaded the merle.

“Hasn’t it the face of a cunning little kitten? Such a wise, blinking, round-eyed kitten! Its head is reddish, not gray–and the rufous markings on its breast, too! Oh-h! I wonder if the boys did catch it in the woods and thought it was a good ‘henkyl’ to put down our chimney?”

But that, as the girls knew, would remain as blind a puzzle as the long, screened dormitory was to the dazzled owl, unable to see clearly in daylight, out visiting when he should have been in bed in the cool, dark hollow of a tree.

“Oo-oo-oo-ooo ... cluck!” it cooed and grumbled, pressing a dappled breast and wide-spread wings against a screen, the mottled back-feathers ruffling into a huge breeze-swept pompon.

“See! He’s playing he’s a big owl.”

“Oh! I wonder if he’d let me–let me catch him.” Jessie sighed yearningly.

“Do-o, and we’ll tame him–keep him for a mascot!” It was a general acclamation.

And the feathered Santa, apparently having no objection to this rële–finding himself no longer a waif in Babel–finally settled down again on the glittering head-rail of Una’s cot, his fluffy breast to the outdoor sunlight, his solemn, kittenish face–the head turning round on a pivot without the movement of a muscle in the body–confronting sagely the delighted girls.

“Isn’t he the dearest thing? Oh! I’m glad the boys played the trick–if it was the boys. I’d rather think he played Santa himself.”

There was no inkling in Jessie’s mind, as, so murmuring and softly barefoot, she stole up to the visitor, now motionless as a painted bird, of a much worse trick that those freakish Henkyl Hunters might play, a girl abetting them, too–shocking fact–before night fell again upon the pearly Bowl.

“Oo-oo-ooo! Boo! See me reverse!” It seemed to be what the owl was saying to the maidens as he turned the tables on them again and again with that teetotum trick of his swivel neck.

But he did not scream any more or offer the least objection when the merle took him to her tender breast, cooing reassurance.

“There! you’ve got a new singing teacher, Jess–a little screech owl. Little! My! he’s big for a small-eared owl, isn’t he?–nearly a foot long. Brush the camouflage off him–the smuts of the chimney!”

“Well–well, whether he enacted Santa Claus of his own accord, or whether he didn’t–” thus Tanpa broke in on the last flow of speech which was a medley–“he’s brought us one gift, anyway, the gift of a glorious day for our annual White Birch celebration.”

It did prove a banner day, from the breakfast out of doors on the wide piazza in that matchless warmth of early summer when buds are bursting, trees singing themselves into leaf–for “all deep things are song–” when the inquisitive breeze peeps longingly into the yellow heart of the first wild rose and May is bourgeoning, flowering, into the joy of June.

Below the bungalow the three-mile lake, a mile and a half across–the transfigured Bowl–was still a softly glowing pearl, treasured in cotton-wool mists which entirely hid its real framing of lofty hills.

“When the mountains cease playing blindman’s buff with each other, then–then it will be time for our morning swim, won’t it? The first real swim of the season, too,” murmured Tomoke, the signaling maiden, nestling coaxingly near to the presiding Guardian.

“Yes, if you think the water will be warm enough.”

“Oh! it was quite warm yesterday when we paddled out around the float–the floating pier.” Jessie, who was tempting the feathered Santa Claus, pampered captive under her arm, with every tidbit she could think of, from cereal to lake-cod caught by the girls themselves, looked down at that buoyant pier–a golden raft, at the moment–tossing a dozen yards from the base of a fifteen-foot cliff where the shore jumped sharply down to the water. Yesterday it had been wreathed with boughs for the coming festival: the swimming structure, naëvely composed of two great barrels, boarded over, with a broad plank, as a bridge, running out ashore.

To it a couple of shining canoes and two broad camp boats were moored; it also served as a springboard for diving.

Built by girl-carpenters themselves–with a little masculine help–presently to be garlanded with daisy-chains and buttercups, for the June carnival, and to hide its crudity, it stood, so the Guardian thought, exquisitely for the practical and the poetic in Camp Fire life, which ever in “glorifying Work” seeks Beauty!

The sun was seeking that too, just now, gloating over his own noble reflection in the green-lipped Bowl,–benevolently promising, indeed, a day hot for the season, as well as radiant.

“Yes! the temperature has taken a leap ahead,” said Tanpa musingly. “I think you can go in–for a short swim, any way.”

“Notify me–notify me if you see me drowning–for I can’t hear the voice of doom through my bathing cap!” laughed Una Grosvenor, two hours later, in consequence of this permission, wading coyly out beyond the float, to where the lake-water rose over the crossed logs of the Camp Fire emblem on the breast of her blue bathing suit.

“Oh! she’s in no danger of drowning; she swims better than I–I do-o now,” shivered Pemrose, rather wishing that June were July and the Bowl had undergone the gradual glow of a heating process. “Aren’t you coming, Thrush?” she cried. “Aren’t you coming in, Jessie?”

