Pemrose Lorry, Radio Amateur
Date: 2020-06-11T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Camp Fire Girls -- Juvenile fiction; Camping -- Juvenile fiction; Radio -- Juvenile fiction

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Title: Pemrose Lorry, Radio Amateur

Author: Isabel Hornibrook

Illustrator: Nana French Bickford

Release date: June 11, 2020 [eBook #62371]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PEMROSE LORRY, RADIO AMATEUR ***

PEMROSE LORRY, RADIO AMATEUR

By Isabel Hornibrook

DRAKE OF TROOP ONE
SCOUT DRAKE IN WAR TIME
COXSWAIN DRAKE OF THE SEASCOUTS
DRAKE AND THE ADVENTURERS’ CUP
PEMROSE LORRY: CAMP FIRE GIRL
PEMROSE LORRY: RADIO AMATEUR

“We’ve got to ride on—your own horse is here—to where you and I can be together.”

PEMROSE LORRY
RADIO AMATEUR
BY
ISABEL HORNIBROOK
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
NANA BICKFORD ROLLINS
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1923

Copyright, 1923,
By LITTLE, Brown, AND COMPANY.
All rights reserved
Published April, 1923
Printed in the United States of America

The author acknowledges her indebtedness to Nawadaha of the Camp Fire (Ethel V. Smart) for the songs and rhymes, and for some helpful collaboration.

CONTENTS
I | A Flower Clock
II | A “Roaring Buckie”
III | An Awful Note
IV | Fathers
V | The Magic Carpet
VI | A Gentleman
VII | Fit for Fit
VII | The Wee Hour
IX | Dandering Kate
X | Hidden Valley
XI | Her
XII | The Shack Corner
XIII | The Long Pasture
XIV | Revel and Revelation
XV | Wheeled through Life
XVI | The Lip
XVII | Wild Flowers
XVIII | Mondamin
XIX | A Girl Brigade
XX | No Answer
XXI | The Call of the Air
XXII | On Little Sister
XXIII | The Ring
XXIV | The Race
XXV | Spring

ILLUSTRATIONS

- “We’ve got to ride on—your own horse is here—to where you and I can be together.”

- Drifting down, a fire-tail, the aëroplane truly was.

- “Well! I say, this is a little bit of all right—isn’t it?”

- Pemrose was standing with her aërial out to a gnarled pine-tree.

PEMROSE LORRY RADIO AMATEUR

CHAPTER I
A Flower Clock

“Good morning, Daytime!” A girl stood upon the gray stone steps of a Lenox mansion and, looking up, answered the first lovely smile that young day flung down to her as, robed in pale pink and bluish bloom, it slowly climbed the eastern sky.

“Good morning, Day-sky!” she laughed again—smiling all over in response to that pink of beauty above her. “Well! this is the first time that the Sunrise and I have been chums,” she murmured to herself, “the first spring, I mean; I—I who used to suffer from the sleepy fevers more than—than the ‘nappiest’ little flower in my garden.”

She laughed softly now, Una Grosvenor, known to her girl chums as Jack—a gay bit of satire, by the way—and by the Council Fire as U-te-yan, Flower, as she descended the gray steps into a dewy garden, where those Rogues O’May, the late spring flowers, were still, many of them, slumbering with eyes tight shut.

“Yes, you gain an hour by the daylight saving—or you think you do, you sluggards!” she flung at them, a slight nearsighted peculiarity in her dark eye flashing with pretty mockery. “Six o’clock, now, by my watch—really only five—and there you are: chicory, tulip, wild rose, pond lily, fast asleep still; poppy, marigold, daisy—and wild dandelion, only just awaking—and one little belated Crocus, just one, dozing, too!”

It was with a smile, roguish and tender, tender as that of the dawn, that Una stood still, cooling her toes in the dew, to look at her garden—with its cheek, silver and pink as a baby’s, reflecting the flush of the sky.

A large, old-fashioned garden it was and full of surprises, inclosing U-te-yan’s blooming beds where, as a Camp Fire Girl, she had sown or planted, experimented and transplanted herself; and it was plain from the look upon her face that she lived in it—dreamed in it, as a princess might live in a fairy tale.

“My flowers!” She dimpled imaginatively. “Oh-h! at this hour, I can almost hear them singing to me. What is it—they—say? I made it up, for them, before:

“Good morning, dear Una! Good morning, dear Day!

The gloom of the night clouds has all flown away,

We kick off our blankets of mist, soft and white,

And dress ourselves up in the lovely gold light,

From rock, bed and border we’re smiling at you,

Good morning! Good morning! Now, you say it too!”

“Good morning! Good morning!” threw back the caroling sprite, her dark eyes dressing themselves up in light, too, as she impersonated her flowers. “Now! what was it I wanted especially to do this morning,” thus she silently questioned the dewy beds, “besides watching the sleepy flowers open in my flower clock, my sundial bed—that’s the clock which really gets me up early,” with a merry nod, “to study their waking time, as the shadow of the dial hand, beginning to move with sunrise, points to one after the other? Oh-h! I know; I wanted to do some transplanting, ‘housemove’ my little Quaker Ladies, before—before old Sods gets around. Now! did any of you ever hear of such a thing as a crusty old gardener whose ‘really truly’ name is—Jacob Sods?”

Whimsically she interrogated pansy and little blue johnny-jump-up, just opening its sleepy eye, daffodil, narcissus and lamp-like geranium which, open-eyed, had kept vigil all night long.

“Humph! There he is now! I never can get ahead of him.” The girl shrugged her shoulders.

“Lorie me! Miss Una,” grunted an old mountaineer who at that moment came shuffling down a garden path, spade in hand and munching a dew-piece, a hunch of bread. “Lorie me! Now, what be you up for so ear-rly! It ben’t but—five—o’clock.” He pulled a timeworn old silver watch out of a side pocket.

“Six—by—me!” Una glanced at her tiny jeweled wrist watch.

“Humph! I go by the Lord’s time, I’ll have you to know!” snorted Jacob Sods, gardener. “I—I ain’t no ‘nose o’ wax’ to be changin’ round.” He shuffled on, grunting.

Una’s tickled laughter rang out as she set to work to transplant her little Quaker Ladies from what was known as the wildflower garden to a sunny rock bed.

“A plant—a plant is a regular tomboy when you’re making a new home for it,” she was murmuring archly to herself, five minutes later, her dark eyebrows lifting over the busy trowel. “You have to make a nice little mound of earth, deep in your hole, for it to sit on and swing its legs, its roots, just like a boy or girl. And—and it likes a snug fit, too! There now, my bluets are in a nice, comfy hole.... And the little Quaker Ladies will never know what happened to them!”