“I can’t leave the owl! I believe the boys meant him as an anniversary present–though they went about presenting him in a queer way,” was the fostering answer.

The other girls, however, were in the water, as those grigs of boys had been before them; the Bowl seemed to froth with their laughter, spray creaming around the bare, sunflushed arms flung above it, as if the lake itself, in festive mood, were a sentient sharer in the joy of these daring June bathers.

“Now–now who wants to dress and come out in the boats for a study of pond-life under the microscope?” cried the Guardian.

“Whoo! Whoo! That–that’s a bait to which the fish always rise,” cried one and another, eagerly splashing ashore blue of brow and covered with gooseflesh, yet loath to admit that on this the feathered Santa Claus’ gift of a prematurely perfect June day the creamy Bowl was still too emphatically a cooler.

Up the rude sod steps of the cliff they trooped–a bevy of shivers–fleeing for warmth and the shelter of the bungalow.

“Oo-oo-oo! I’ve never been in bathing so early in the year before,” shook out Pemrose, to whom the experience–the lingering chill of this mountain Bowl many hundred feet above sea-level–was rather too much of a weak parody upon her last freshwater ducking.

“Oh! you’ll soon warm up. Come, hurry and dress! It’s no end of fun studying water-snails and egg-boats–gnats’ funny egg-boats–under a microscope, with the Scoutmaster,” encouraged Tomoke, in everyday life Ina Atwood, blue as her lightning namesake, and rather hankering after the warmth of her pine-knot torch.

“Ye-es; and–and minnows–where every one of them is–is a chief Triton among the minnows!” laughed another girl, scrambling into her clothes. “Meaning no minnows, at all–all-ll Tritons!”

All Tritons, sure enough, rosy Tritons, brilliant now in the early summer, the breeding season, with wonderful colors, the males, especially.

Swimming about, near the surface, as the minnows usually do, the clear waters of the June Bowl became for the girls, looking, one by one through the large microscope over the boat’s side, a “vasty deep” in which leviathans played–fairy fish–seeing everything rose-color, painting themselves to ecstasy with the joys of mating, the joy of June.

“See–see they’re not all red–or partly so–s-such a lovely pinky-red, especially around the fins and head–that’s where they keep their pigment,” said Tanpa. “Some have colored themselves like goldfish; others are greenish–or lighter yellow.”

“Ha! While others, again, are gotten up as if for a minstrel show for their marriage–painted black, for the time being!” laughed her husband, the tall Scout Officer.

“Yes. That’s why we like, girls and boys, to come down to our camp early in the season–if only at intervals–because we watch the summer coming and can study the wonderful lake life as at no other time,” remarked the Guardian again, and then subsided into private life in the stern of the broad, red camp-skiff, scribbling something in verse form to be read at the White Birch celebration in the afternoon when land as well as lake was a-riot with young color, strewn with wild flowers for gay June to tread on.

“Oh! isn’t it the most wonderful–wonderful season? In the city we go camping too late. The freshness isn’t there.” Pem’s eyes were dim as she applied one to the lens of the microscope, to gaze once more at the painted Tritons; she was glad that in the freshness of the year it was–oh! so soon now–that the little Thunder Bird would momentarily color the skies and paint the World rose-colored in excitement over its demonstration–over the heights that could be reached–paving the way for the Triton of Tritons to come.

“Well! if we spend any more time with the minnows, we’ll have to ‘cut out’ the ‘fresh-water sheep’, the little roaches, and the insects’ egg-boats,” said the Scoutmaster. “Speaking of the latter, I saw a curious one yesterday upon a stagnant pool over on the other side of the lake; perhaps the visitors would be interested in it.”

The visitors were interested in the bare mention. Warming equally to comfort and excitement again, they clamored–Pemrose and Una–for a sight of that raft of gnats’ eggs, so cunningly formed and glued together, minute egg to egg, hundreds of them, that it was a regular lifeboat–no storm could sink it, and pressure only temporarily.

Yet, after all, Pemrose only half heard the Scoutmaster’s explanation of how the insect chose a floating stick or straw as a nucleus, placed her forelegs on it and laid the egg upon her hind ones, holding it there until she had brought forth another to join it, gluing the two together by their sticky coating,–and so on till the broad and buoyant boat was constructed!

Pemrose hardly heard, for as the party made its way to that stagnant pool, an overflow at some time of the sparkling Bowl, and hidden in a dense little wood, she had a sudden demonstration of how, under certain circumstances, a girl’s heart is much more capsizable than a gnat’s egg-boat.

Hers positively turned turtle–yes! really, turned turtle–at sight of a long, gray figure lying, breast down, amid undergrowth upon the margin of a little stream that was hurrying away from it to the lake.

She felt momentarily topsy-turvy, every bit of her, for anywhere on earth–aye, even if she were scouring space with the Thunder Bird–she would recognize that angular figure.

It had once pulled her up a snow-bank to the distant rumble of an engine’s explosion.

Yes, and surely she had seen it again, once again, since then–although, sandwiched as it now was between egg-boats and painted Tritons she could not–for the moment–remember where.

“Fine day! Having luck? Catching anything?” hailed the Scoutmaster, with genial interest, as one woodsman to another, for the figure was angling with a fly-rod.

The latter shot a side long glance at the party from under a broad Panama hat,–then jammed that, rather uncivilly, further down upon his head.

“Bah! The fish aren’t ex-act-ly jumping out of the water, saying ‘Hullo!’ to you!” it returned in the freakish drawl of a masked battery, shrinking deeper into cover amid the ferns.

Yet, when the Nature students had passed on, one quivering girl, with ears intently on the alert, heard it fire off something in the same fern-cloaked rumble about a certain fly being a “perfect peach” to fish with.

And the answer came in clear, ringing, boyish tones–from another angler presumably–momentarily rainbowing the wood.

“Yes–sure–that Parmachene belle is the girl, Dad! If–if there’s a trout in the stream, she’ll put the ‘come hither!’ on it.”

“Bah! Likening a trout-fly to a girl! So like his ’nickum’ impudence!” Pem’s teeth–in her present mood–came together with a snap. And, of course, she couldn’t see the gnat’s raft when she arrived at the stagnant puddle, for she had borrowed the gnat’s sting with which to barb the snub which she meant to inflict, some time, upon that angling youth who had sat, unabashed, in the Devil’s Chair,–if ever luck held out a chance.

“Yes–yes! and if he had played Jack at a Pinch forty-eleven million times, I’d do it.” Her eyes were flashing now like the sky-dots in the pool, forked by iridescent shadows. “So–so here’s where they have their camp,” craning her neck for a glimpse of a log-cabin amid the spruces. “Stud said it was just across the lake from the girls’!”

After that–well! who could be interested in gnat-boats when they had just lit upon the ambush of a Puzzle; a puzzle that would only open in a pinch and shut up, like a Chinese ring-box, afterwards?

And, moreover, that woodland lurking-place was just a bare mile and a half across the Bowl from the floating barrel pier, decked, as it was built, by girls’ hands, and from the great heart’s-ease bungalow, now, too, in process of decoration for the gala time in the afternoon around the White Birch totem; and for the blissful, far-off event, drawing nearer with every shining moment, the brilliant piazza, dance in the evening!

CHAPTER XVIII
Reprisals

It was Tanpa, with the sunburst upon her right breast, general symbol of the Camp Fire, and the birch tree in grace of green and silver embroidered above it upon emerald khaki, who read the verses which she had scribbled in the skiff’s stern under cover of the general interest in water-snails, eggboats and “fresh-water sheep.”

“Most beautiful of forest trees–the Lady of the Woods!” came the responsive hail from eighteen green-clad maidens, tiptoeing around the Silver Lady, the emerald tassels of their Tam-o’-shanters skipping in the June breeze that peeped under her fluttering veil, still tucked with buds, to kiss those white limbs lifted to the skies, with surely, some bud of conscious joy.

It was June! Upon the cliff-brow, above the lake, wild roses were budding, too; and the girls’ cheeks painted themselves with their reflection–even as did the blushing minnows in the lake.

But the lady of the woods had the best of it so far as decoration went. Never new-crowned head wore in its coronet Life as hers did,–fledgling life.

For amid the heart-shaped leaves, so brightly green, was the cap-sheaf of summer wear:

The poet who penned that line would have gloried in the sight of her, that bungalow birch tree, a tall, straight specimen, radiant as a silver taper from the black, frescoed ring about the foot to the topmost ivory twig, and here and there amid the fluttering, pea-green tresses a little tuft of conscious life–a nestling with open beak and craving, coralline throat.

He would have joyed in the sight of the tree-loving Group, too, as the earth was turned and the first silver sapling rooted deep to the music of Tomoke’s voice, softly proclaiming:

And Life would do the rest–oh! surely–in the case of her father and herself, was the dewy thought of Pemrose Lorry as she planted her baby tree in honor of that novel Wayfarer, that would first traverse space and conquer it–bridge the gulf which made Earth a hermit amid the heavenly bodies–of the great invention, whereof poets in future ages would sing, that daringly took the first step towards linking planet with planet.

And the tender sapling was rooted in the hope that long before it was a mature tree that comet-like Wayfarer would start,–the Thunder Bird would fly.

Well! star-dust never blinded the eyes. But it certainly dazzled those of Pemrose, that young visionary, as she pressed earth around her sapling’s root: would there ever come a time when the Camp Fires of Earth would hail the Camp Fires of some other planet across that illimitable No Man’s Land of Space, first–oh! thought transcendent–first bridged by her father’s genius?

But with the high seasoning of that thought came the salty smack of another! All unseen in the planting excitement a tear dropped upon the spading trowel as she thought of that whimsical “Get thee behind me, Satan, but don’t push!” plea of the inventor sorely tempted to commercialize his genius, thwart its inspired range, because of the difficulties about bringing his project to fruition–and of that money hung up, idle, for the next twelve years.