She started. Something was happening to her. Breathlessly she kneeled upright—earthy knuckles pressed against her lips, ear intent.

“Goodness! this—this isn’t the first time when I’ve been up early, before anybody else was around—Pemrose, anybody—that—I thought—I thought I heard a strange sound from the wood. There it is again! Faint hum—silvery hum—all round us in the air! Don’t you—don’t you hear it?”

She turned half wildly to the Quaker Ladies, who seemed to be settling into their new home to music—if music the faintest, vaguest murmur could be called.

“It—it comes from the wood, but it isn’t the trees—pines or beeches—it isn’t, oh! it isn’t any sound in Nature, at all.” Una waved her trowel, in utter bewilderment. “What can be doing it—making it? That distant ‘surgy’ hum, rising, falling, murmur, murmuration! Silvery murmuration!” The little peculiar cast in her fascinated eye, too slight to be a blemish, shone, a morning star of marvel, now as she gazed off towards a low, stone wall about a hundred feet away, beyond which was a dark, slowly lighting pine wood.

“If I were to say anything about this to Pemrose, she’d laugh at me—think it was all imagination. She’s—so different. Full of ‘pep’—a radio amateur!”

The girl, the dark-eyed girl whose nature was more woven of poetry than “pep”, who put morning songs into the heads of her flowers, continued to kneel “possessed”, upon a dew-silvered stone beside the rock garden, continued to stare, bewitched, at the dusky green of the early wood.

To her, the vague, sweet murmur which, like a silver cloud, enwrapped her, was not unnatural; it was part of the fairy wonder of the sunrise; of a May sun rising, dim and silvery, like a moon—like a young moon calf—behind shrubbery trees.

“Extra-ordinary!” Her earthy fingers sought each other, restlessly intertwining. “It can’t be a bee? Big, droning bumble bee—Canny Nannie, as the mountain children call it! A whole swarm of Canny Nannies! But there isn’t a bee in sight at this hour; and, if there were, ’twould have to be a glorified—glorified one for me to hear it—at this distance from the wood.”

She stumbled to her feet now, dropping the trowel almost upon the long-suffering heads of the Quaker Ladies, and wandered down a dewy pathway towards a point still nearer to the pine woods, where a gray old sundial upon its four-foot pedestal, shimmered at sunrise, like a huge primrose.

Around this U-te-yan, Flower had created her masterpiece, a ring-like bed in three-cornered sections, peopled only by horological flowers, as her books called them, those that closed sleepily at night, to open at various hours of the morning, energetically or lazily, as the case might be.

To the lovely flower clock, the blooming democracy, wild flowers, even weeds, were admitted, side by side with garden aristocrats, in order to find a flower, sometimes two or three, whose waking or sleeping habits corresponded to the numbers upon the dial’s face—to the sunny hours counted out by the pointing of the shadowy dial finger.

The flower clock had suddenly developed a tongue. The vague hum pursued her here. Pale, spring poppy, uncurling dandelion, caught it, held it—and winked at her over its mystery.

“If—if I were Pemrose now, I’d go right on into the wood, and find out where it comes from—what’s making it,” she murmured to those waking flowers. “The truth is, I’m too—t-too ‘funky’,” with a little deprecatory shrug. “That—that’s why father won’t hear of my going hiking, camping with the other girls this summer; he says I never would stand the sleeping out at night—even for a few nights. And Treff, my madcap cousin Treff, says I’d be such a ‘weer’ I’d turn them all ‘wuzzy’,”—a low laugh—“his barbarous college slang!

“He—he’s coming over to take Pemrose for a little flight, this morning, a little ‘air-hop’, as he calls it, before breakfast. I—I daren’t go up with him in his aëroplane, to hear voices among the clouds—his new radio outfit. That must be weird. But—this is weirder!” The girl’s lips curved silently. “And yet—and yet that’s not the word, either; it’s too sweet. Gracious! Now I hear it, now I d-don’t.” She stole forward a step, bending her ear towards the intoning pines.

“Now—now it’s like a wandering organ note. Oh! am I listening in on anything by radio—a new sort of radio ‘bug’?” with the faintest whiff of laughter. “Am I awake, at all? I’d give worlds—worlds—to go on into the wood, find out what it is—what’s making it. But I’ve seldom been into that pine wood, alone. Never—at this hour.”

Yet, as if that dulcet, wavy murmur, now high-pitched, now low-pitched, faint, yet audible—increasingly audible—in the still May morning, were a luminous belt, an irresistible power-belt, drawing her, Una was moving slowly—vaguely—towards the wood.

She reached the low stone wall—the dark skirts of the passive pines were only fifty feet away.

Each gray stone in that rough wall was now a ruby, reflecting the wonderful amethyst lights in the sky—wings of that mild young sun which had risen so like a moon calf.

Suddenly her hands clutched each other convulsively. Was she masquerading, too? The morning had, all in a moment, become dim; and she was the ghost of a girl standing down, in a mist, by a seashore—holding a hollow sea shell to her ear.

“I can’t—oh! I can’t be happy—unless I find out what’s doing it!”

She sobbed it aloud, now, in light, breathless, seafoam sobs—all irradiated, too—to the dewy flowers among which she stood; gay cottage tulips straggling among sweetbriars along by the wall, each red and yellow mite flashing as if, true to its legend, it had rocked a little elf in its cradle the night before.

There was not a flower in the garden whose legend was not in Una’s flower-basket brain.

This soft sea shell throbbing of the air about her, the faint, shrill piping—now, again, it was high, clear, metallic—yet strangely disembodied—fitted in with a dozen of them.

“It’s not earthly; it’s not,” she cried passionately to the tulips; “it’s t-too fairy-like—too unlike anything I ever heard ... but I can’t be happy, unless—”

A sweetbriar, herself, now, the unfinished protest a thorn in her brain, she was over the low wall—and through the dim shadow gate of the wood.

CHAPTER II
A “Roaring Buckie”

A pure, high note upon the air, a shrill, vibrating beat, as of a bird or a woodsman faintly calling! Wordlessly calling!

But it was not bird, nor woodsman. Una stood still, near a dark little pond, fringed with blue iris—May iris. She heard the birds with it.

“Goodness! can it be-e—am I dreaming that I’m Pemrose—Pemrose, ‘listening in’ on something, picking up sounds from the air with a wonderful ring—radio ring—that her father has made for her?”

The girl looked down at her forefinger; there was no deep ring, no shining cat-whisker, no shimmering crystal there.