“Daddy-man thinks he’ll be–well! not an old man, but that his best energies will be spent by that time, even if–”

But here the trowel dug vigorously, burying head over ears the thought of the possible return within that time of the “zany” who had been such a mad fellow in youth that, according to her father and others, it was like sitting on a barrel of gunpowder to have anything to do with him, so sure were you to come to grief through his explosive pranks. And yet, and yet–perhaps it was the dash of spice in her name–Pem could not help feeling an interest for his own sake in that “hot tamale”, the Thunder Bird’s rival in the will!

So she spaded away, watering her sapling for the first time, herself, with that little tributary tear; and then, propitiating it, after the manner of the Indians, in the graceful Leaf Dance, capering around it, around the Queen Birch, too, with her companions, upon the lightest fantastic toe, their green arms outstretched and waving, to imitate the leaves above them, blown by the wind.

Went the phonograph upon the bungalow piazza, as it threw off the music, the quaint Indian accompaniment to those stamping, shuffling, skipping feet, to the queer little half-savage syllables, borrowed from the Creek Indians, upon the lips of the chanting, dancing girls, to the coconut hand-rattle wielded by Aponi, the Butterfly, most fairy-like of the green dancers, as she led and led, in honor of the new idlwissi, or tree-hair, the listening leaves–ethereal partners overhead.

Containing little pebbles picked from the lake-side, with a stick running through the painted coconut-shell for a handle, its gleeful rattle fairly turned girls’ heads with the joy of June.

“I think we’ll have to ask you to repeat that dance to-night for the benefit of the boys, your guests,” said the Scoutmaster, who was manipulating the phonograph. “Fairyland wouldn’t be ‘in it’ with the human leaves tripping in pink and gold and green and–no ordinary man knows what!”

Fairyland, indeed, seemed beaten hollow as “across the lake in golden glory” the waning sunbeams of early June bathed the little floating pier, wreathed in laurel and daisy chains, then climbed with flagging feet, like a tired angel, the sod-steps cut into the side of the steep cliff, and, gaining the top, joined their rose-colored brothers skipping among girlish forms in every fair hue imaginable, claiming partners in a dance as of Northern Lights before ever their human brothers, the scouts in gilded khaki, got a chance at a reel.

“Oh! I feel it in my toes that this is going to be a won-der-ful party,” said Toandoah’s little pal, kicking lightly, impatiently with those satin toes of her party slippers at the tufted grass, as she sat enthroned upon the sod of the cliff’s brow, with two knights beside her, Stud of the stout heart, and a bright-eyed luckless tenderfoot, whose parents, in a fit of dementia surely, had named him Louis Philip Green, which, as he used only the initial letter of his second name, had of course entailed a nickname.

“You promised you’d dance the Lancers with me, although I’m only a tenderfoot,” said Peagreen, nibbling a blade of grass as he lay prone upon the sod and shooting a glance, bright and eager as a robin’s, in the direction of the black-haired girl with those skybeams in her eyes under inky lashes.

“Humph! The cheek of some kids who ought to be tucked up in their Beehive when–when that dance comes off!” grumbled the fifteen-year-old Stud, with the arrogance of a Patrol Leader, directing his glance at a brown, conical bungalow flanking a large one, where the younger boys turned in at what seemed to them unseemly hours, while scout veterans sat up overhauling the day’s doings for an occasion of a laugh against somebody, practical joke, of course, preferred, to be published in the Henkyl Hunter’s typewritten Bulletin and hung up in the porch next morning.

“Well! I’m safe for the Grand March, anyhow–and the Virginia reel, too, eh!” Stud dug congratulatory fists into his brown sides, wriggling aggressively upon the cliff-brow, like Peagreen figuratively hugging the ground with an impatient nose.

Privately he was inclined to the opinion that the blue-eyed girl’s friend who had that little nearsighted stand in one of her dark eyes, and two dimples to Pemrose’s one, was the daintier “peach” of the two–and that his own sister, Jess, was as pretty as either; but think of the distinction of leading off with a girl whose father would lead off amid the dance of planets, in sending a messenger to the moon, Mars, too, maybe!

“Whoopee!” He kicked the sod as if spurning it as common or garden earth–although there were moments when, like others–elders–in a skeptical world, he told himself that the Thunder Bird would prove, after all, a Flying Dutchman,–just an extravagant dream.

“So–so you were out on the lake this morning, studying pond life with the professor,” he said, alluding to the Scoutmaster. “He’s instructor in a college and each year he gets us started on something; last summer it was astronomy–he brought a small telescope along.”

Pem’s heels drummed more excitedly on the sod–the starry heavens were her scope.

“But we have a good deal of fun with the big compound microscope, too–and more without it,” acknowledged Studley. “Fancy last week we caught a huge pike which had jumped clear out of the water, on to the bank, after a water-hen!”

“Where was that? How–how big was it?” The girlish questions mounted helter-skelter.

“The pike? Oh! he weighed about fifteen pounds. It was right over there, on the other side of the lake,” pointing to the spot where the party interested in egg-boats had landed that morning. “He–he gobbled the hen, too.”

“Did he?” But he might have been threatening to gobble her, judging by the start which the girl gave at the moment.

Her heart jumped down to the water’s edge as abruptly as did the cliff beneath her.

Her eyes were on a boat rowing out of the sunset’s eye directly across the lake from that very spot.

There was but one individual in it and he–he was rowing by instinct, as the birds fly, for his gaze was glued to a newspaper sheet, the sun’s own evening edition, gorgeously printed by the painted rays in every hue of the spectrum.

He was heading straight–straight for the floating wharf with its plank-bridge running out ashore.

Jack at a Pinch again!

“Do–do you know who he is?” Pem flashed the question upon the older of her two boy-knights.

“Well-ll! I guess so.” Stud’s joy in the recognition floundered a little. “He–he’s the fellow–one of the fellows–who boomed the aëroplane, the other day, to get you girls quietly out of the cave, when there was a ‘rattler–’”

“As if we’d have made a fuss, anyhow!” The girl’s eyes blazed, again a patchwork, drawing their red center from the sun. “You said–you said that it was so hard to make friends with him, like whistling jigs to a milestone–ah!” Her own voice was suddenly stony. “Have you–oh! have you made any headway since?”

“Humph! Yes. I’ve found out something about him.”

The patrol leader’s preoccupied eyes were on the boat edging vaguely nearer to the wharf, with its one “nickum” figure, so nonchalantly rowing, so absorbed in the rainbowed sheet upon its knees that at this moment it awkwardly “caught a crab” and almost suggestively lost an oar.

Simultaneously, however, the phonograph on the piazza struck up, as a prelude to festivities, the Virginia reel, the notes tripping gaily out across the painted lake; and the rower shot one glance upward, as if to say: “I’ll be there in time!” then bent his hungry nose to the paper again.

“What–what did you find out about him?” Pem’s interest was equally hungry–positively famishing. “His name–eh?”

“Ha–that’s the question! Over on Greylock the farmers’ sons call him Shooting Star’, alias ‘Starry’,” with a boyish laugh, “because when they were awf’ly hard up for a player in the last ball game of the series against Willard College, having lost their second baseman and substitute too, by gracious! he breezed along, an’ the captain, hearing he had played on a college team, roped him in ... an’–an’, what do you know, but he won the game for that mountain team with a home run! A home run over the left field fence! Bully!”

“But, surely, they know his–real–name!” Pem’s aloof absorption in that fell like fog-drip even upon the glow from that left field fence.

“Maybe they do–and maybe they don’t! He refused it to the fans. And when the Greylock coach cornered him he palmed it off as Selkirk. But my cousin who’s pitcher on the team says in his opinion that was just ‘throwing a tub to a whale’–something fishy about it, see?” Stud winked. “For ‘Starry’ an’ his father–who’s a queer fish, if ever there was one–had a camp then up on Greylock peak, and the postmaster in charge o’ the Greylock mail owned that he received letters for them addressed to another name–only he couldn’t–wouldn’t–give it away.”

“Wha-at!”

Pem’s hand suddenly smote her lips.

Her wide eyes were no patchwork now. Stud had not thought that a girl’s eyes could be so blue. It almost gave him the “Willies”, their remote, peculiar sky-glow, as if afar–afar–they were seeing things.

“What!” she gasped again, while that vivid glow faded, became bluish, blank, the tint of “Moonshine”–of a strange, wild, nondescript dream.

Moonshine that seemed flooding her whole being!

And yet–although she was a quick-witted girl–it was too vague for her to draw from it one clear thought–only an uneasy, unreal, absolutely breathless feeling!

And then the queer, air-drawn sensation as suddenly passed–and with it the blue moon which had momentarily turned her world to nothing–“shooed” off by a very real, very tangible, quite pressing apprehension:

“He–he’s not coming to the da-nce?”

She sprang up hurriedly, pointing to the boat below; to its one preoccupied figure, clad neither in rough sweater nor May-fly gaudiness, now, but, if the sunset didn’t exaggerate, in a very becoming dark suit.

“Humph! I don’t know! I guess he is! Didn’t think he could pull it off for some reason or other–” Stud’s shoulders were shrugged. “But, maybe, he’s found where there’s a will there’s a way.”

“Why-y?” The girl’s lips were parted breathlessly, her foot involuntarily stamping.

“Oh! you know you told us to invite our friends to the party; not you, but the other girls did, when they signaled across that night from the green Pinnacle–gee! and it was some signaling, too.” The scout’s glance was teasing now as it shot up from the grass. “So–so one of the older boys he ran across that bunch o’ fellows who were blooming round in the cave the other day–they’re all from camps on the lake–and invited the whole five. This one thought he couldn’t accept, but I guess he’s making a dash at it–at coming just the same!”

“Oh!... Oh, dear! I wish he wasn’t!”

“Why?” Now it was the scout’s turn to hang, breathless, upon the interrogation as he too jumped to his feet.