“Or am I—am I going far beyond her, beyond any one, picking up waves, sounds, without any of these things, aërial—or ‘radio soul’?”

The dark eyes were translucent now in the dimness of the wood, with the vision that she, least practical, least plodding of girls—except where her flowers were concerned—should be the elect of heaven for a new discovery.

And as the elect of heaven cannot pause to consider, on she went, through the heavy dew silvering the brown pine needles, sparkling upon tall fiddle-head brake and cinnamon fern, occasionally upon the ebony stem of a baby maidenhair upon a bank.

The woods were unspeakable at this hour—the slowly lighting May woods. There was a little, stealing smile in them, a laugh too young, too subtle to belong to this old world, at all. Or else the world had suddenly grown very young—so young that anything might happen!

Una, herself, felt more like six than sixteen, within a near run of sixteen, as she tiptoed over the trail of a sunbeam on the needles, pausing now and again to lift one foot off the ground, lift it high and listen—after the manner of the terrier who thinks that he cannot listen satisfactorily without a paw in the air.

The high-pitched note, the elfin call vibrated off into faintness. And now, again, she seemed to be standing in mists by a seashore, holding a hollow shell, with a curve in its pipe, to her ear.

There was a throbbing of the air about her, a low reverberation, swelling into a soft intoning, like the murmur of sad sea waves.

“Goodness! Now—now the wood is a ‘roaring buckie’, as Andrew, our Scotch chauffeur, would call a big crooning shell that he’d pick up for me on the seashore. I wish Andrew were here. If only Pemrose was here!”

She had a momentary spasm of faint-heartedness—of being once more the timid Una, timid to weakness in all but the strength of her imagination. She turned to flee—to beat a retreat to the garden, to her fanciful flower clock.

But that hum was too alluring. A wood that, at daybreak, was a roaring buckie was too persuasive—appealing to every fancy she had.

She began to feel like the ghost of some poor little queer fish that had crept back into the clammy shell it once inhabited.

But she stole on.

“It seems to come from somewhere behind that log-stack,” she told herself, peering through thick brambles and umbrella-like scrub of the tenderest fairy green, at a great pile of crossed logs, their ends gleaming, golden—a shack for the haunting shadows.

But when, taking her curiosity in both hands—if her courage was too frail to be handled—she reached that shadowy stack, the mysterious music—if music it could be called—had receded.

She heard it from a recess farther on—and deeper in the wood.

And now again she wanted to turn. But, at that moment, the soul of the distant thicket, it soared, indescribably sweet, shrill, clear, like the vox angelica, the angel stop upon an organ.

“Oh-h! I m-must be dreaming!” Yet, with hands clasped—carried out of herself—Una pursued that fleeing organ-note.

It brought her in less than another minute to the pine-wood’s battleground. Trailing, khaki-colored limbs of dead boughs, dead soldiers, which had fought bravely with last winter’s record ice storm, swept the earth, withering.

But among them there were other warriors, green recruits, whose flexible youth had so battled with wind and weight of ice that the branches, twisted, deformed, bowed to earth, were still green. Sap flowed in them. They were one with the living trunk.

In some dim way the lesson of those young hemlocks went home to Una. Her lower lip sagged as she looked at them. Some part of her—some part of her—she began to feel it—was twisted by curiosity, over-wrought fancy, away from her normal self. But it was not broken off.

Suddenly—elastically—it sprang back into place: “I w-won’t go any further—after it; I won’t!” she cried aloud—and turned her head to look around.

It was then that she got the crowning shock: yet as delicate, as fairy-like—as full of glamour—as the others had been.

Something fell at her feet. A little bunch of dewy wild flowers.

Lace of the carroway, gemmed with dew, lavender wild geranium, its cheek on her shoe, a lingering woodland violet with a tear in her eye, buttercup, dandelion—ebony-stemmed maidenhair, fairy-like in its pleading.

It was beyond Una to resist flowers at her feet.

She stooped to pick them up. Was there a nettle among them? Something stung her. Stung sharply!

She was about to rub the prickling fingers across her lips, but with some thought of the poisonous weeds which, as a Camp Fire Girl she had come to know, she chafed them against her skirt—her sweater cuff—instead.

But there seemed to be no poisoner in all the innocent little bunch that rested its cheek so trustfully against her tan shoe.

Was it the tear in the violet’s eye that warned her? Was it the averted face of the drowsy dandelion, still, in the woods, half asleep? Was—oh! was there the faintest whiff about them that was not natural?

Suddenly all the daylight fled out through the tops of the trees, as it were.

And, spurning for the first time a flower, Una turned and fled with it, sobbing, tripping, stumbling, out of the wood—the intoning wood.

She reached the low, stone wall, breathless, wild-eyed.

“Preserve us a’! lassie, what’s happened to ye, the morning? Ye look ‘beglammered.’ Ye look scared; ye look sparrow-blastit.”

Never did a human voice fall more comfortingly upon a girl’s ears than the rough Scotch accents which greeted hers from the other side of that garden wall.

“Oh! Andrew, I—heard—” began Una, as strong arms lifted her over the wall.

“I h-heard—” she raved again.

But the words were blown from her lips by another hum; a hum that seemed heavenly, so loud, so cocksure, so mechanically humdrum it was—the hum of a skimming aëroplane.

“I heard—” she began for the third time—and lifted her eyes to the sky.

They were blinded by a sheet of flame.

CHAPTER III
An Awful Note

“Preserve us a’! It’s coming down. Coming down—a fire-tail! Driftin’ doomward—down’ard—an’ afire!”

Andrew’s hoarse exclamations tore at the reddened air, even as sharp horns of flame gored it, springing out from a biplane’s slipping side.

“Willa-woo! It’s side-slippin’—side-slippin’ down—afire!”

Old Andrew’s hand went to his head. The girl sank to her knees beside her waking flower clock. For her the end of the world had come, heralded by that mysterious pitch pipe in the woods.

The chauffeur looked, too, as if he heard the Big Trump.

Drifting down, a fire-tail, the aëroplane truly was; a long, thin tail feather of brightest flame streaming out from it to the little leaden fish, two-pound fish, that held its radio antenna steady in the air, kept it away from the controls—flipper and rudder controls!

Drifting down, a fire-tail, the aëroplane truly was.

Those controls were useless now. The burning plane was side-slipping from five hundred feet aloft—in spite of the efforts of the one aviator to right it before it landed.

It was but for a moment—an eternal moment—that the man and the kneeling girl watched it, before it roosted, bird of thunder, in a tree top, a noble white ash, over fifty feet tall, growing upon this side of the garden wall.