“Because–oh! because I’d be–be ever so much more comfortable without him–enjoy myself more.” Pem caught her breath wildly.

“Then ’twill be A. W. O. L. for him! ... A. W. O. L. for him–if I perish for it!”

“What–what does that mean?”

“Absent With-Out Leave, as they set it down in the Army!”

Mischief leaped to the Henkyl Hunter’s eye.

He beckoned Peagreen from the grass to follow him. A whisper in the tender-foot’s ear and down the winding sod-steps of the cliff they scrambled!

Pem knew that she ought to call them back; knew it from the white parting at the side of her throbbing little head to the toe of her satin slipper tumultuously beating the ground, as she sank down, an orchid amid her chiffons, to watch.

But it was a moment when the spice of her chowchow name had all spilled over; when the Vain Elf which, according to her father, slept in the shadow of the Wise Woman, was broadly–mutinously–awake.

The boat had drawn in alongside the decked float now.

It was gently rocking there, on and off, the rower having shipped his oars and laid them beside him, his strong fingers now and again hooking the wharf when there was danger of his drifting away, while his obsessed nose was bent closer still to the newspaper sheet, catching the last rays of daylight on it.

He did not look up when the scouts, running out over the plank bridge, spoke to him.

Suddenly one of them–Stud it was–leaned down and snatched the oars, lifted them high in the air, the nickum’s evil genius having prompted him to lay them in the boat’s side nearest the wharf; perhaps it was the demon which he had dared by sitting in the Devil’s Chair.

At the same time Peagreen gave the boat a strong shove outward to where a current caught it and swept it further–mockingly further, towards the darkening center of the Bowl.

“Oh! I say–I say, you fellows, that’s no stunt to pull off!” roared the nickum wrathfully. “I’m due at the dance now!”

“You’re not coming to the dance. There’s a girl here who doesn’t want you!” rang back the voice of callow chivalry in the barbarous pipe of the tenderfoot.

And Pem, slipping up from the grass, her hands to her burning cheeks–for she had not meant it to go as far as this–stole back to the piazza, to dance away from the shamefaced ecstasy of reprisal in her heart.

Perhaps she would have felt that this was too sore a snub to inflict for any rudeness on Jack at a Pinch; perhaps she would have compelled her boy-knights to put out in the camp skiff and return those oars–under pain of not dancing with them, at all–had she seen the illuminated column over which the victim’s nose had been so disastrously bent.

It was in every sense a highly colored description of her father’s record-breaking invention, dwelling particularly, though vaguely, upon the experiments so soon to take place with a lesser Thunder Bird, a smaller rocket, from the remote and misty top of old Mount Greylock.

CHAPTER XIX
A Record Flight

But whereas travelers, hitherto, had carried that up a sleeve or in a breast-pocket, it would have its journal in its cone-shaped head; the little openwork box, five inches square, with the tape-like paper winding from one to another of the wheels within and the tiny pencil making shorthand markings, curve or dash, as the air pressed upon it, until it got beyond the air-belt altogether–out into that bitter void of space, where pressure there was none.

No wonder that the inventor called this log the golden egg, for when the magic Bird had flown its furthest, when all the little powder-rockets which, exploding successively, sent it on its way, were spent, then its dying scream would release the log from its bursting head.

Back that would come, fluttering to earth on the wing of a sable parachute, lit on the way, as it drifted down two hundred miles, or so, by the glowworm gleam of a tiny electric battery,–a little dry cell attached to it!

And this, really, was, as Pemrose had said, the kernel of the present experiment to her father, the only witness to prove that the baby Thunder Bird had, indeed, “got there”, flown higher than anything earthly had ever ventured before; and that if a little two-footer in the shape of a sky-rocket had done so much, then there was nothing to prevent a twenty-foot steel Bird from flying on indefinitely,–even to Mammy Moon, herself, or fiery-eyed Mars, perhaps.

“I don’t believe that Dad has slept for two nights now, thinking about its safe return,” said Pemrose to Una, as in the starless, breeze-tickled night the two crouched together upon the mountain-top.

“Well! that little firefly, the tiny electric lamp–the ‘wee bit battery’, as Andrew calls it–will guide us to finding it when it drifts down,” panted the other girl, excitement fixing that little peculiar stand, like a golden lamp, in her dark eye.

“Yes, but–” perhaps her dream in the bungalow of Ta-te, the tempest, was affecting Pemrose–“but suppose, oh! suppose, that the wind–there is a wind–should waft it away–away from us, down the mountainside, to where we couldn’t find it in the woods–dark woods–to where somebody, some horrid meddler, might pick it up, and get a look at the Thunder Bird’s diary before us ... the first record from so high up. Oh–dear!”

The girl’s sigh was echoed by that stealthy wind around her, in whose every whisper there was menace, as it swept through the long grasses and ruffled the ash trees of Greylock’s summit.

Una, to whom this “half the battle”, the quick locating of the parachute and its treasure, was not so vital, soared above all threat in this witching-time of excitement–the transcendent hour.