The startled tree seemed rolling up the whites of its eyes in terror—rustling the pale undersides of its crown of leaves—as the burning plane landed and stuck upon a topmost branch; and, a second earlier, the aviator, finding that he could not make a better landing before the gasolene tank blew up, jumped.

As the dark, helmeted streak shot downward, it just grazed the old sundial, which now counted one flaming hour amid its many sunny ones—and landed right in the middle of the blooming flower clock.

“Dog out!” groaned Andrew and, with the hoarse exclamation on his lips, sprang forward to catch it—break the fall.

But his long arms, his strong breast missed it.

With a soft, reverberating thud it landed in the dial-bed, right on the head of pale Miss Poppy, garden beauty, who got the flattening shock of her life at the moment.

One leg of the figure, rebounding, hit its owner, the half-stunned aviator, below the waist line, after which he, too, drooped over, lay, huddled, amid the flattened flowers.

“Treff! Oh-h! my cousin Treff. Coming to take Pemrose—up!... Is he—dead?” It seemed to Una to be the ghost of herself that put the question.

“Dead—no! My paley lamb!” Even at this moment the elderly chauffeur shot a glance of fatherly concern and tenderness at the white-lipped girl—she was to him a symbol of the daughter he had lost.

“Dead—not by a hand’s-breadth!” Andrew was kneeling by the unconscious figure, straightening it out. “But his right leg’s broke, I fear—poor lad. Hit him in the stomach, too, that blamed leg, knocked his wind out—knocked him into as-far-land! Water-r, lassie! Water! A stream near-hand there, by the wood!”

“The—w-wood!” Una stared at him feebly, making no motion to pick up the little metal cup, blistered by heat, which he unhooked from the aviator’s belt and flung towards her.

“Yes, the wood! Air ‘ye jacky-witted’? Oh! shame fer a lassie to be ginge’-bread at sech a time. Well, deil-mak’-matter! I’ll go meself.”

But it was at that moment that the “deil”, called upon, seemed to make the matter in question his own.

It was at that moment that the world went quite to perdition with a roar as, aloft in the tree top, the gasolene tank blew up.

Flaming fragments, bits of wing that seemed wrenched from imps, red imps, blazing splinters, scraps of wire and red-hot metal rained all around the girl in the terrified grass—still blanched with dew.

“Warry!” shrieked Andrew. “Down, lassie—down flat, ere the fiery off-fall hit ye!”

But that “fiery off-fall” dropped a curtain between Una and her visions of the wood. In a delirium she picked up the cup—and fled, not back to the wood, but to the nearest garden hydrant.

A fragment of linen wing, aëroplane wing, treated with the preparation that was so inflammable, swept her cheek—a scarlet butterfly. But she managed to fetch the water, her brief dizziness shriveled, like that doped wing, into a frenzy—red frenzy.

As cool drops fell upon his face, moistened his blistered lips, the boy aviator opened his eyes.

“Gosh! but this is an aw-ful note.” He blinked mockingly at motes of his wings swimming before him in the red glare, at his aëroplane fast being reduced to a blackened motor and a few twisted wires in the tree top. “Aw-ful note!” He grinned.

“Aye, it is—my cock-o’-pluck!” gurgled Andrew.

“‘Pulled a bone,’ up there—a blunder,” went on the freakish voice. “New radio outfit, shoved the power plug into wrong groove, short circuit—wires red-hot in a jiffy—spaghetti all blazing—”

“Aye, the inflam’ble, insulating clothie around the bit wires,” put in Andrew.

“Reached over for my chemicals to right of seat—” an amber-brown speck in one of the boy’s stone-gray eyes flashed—“unbalanced plane, she side-slipped, and now ... it’s three thousand for a new ‘bus’ and I can’t take a girl up this morning.”

“Pemrose,” breathed Una.

“Yes, Pemrose. Pretty—Pem!”

“Easy there—easy there, with that right leg—my cock-o’-the-clouds!” Andrew was muttering. “You’ve ‘pulled a bone’ in that, I’m thinking.”

“Ouch! Have I? You look as if I had broken every bone in your body by falling a few hundred feet.”

The aviator glared at Una—then winked his mischievous brown spot.

She could not wink back. Behind the red note of misfortune was, still, for her, the note of mystery: an echo that seemed borne from that hum-haunted wood, the tear in the violet’s eye—a nettle where no nettle was.

She lifted her stung fingers, where the prickle had faded, and looked at them.

Still—still she was “sparrow-blasted” as Andrew’s queer figure put it, blighted to the core by a trifle—kicked by a paltry sparrow, as it were.

And she had not been able to come back with even one little kick of spirit—not even so far as to venture to the safe skirts of the wood again—to the spring not fifty yards away—in the face of another’s need.

Her head drooped shamefacedly, her dark head.

There was a sudden rush of figures running, wildly running across the garden, where a patch of grass and a tree top were now ablaze: her father’s, half clad, old Sods’, others—a girl with blue dilated eyes.

“Pemrose!” She stretched out her arms, in a fair flutter as Andrew saw, then drooped over and fainted, a lily-heart, beside her flower clock.

CHAPTER IV
Fathers

“But I did hear it—father.”

“You dreamed it, girlie—up so early.”

Dwight Grosvenor, father of Una, drew his hand across his forehead; curiously enough, the rim of that high forehead looked damp—clammy as the woods at daybreak.

“Pemrose—Pemrose will believe me that I heard it; that strange sound, high piping—silvery hum. Pemrose will believe me.”

Pemrose Lorry looked in bewilderment from one to another—in the tempered glare of a bright sun-parlor.

“It m-must have been the trees,” she ventured—her glance in the direction of Una, the flower sprite, said that she was accustomed to the whims of a girl as timid as she was finespun.

“But there wasn’t any breeze, I tell you!” Una stamped deliriously. “The pines—the beeches—weren’t even stirring.”

Silent, for a moment, she gazed thoughtfully out at her May garden—at the woods, the hills, beyond it.

“’Twasn’t like anything I ever heard before,” she murmured pensively. “Not like any sound in Nature, at all! ’Twas like the fine small music Andrew speaks of that calls the—fairies—”

“Andrew!” Her father suddenly set his foot down in relief—the vague annoyance in his face melting, “I’ve a great mind to dismiss that ‘blellum.’ A fogy whose tongue drips folk lore as a rain streak drips mist! Whose stories—”

“Ending with; ‘An if a’ tales be true,’ that’s no lie,” put in Pemrose slyly, with a preoccupied glance at an adjoining room where, in splints and bandages, a young aviator, with a mocking brown speck in one gray eye, lay dreaming of his fiery “note.”

But, now, it was Una, petted child, who set her foot down, stamping it again—stamping passionately:

“Dismiss Andrew—father!” she cried. “Andrew who picked me up bodily and hurled me into the back of the car when I was out with him alone, six months ago, and another auto, recklessly driven, came right for us round a corner! Andrew who never thought of himself, at all—only of saving me! Who—who was so badly battered—got some of the glass of the wind shield into him—that he had to have....” She almost snapped her fingers at her father.

“There! There, child! Of course I didn’t mean it.” The latter patted her shoulder soothingly. “But I wish he’d shed his Scotch mists, anywhere but in your ears.”

“Well—well, Andrew had nothing to do with this,” insisted Una, after a cooling minute. “I did hear it, that funny—piping—hum. The Quaker Ladies heard it, too—” her eyebrows arching merrily—“and they thought ’twas like the ringing and singing in harebells—”

“There now, Jack! There now!” Her father threw up his hands as he called his only daughter by the name, occasionally, thrust upon her by her girl chums, as a satire upon the “betty” element in her being so strong—on her being as far as possible removed from what might, possibly, be known as a “lassie-boy.” “There you are! You’re just steeped to the ears in these flower legends, very finespun and poetic—but too airy an atmosphere for a girl like you, with an imagination that ‘works overtime.’ Oh! I’m glad of your new interest in your flowers; it overcame your—”

“‘Sleepy fivvers,’” put in Una archly. “You used to say I was as lazy as the white Star of Bethlehem, Daddy dear, and she’s a perfect dormouse, garden dormouse—the little ‘ten o’ clock.’”

“But I—I’d like to see my little girl interested in something else, too, to keep her earth-fast.” Mr. Grosvenor laid his arm tenderly around the shoulders of his only child. “How—how about learning to run one of my big cars? How about becoming interested in radio, like your friend Pemrose? Oh-h! not in listening in on a concert. The laziest lubber-sprite could do that!” with a laugh. “But in riding the whirlwind and directing the storm,” gayly, “the jumble of noises coming through the air taking you by storm. I declare if you could once gossip familiarly of vacuum tube and variometer, current and condenser; if you could pick up one sentence—one word even—from the dot and dash with which the air is forever ticking, I might—”

“What! code. Telegraphy that—that horrid teaser!”

Una curled up like the finical Star of Bethlehem before the blinding beat of a thunder shower.

“I might,” Mr. Grosvenor went on, unheeding, swinging his eyeglasses judicially, “I might, even, decide that you were stern enough stuff, hot stuff enough, to go into camp with the other girls, this summer, and not infect them all with ‘peerie-weerie’ fears—fancies.”

“To camp!” It was a little diverted scream. “Oh! father, you know I’m dying to go—go with Pemrose.”

“Well! I’m beginning to think it might really be better for you than staying here under the care of a governess, while I—while I make a flying trip, business trip, to Europe—and your mother goes to bring me back,” with a shrug. “When do you start? What are your hiking plans?” The big man of affairs, banker, financier, turned to Pemrose.

“Oh! we leave here—I leave here on the tenth of July, seven weeks from now, to pick up my Camp Fire sisters just over the Massachusetts line, where we follow the Greylock Trail until we strike the Long Trail winding right through the Green Mountains, from end to end.”

The girl paused, the lure of the Long Trail unwinding itself remotely in her blue eyes.

“But we don’t follow that, for long, either; we branch off along other mountain trails and—and little snaky, brown roads that stand on their hind legs and grope for the sky,” laughingly, “until—until—four days’ hiking and sleeping out at night—” Pemrose waved a letter, just received—“we come to Mount Pocohosette at the heart of the Green Mountains—”

“Pocohosette!” Una sprang erect and clapped her hands. “Why—why that’s where your horse-farm is, Daddy, and I’ve never—never been up there.”

“I only bought it and stocked it last year, down in the valley, the rich bottom lands at the foot, and put a ‘canny’ farmer in charge of my Morgan thoroughbreds.” Mr. Grosvenor laughed. “Well, go on with your program,” he looked at Pemrose.

“The mountain is very wild, so I understand—adventure by the yard!” beamed the blue-eyed girl. “A—a rocky Balcony, half way up, where you can stand on the lip of nothing and look down!”

“Oh-h! lovely,” shivered Una; for her such a breakneck blank had a fascination—fancy could always people it.

“The Guardian—Guardian of our Camp Fire Group hopes to rent some old farmhouse for a week or two.” Pemrose glanced at her letter.

“How about a month or two—eh?” The fluttering eyeglasses in Mr. Grosvenor’s hand reflected, now, the deepest twinkle in the eye above them—is there any role more gratifying to a “high-powered” humanitarian than to play fairy godfather to a group of girls? “If—if I might suggest,” he said slowly, “there’s a jolly nice sort of camp—pine-log cabin—there already, on the breezy sidehill, just a mile and a half above the horse-farm, which I used for hunting quarters, before I was seized with the passion for raising Morgan horses. If your Group will accept the loan of it ... there, I’ll write to the Guardian to-day.”

“Oh-h! Mr. Grosvenor....” The light fairly swooned in Pemrose’s blue eyes.

“And if this daughter of mine will only strike a bargain on the dot and dash ‘teaser’ just to show that she isn’t entirely such stuff as dreams are made of,” with a laugh, “I might have radio installed for you—so that you can, now and again, tune in on a concert, while camping on the edge of nothing.”

“Boys—boys say that they have a respect for any ‘O. G.: Old Girl’, radio slang, who can master code—the ‘crutch’, as they call it—because she has to set her back to the wall to do it,” put in Pemrose roguishly. “And then—” her hand went up, in excitement, to her dimpling chin—“we wouldn’t have to depend altogether on my magic ring, radio ring, for any—any little gleanings from the air.”

“Magic ring—humph!” The fairy godfather’s eyebrows were lifted—just a little superciliously. “What can you pick up with a gewgaw like that—toy set like that? Firing pellets at the moon, eh?” he winked quizzically.

“You forget—you forget that my father is an inventor, sir, and that he has invented—discovered—a new crystal—‘radio soul’—which is an amplifier as well as a detector!” Pemrose’s back was up and to the wall now, her blue eyes flashing. “He—oh, he stumbled upon it while experimenting for my ring. We all know that crystals up to this time have been crude affairs,” vouchsafed the girlish radio fan, her chin in the air.

“A one-stage amplifier, I suppose—as well as a detector, sorting out sounds from the air!” Mr. Grosvenor gasped.