“The Thunder Bird’s diary! Oh-h! the Thunder Bird’s diary,” she repeated dreamily, as if reciting a charm.

Being Camp Fire Girls of fervid imagination, the supreme invention, the beginning of old Earth’s reaching out to the heavenly bodies, gained its crowning romance from them.

As moment by moment flew by romance in their young breasts became a sort of rhapsody that set every thought to wild music.

To Pem it was as she had dreamed it would be, away back in her father’s laboratory, before the February train wreck.

Hands seemed reaching out to her from everywhere,–she the satellite reflecting her father’s light.

From the four quarters of the habitable earth eyes seemed trained upon her, as she knelt in a little island of flashlight, with her thumb on an electric button which, connected by wires with a platform about a hundred feet away, would throw the switch and release the magic Bird to flying.

“N-now, keep cool, Pem! Don’t get excited–too ex-ci-ted–or-r you may miss the moment when they shout to you: ‘R-ready! Shoot!’” breathed Una, so wrought up herself that her words had a sort of little zip, a hiss, in them, like the soft sighing of the breeze at the moment.

Pemrose knew that her father’s thoughts were taken up all the time with that summit breeze, on how far it might affect the safe return of the golden egg, as he hovered about the low platform, a hundred feet away, on which the little Thunder Bird was mounted, together with his young assistant tightening up every bolt and screw for the record flight. A third tall figure hovered near, within the ring of distant flashlight, that of Una’s father, as transported now over the whole experiment as if he had never hinted that the far-flying rocket was a Quaker gun.

With the girls in their little fairy-like ring of electric light–to go out like a will o’ the wisp presently–was their usual body-guard, old Andrew, who had driven the party up the mountain.

“Cannily noo, lassie! Cannily. Dinna be fechless–flighty!” The Scot was breathing like a Highland gust as he cautioned the girl whose tingling little thumb touched lightly as thistledown the fairy button. “Whoop!” he grunted sharply. “I reckon they’re maist ready, noo, to gie it its fling–let it go!”

It was at this moment that in the distant island of flashlight an arm was flung up. It was that of the professor’s young assistant.

He forgot to bring it down again.

And, lo! a hush, as of a world suspended, fell upon old Greylock,–that grim, black mountain-top.

The long grasses ceased to whisper. The mountain-ash trees cuddled their little pale berry-babies in awe.

“All R-ready! Shoot!”

Toandoah’s battle-cry it was.

A roar as of a small brass cannon, the first gun of the new conquest, responded, as the hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America pressed the button, triumphantly throwing the switch in the nozzle, or tailpart, of the mounted rocket, a hundred feet away.

Simultaneously the flashlights went out.

And in the darkness–into the blackness the little Thunder Bird soared.

Soared with the wild red eye of its headlight challenging the heavens themselves to stop it, with its comet-like tail of red fire streaming out full twenty feet behind it.

At lightning speed,–fifty miles the first minute, a hundred the next,–it leaped from its mountain platform straight up–bound for the vacant lot of space.

Explosion after bright explosion tore the cloud-banks as, one by one, the innumerable little rockets, which Pem had watched her father fitting into their grooves in its interior–far back in that quiet laboratory–went off.

And with each radiant roar higher–faster–it dashed, the little Thunder Bird, with never a puff of smoke to dim the spectacle–the transplendency of its flight.

“Michty! Michty!... Magerful!”

There was just the one skirl from Andrew, to lend it music on its upward way; he had not thought that he came to America to witness a thing like this.

“Magerful”, indeed! Magical, indeed! The others were silent, swept away by the magic of it–the greater, moon-storming magic to come.

Only–only, they breathlessly asked themselves: “What next?”

Well! the immediate “next” would be the return of the golden egg, the diary, the falling fruit of the experiment, without which there was no proof of its success–of how high the fiery Bird had flown–before, its last automatic charge expended, it sang its swan-song somewhere in space.

At the increasing speed with which the little Thunder Bird flew–when miles were but a moment–the record might be expected back in a few minutes.

Minutes–but they seemed a moon’s age!

It was Una–Una–who saw it first: the tiny speck of star-dust drifting down, down among the woolly clouds–dark as if the night had been shorn and its fleece hung out to dry–alighting here and there, the little firefly, in other words the atomy electric battery attached to the precious record, trying so hard, with the parachute’s aid, to find its way back to earth from the lonely height it had reached.

Another quarter of a minute, and they could trace the outline of the black silk parachute, itself, a drifting crow with their prize in its claws; that prize which the inventor, at least, would have given ten years of his life to grasp–if, grasping it, he could see that the little pencil had duly made its record markings–the proof that his Thunder Bird had “got there.”

“Glory halleluiah! it’s drifting down right into our laps–into the old mountain’s lap, rather! The wind won’t carry it far, I bet! ’Twill land within quarter of a mile of us, anyhow,” shrieked the professor’s young assistant, a college boy, an athlete, who had led the quarter-mile sprint on many a hard-won field, when the racing honor of a school was at stake; and he ran as never before to get the better of the tricky gusts and seize the parachute–faster, even, than the nickum, that mysterious youth, had run, when he saved the day for the mountain team at baseball.

“Hoot mon! Dinna ye let it get away frae ye into the dar-rk woods!” skirled Andrew, equally excited, and filled with awe of the raven parachute now springing, like a great, black mushroom, out of the night–and of the firefly which had been up so high.

“Oh! it is–it is drifting towards the dark spruce woods–where we’ll have hard work to find it.”

In the wild chase after the prize, Pemrose made a good third, as she thus shouted her fear.

“See–oh! see, it is landing,” she cried again, “c-coming down–touching earth.”

Yes! for one fleeting instant it did alight upon a mound, the shooting starlet, the little electric dry cell, winking brilliantly against the background of somber evergreens, now dark as Erebus, that girdle old Greylock’s crown.

Then, freakish firefly, there, it was off again, the prey of the nickum gusts, before ever a hand could touch it–the black parachute rotating like a whirligig.

Never–oh, never–was such a chase for such a prize since mountain was mountain and man was man!

Once again the steely clog, the weight of the five-inch box containing the recording apparatus, the precious log, almost dragged it to a standstill! But the summit gusts were strong.

Even the college boy began to have heart-quakes and Pemrose heart-sinkings.

“Jove! What a stunt you’re pulling off on us, you old black crow of a parachute–you booby-headed umbrella!” groaned he. “C-can’t you stay put for just a second? Or are you bent on leading us a dance through the woods?”

He began to lose hope of its landing in his lap, that breezy athlete, as it made straight for the jaws of darkness now, the inky spruce-belt–the parachute coquetting with its pursuers, like a great black fan.

Was–was it the wind then?

Something–something caught it up, the golden log–the first record from space–something snatched it up and whisked it off, off into those blackamoor woods, while the feet of the foremost runner were still many yards away.

“’Twas na the wind! ’Twas mon or deil; I saw it loop out frae the boggart trees!” roared Andrew.

And now in his skirl there was a wild ring of superstition that turned girlish hearts quite cold.

“I saw it loup out frae the dark–dar-rk woods!” he insisted hoarsely.

Ah! but those dim spruce woods were faintly illumined now with strange little dots and dashes of light–the firefly winking passionately, as if somebody, some thief, were running with it.

And they ran, too, its rightful owners, in full cry, calling frantically upon the robber, whether thief, or tempest, to stop.

And the girls kept bravely up with the men. Or one of them did! For all the spice of her chowchow name was afire in Pemrose Lorry now; and she would have tackled the thief, single-handed, to get back her father’s record.

Into the core of darkness–in among the ebony spruce-boughs–the jetty, frowning trunks, the snarling, brambly underbrush, dashed the chase, the hue and cry, not daring to turn on a flashlight and in its glare lose the one little piloting blink ahead, which now seemed to have considerable odds on them, as it fled helter-skelter through the woods.

“My word! this–this beats anything I ever dr-reamed of,” gurgled the college boy. “The Thing, whatever it is, has us nicely fooled. There–there, it has switched off the ‘glim’ now–the little, telltale battery. Now–where are we?”

No one could tell, as they floundered about, three men, and two girls, in the mysterious night-woods–without a clew–Pemrose clinging desolately to her father now, Una to hers–while Andrew, the Church Elder, muttered weird Highland curses.

Nobody could tell where they were, indeed, figuratively, of course, except–except that the experiment was a failure, so far as any proof to the World was concerned!

Except that Toandoah’s hopes were dashed,–if not broken!

The first record from Space was stolen,–or lost.

CHAPTER XX
The Search

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

But all this, as the girl passionately told herself, was an everyday trick,–just a paper pellet thrown at one beside the overwhelming blow of the loss of her father’s record.

And he who could quote Shakespeare upon “Something rotten in the state of Denmark”, amid the horrors of a zero train-wreck, who “liked his excitement 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 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 assertion 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 assistant 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 lassies”, 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 anticipation. “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 anticipation 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 passion, 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 pass, 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 glass–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, lassie! 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 passion 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 passionately.

“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 space 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 passionate 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 impassive chauffeur’s breast was occasionally apparent in a furtive glance thrown skyward, or in a momentary glisten of mist in the gray shell of the mechanical eye.

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

“I reckon if leetle Margery were livin’, she’d feel in the verra same way gin anny misfortune happed to me,” he told himself.

“Aw, weel, lassie!” Thus he spoke aloud. “Since ye’re set on gaeing on a wee bit further, we’ll gang; but dinna get yer hopes stickit on finding onything!”

“Andrew–Andrew, himself, has found something! Look–look at him!”

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

“He–he’s hearing things, if he isn’t seeing them. Oh, look!... Look at him!”

Una’s hand was at her jumping heart–pressing hard as if to hold it in her body–as she beheld the tall figure of the chauffeur, motionless as arrested mechanism, upon the trail, ahead.

“I heerd a–skirl.” Andrew’s face was stony as that of the Old Man of Greylock–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, where the 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!”