“Oh, by George! child, I did forget that your father is the archwizard who has bombarded the moon with something more ponderable than pellets. If any one can achieve the impossible—”

“He could have made me a ring with just an ordinary galena crystal, or silicon,” murmured Pemrose shyly, as the great man paused, “with which I could have picked up waves—sounds—not very far off. But—with this—my two hundred feet of aërial out to a tree, my spiked heel in the mud,” laughingly, “early in the morning, especially, I can—can glean snatches of everything within five or six miles; further—further, if it’s dot an’ dash—a powerful station sending!”

“Oh, by Jove! I can fancy you standing round, out-of-doors, after daybreak, with your shining halo—headpiece—on.” The tall man threw back his shoulders, with a chuckle. “Well! maybe, you’ll be the woman with power on her head who can ride Revelation.” He winked. “Revelation, son of Revel, Morgan bay, fifteen hands high, good-natured, well-trained—bridle-wise—but needing a rider with ‘pep’ to handle him!”

“I rode with father all last summer.” The “pep” leaked out of Pemrose’s whisper into her red cheeks now—the sunburst of luck was too suffusing.

“Oh! there will be eight or nine horses, I expect, out in the Long Pasture, on the sidehill. You girls can take turns in riding. Revel, gentle little mother-horse—a baby could ride her—I meant to have her brought down here this summer, for Una.”

“And—and I can ride her, up there, father!” Una flung her arms around him—a clinging vine. Suddenly, however, she raised her head, as if afraid that she might be riding Revel in a false habit. “But I did hear-r it, father,” she persisted, “that silvery murmur—hum. And, oh! that wasn’t all—only you’re so unbelieving. While I was listening, wondering—wondering whether I could be strung on wires,” half laughingly, half fearfully, “picking up sounds by radio, something fell at my feet. A little bunch of wild flowers! I touched them. Something stung me.”

Again she held up her slim fingers and looked at them curiously.

“Well, it left ‘nor mark nor burn’, child,” chaffed her father, catching the hand and examining it, too. “Bah! Some boy playing a trick on you—playing on a Jew’s harp! Don’t go into the wood again so—early—”

“It wasn’t! It wasn’t!” Passionately the vine tore itself from its pedestal and maintained its own independent conviction.

But as Una caught the cloud, the vague cloud, descending again upon her father’s face, her soft flower-heart capitulated.

“Well! all right, Daddy, if you want me to think that, I will—I’ll try to,” she pledged. “You’re the dearest prince of a father ever was—and I wouldn’t exchange you even for Pemrose’s Wizard,” with a little moue, a little grimace in the direction of the other girl, who had turned aside and was looking out through the plateglass panels towards the mountains.

“There—I haven’t done your hair this morning, yet.”

Una pressed her father into a low wicker chair, perched upon his knee and began twisting the dark, graying locks around her finger.

Pemrose, over her shoulder, watched them smilingly. She had no cause for envy, she who wore a Wizard’s ring.

“Revel and Revelation!” she murmured beatifically. “But why-y did he look so upset if he, really, didn’t believe that Una heard anything unusual in the wood ... now, that’s what I’d like to know!”

CHAPTER V
The Magic Carpet

“Well—‘Jack!’ Hullo, Unie! Haven’t you said good-bye to your flower clock yet? Good-bye for six weeks to your flower clock! Oh-h! I’m so excited over the start I just don’t know what to do with myself.”

Pemrose Lorry danced down the dew-blanched steps of the Grosvenor mansion, at Lenox, just a little earlier, as clock and dial hand went, than the “mornie” hour at which Una had descended them, seven weeks before, with electrifying results.

The sun was in the act of rising, no May moon-calf now, but a summer Sultan, proclaiming that July was here: Moon of Thunder, but moon of summer idylls, too, of wonderful shadows in the triple greens of brooks, of cardinal flowers fairly “smashing” across the eye with their joy of color in mountain passes—the ideal month for campers.

The garden, the great, terraced garden, seemed to have paled a little in July heat from its flush of June joy.

White flowers predominated—or light ones.

But, here and there, blue larkspur raised its dewy spires, one with the dancing tint of the girl’s eyes.

Gladioli and hollyhocks, tall pages of the rising sun, in their salmon-pink and crimson, bent to awaken their neighbor, the yellow tiger lily, one of the flowers admitted to the lovely democracy of the sundial bed, the flower clock, because it closed sleepily at night, to open at a rather late hour of the morning—as would the dreaming carnation.

Una—Una was saying good-by to that dewy flower clock now, for which she had won a Camp Fire honor for creation—original creation—or if the idea, old as the hills as all ideas are, had been in the “flower-bab” brain of some old botanist, a couple of hundred years before, it had been born anew, impromptu, in hers: she had risen early and watched late, to work it out.

Old Sods, who spurned daylight saving, going by any but the Lord’s time, established custom, had repaired the pretty floral clock after the rude shock of an aviator’s crashing down upon the heads of the sleeping flowers.

Like Andrew, the contradictory old gardener, whose name fitted like a glove, had an affection for the white flower of a girl whose hobby it was!

He had risen early, on the morning after the “fiery note”, had deported sleeping flower families from other beds and wild flowers from their rustic haunts, to build up the new democracy.

But the ruined ash-tree he could not repair. Reduced almost, to a bare trunk, it could no longer roll up the whites of its eyes, when ruffled—show only the pale undersides of its crown of leaves—or it might well have done so, this morning, over a miracle which presently took place with its assistance.

“Hullo—Unie! Unie-Wunie! Well! isn’t the last long farewell to your flower clock said?” cried Pemrose again, dancing down the silvery garden path—her whole warm being simply on the fire-edge of vacation joy. “Oh-h! this is a wonderful day to start for camp. A little ‘chilly-cold’, as Sods would say! But that makes it all the better for hiking. And to-night—to-night we may be sleeping out by the Long Trail! Oh! aren’t you just wild over it, too?”

There was an answering shout, rather faint, from the neighborhood of the dim old sundial, within a stone’s throw of the wood.

“I expect she’s watering the ‘clocksie’ with a final tear,” said Pemrose to herself. “Well! if she is feeling rather blue over saying good-bye to her flowers—goodbye for this year to most of them—on top of the good-bye to her father and mother when they started for Europe yesterday, I—I’m going to spring a diversion on her.... Hi there, Jack,” she called exultingly, “don’t you want the big end of a sensation, a sunrise sensation; don’t you want to listen in on my ring; so early in the morning as this we ought to be able to pick up something, before the sounds ‘dim off’ with bright daylight—there are some strong sending stations near?”

Una rose, a dewy sprite, from the neighborhood of her flower clock.

“Why are the sound waves stronger at night—or in the early morning?” she asked.

“Search me!” The radio amateur shrugged her shoulders gayly. “Father did venture some reason for it, something about ‘molecules’, but it didn’t stick!” She tapped her forehead with a ringed forefinger. “Anyhow, he said it was only an ‘out-shot’, merrily; that every day somebody was making a new out-shot in the direction of radio, as he did when he discovered this new crystal, more wonderful than galena or silicon, or any of the detectors which people have been using, as a ‘radio soul’, up to the present.”

That listening soul was in the girl’s eyes now, her larkspur eyes. She swung the radio head-phone, artistically carved, or engraved, with Camp Fire symbols, connected by an enameled wire with a minute joint in the deep ring upon her forefinger—a ring whose light-hued bakelite setting shimmered like amber in the primrose dawn.

“Besides, at this hour, we’ll have the atmosphere to ourselves—or nearly so—so that we may come in on something that’s broadcasted from some powerful station in town,” she added hopefully, “or we may even steal in on some fashionable amateur near by, in some one of the big camps or houses along the lake! Some radio fiend, with a costly set, who is so crazy over the new game that he has sat up all night over it and is keeping on into daylight ... with my spiked heel in the soft ground of the stream’s bank over there, by the—wood—”

“The wood!” echoed Una fearfully.

“Yes, you haven’t been ‘coming in’ on any funny murmur, uncanny murmur, there, this morning; have you? I believe you’re a brand-new sort of radio ‘bug’ yourself,” chaffingly.

“No—I haven’t.” The dark-eyed girl shivered, white-cheeked, in the dew. “If I did—if I ever should again—I’d have to try to find out what made it—though—”

“No, you wouldn’t. You’d run to earth—to Sods. I know you! Well! come along then.” Pemrose impetuously seized her friend’s hand. “With my heel in the magic carpet—the wet moss, over there—and my two hundred feet of antenna, fine, insulated wire strung out to the poor old ash-tree, we ought to be able to get results—some results, at this hour.”

“Well! you’ll promise to let me listen in, too, you won’t hold on to those magic ear-phones all the time yourself? I know you!” Una glanced at the dangling “halo”, attached to the ring, yielding as she generally did when Pemrose pulled the strings.

“But we’ll have to hurry, we won’t have much time,” she said, “as we leave here before seven, in the big car with Andrew, to pick up the other campers at Greylock village. We haven’t had breakfast yet; and, oh! are we quite sure that we have everything in our packs?” with the tremor of a novice.

“Everything—ducky! Including the last straw!” Pemrose was toying with her ring. “The rolls of colored paper for our flower costumes, the Wild Flower Pageant—your birthday, in August!” she murmured dreamily, really thinking of those radio “fiends” who might, at the moment, be handling their last few messages before broad daylight—on whom she might steal in. “We ought to have sent them up with the camp stores and extra clothing to the horse-farm—those rolls. When it comes to the last long mile—”

“Pshaw! they don’t weigh any more than two pinheads,” laughed Una, swaying like “white weed”, herself, her dark eyes, like her flowers, “dressing themselves up in gold light.” “And the farmers’ wives, their little children, they have so little in their lives!”

“Um-m. There may be very few ‘natives’ to admire us,” Pemrose was still showing off the ring to the sunrise, “unless—unless you include quack-natives,” merrily, “Treff and his father, who have a camp about ten miles from the horse-farm.”

“Poor Treff!” She dimpled. “Didn’t we have a time teasing him into getting well after his awful note? I believe if the world came to an end to-morrow that boy would call it a ‘note’.... But I like a boy who has a brown speck in one gray eye, just one—his fun-mill!”

“Wonder if he’s got a new ‘bus’ yet?” speculated Una.

“And whether he’s ‘pulling any more bones’ with his radio outfit?” laughed the amateur. “Well! I’ll tell you what, I’m going to loop my aërial round the old ash-tree, this morning, just to make up for what it suffered through him!”

And now was the moment when that noble white ash, upon the garden side of the wall, might have rolled up the whites of its eyes, ruffled the pale lining of its leaves—if it had any left to ruffle—as a girl, clambering up, looped her aërial, her shining wire, as loftily as she could around the blackened trunk.

“Eh! What’s the merricle now?” grunted old Sods to the waking flowers, as he peeped, from a distance, over that garden wall.

And they nodded that they did not know, that they might be still dreaming, half open, as they saw that girl bounding lightly back over the wall to the brook’s edge, to slip a steel creeper upon her heel, the same that a girl might strap upon her daring heel, in icy weather—and don a listening halo.

“You—you’re not going any further into the wood?” Una probed the pines with glances, half fearful, half fascinated.

“No-o, ‘Peerie-Weerie?’ How are you going to stand sleeping out by the Long Trail to-night, if you don’t ‘side-dish’ your fancies?” Pemrose tilted the halo rakishly askew upon her little dark head. “Just look at the ring!” she gasped. “Isn’t it a winner?”

A winner it truly was; fraught every inch with glamour, the divine glamour of ingenuity.

“Four hundred turns of the finest hairwire wound round it, in this bobbin-like groove! Isn’t that—that elfin, if you like it?” The blue eyes danced. “And this ‘atomy’ lever which moves the cat-whisker to touch the crystal—father’s new crystal that takes the shine out of the others! And the miniature ‘bind-posts’, joints—three—one hooked on to my ground connection,” the amateur displayed her heel, “another to my aërial—the third to my hearing halo; father—oh! was there ever anybody like him—” it was a transfigured sob—“worked over these magnetic ear-phones, too, to make them extra sensitive.”

“I wish—if only they could pick up a little speech—music—for us,” murmured Una, half her faint-heart in the wood, “if—if ever so dimly—faintly!”

“Speech—music—before six o’clock in the morning! You don’t ask much!” scoffed Pemrose. “I don’t suppose we’ll even get a twitter of telephony—the twitter of an early bird.” She laughed excitedly. “Listen—listen to that early bird, up there, in the tallest pine,” pushing the ear-phones up, “do you know what he’s saying—that brown thrasher? A brown thrasher it is! He’s chanting advice to the farmers:

“‘Shuck it, shuck it, sow it, sow it,

Plow it, plow it, hoe it, hoe it.’

“And he doesn’t know that he’s away behind the times with his old song!” Pemrose’s black brows were lifted archly. “That the air is just full of advice ‘stuff’ about him to which he’s deaf: ships, far out at sea, signaling reports about the weather, local Weather Bureaus sending in radio reports to headquarters—perhaps, we may come in on some of that! Oh! was there ever—ever, before, a time when it was so much better to be a girl than a bird?”

Fairly translated, now, in her excitement, that favored girl was selecting a nice, wet, oozing spot in the moss of the magic carpet into which to dig her heel—that fairy carpet more wonderful than ever was genii’s for transporting the one who stepped on it, thus, afar—so far as one sense was concerned, at least.

“Good ground connection!” she murmured. “That ought to bring results. Of course anything we do pick up will be awfully faint, just dot and dash, easier to glean—and in which two-thirds of the messages are sent out. Hus-sh!”

Deeper she ground her heel into the sparkling moss—Pemrose Lorry, radio amateur. She straightened her halo. She moved the bronze cat-whisker to touch the crystal and stood a statue as, the magic ring “rubbed”, those highly sensitive ear-phones became active—began to glean from the morning air.

“Do you ... are you—oh! are you—getting—anything?” Una watched her, hands clasped.

“Hush!” frowned the radio fan. “Your—your hor-rid racket!”

“I didn’t make any. Needn’t be so peeved!... You have—have to make allowance for radio ‘fiends’; they’re savage if you disturb them!” murmured Una mischievously to the pines—her interest was beginning to be concentrated on the experiment now.

Five minutes passed. A finger was pointed at her, shooting her straight through the heart with thrill.

“Are you ... oh! are you ...” she ventured again.

“I—am.”

“Wha-at?” in a bewitched whisper.

“Just a little dot an’ dash—faint ticking—weather station in town, couple of miles off—three maybe—but I could—understand.”

She gave her hand to the sunrise, the inventor’s daughter, the new crystal flashing like a diamond. Never did queen of the middle ages, never did Begum of the Indies dream of such a ring upon her forefinger.

“L-let—me. I have been studying code a little, since father—”

Una’s lips barely fluttered upon the whisper, like a flower.

And now—now the halo was upon her dark head. She was listening in through the other girl’s ring, through the other girl’s heel, through the other girl’s heart, as it were, to the faint, faint murmur in the air.

But a smattering of code could make nothing of that swooning tick.

Again Pemrose transferred the headpiece.

And now time as well as space was annihilated—even the approaching departure forgotten.

Una began to feel as if a Meg-of-the-many-feet, a centipede, was stealing down her back, but its hundred little feet were silver-pointed—tipped with light.

“I—got—it!” Again a finger was pointed at her—not the ring finger, that was held out level. “Not—not dot an’ dash, this time: whisper—speech, I got it; one amateur asking another—‘play a few holes of golf—before breakfast!’” Never had a girl’s eyebrows gone so high in the world of wonder, of mischief, before, as those black ones lifted over the blue, listening eyes—for every organ of the body was now “listening in.”

“Word here, word there—repeated an’ repeated—I got it. B-but what’s this? Never—never singing, before six o’clock in the morning. So-o faint! Oh! it seems—seems to come from the far edge of nothing.”

And to the “far edge of nothing” Pemrose Lorry listened, every pulse an ear, until her hearing, so trained in this new aërial communication, began to pick up syllables—words—faint as far moon-shine, indeed, yet half-clear upon the air:

“Night ... done, stars ... to rest,
Perhaps in soft, white clouds ... a nest,
Among your—dewy flowers....”

“Oh! l-let me!” shivered Una, half-sobbing—transfigured sobs.

Mechanically Pemrose transferred the headpiece.

“Among ... dewy flowers ... see you stand,

You do not know ... in my hand!”

“I hate it! Oh-h, I hate it—it.” Passionately the other girl tore the phones from her ears. “It’s like the hum—” the little stand in her right dark eye was fixed in fear—“makes me feel queer—creepy—I don’t know why!” She began to cry. “I don’t want to listen in! I’ll—never—”

“Nonsense!” said Pemrose sharply. “Only some amateur—crazy amateur—singing into a horn at a near-by station, quite near-by, that’s ‘going strong’!”

But, for a moment, her bright face had looked “sparrow-blasted”, too.

Far away, in the silence, a fox barked.

CHAPTER VI
A Gentleman

It was the “yamf” of a fox again. The sun was high now. The brown byroad stretched away like a ribbon between the fringing woods that rose on either side of it, screening the mountain’s grandeur, shadowing the path of the gliding automobile.

“Now where is he—the waif beastie?” said Andrew, peering ahead into the sunlight from his chauffeur’s seat, as, once more, that “yamf” rose, wild and desperate, between a cackle and bark of pain—heard above the purr of the smooth machine.

“It sounds—sounds as if he were near, quite near, oh! just around the bend ahead,” gasped Pemrose, sitting up, a statue, in the tonneau, where, side by side with Una—a rather pale and preoccupied “Jack”—she was fairly cushioned with glee over being off at last; off for a six weeks’ season of grace and growing among the Green Mountains, lying over the line in Vermont.

Andrew had vacation freedom in his veins, too. His employer had gone abroad. For several weeks he would be at nobody’s beck but his wife’s. Transformed into a boy again, by visions of fishing with a “canny” rod in mountain brooks, he had been singing softly to himself, at intervals, and much to the girls’ delight:

“Said the trout to the fluke,

Where is your new crook?”

For the last speeding quarter of a mile this had given way to a pleasing dirge of:

“The crow kilt the pussy, O!

The crow kilt the pussy, O!

The muckle cat sat down and grat

On the back of Johnny Hoosie, O!”

The last “O” was long-drawn. Across it came the ill-dashed “yamf” of a fox.

“Something wrong with his crying pipes. That’s no barkin’ an’ fleeing sound,” said Andrew, flashing a glance over his shoulder at the girls behind. “Zooks! What a mad yammer he’s makin’ the morn!”

A sad yammer it was, with a note in it of supplication that in turn became a jabber, as of cackling laughter.

“Dear sakes! he’s cacklin’ like a hen—a hen, at a hen-wile.” The chauffeur leaned forward over his steering wheel. “Ah! there he is—the puir beastie. Dog out!” proclaimed the voice which had said the same of the falling aviator. “Ha! Trapped he is! Trapped, by that worming snake-fence! Trapped—an’ by the open roadside!”

Trapped! The girls shrank together, shuddering—young shoulder to shoulder.

“Deil tak’ it now! if this isn’t a sight to comb ’em against the hair—make the whole day seem ill-hued,” ground out Andrew. “Taken in a skunk trap, the bit beastie! This is no season for trappin’ foxes. Taken in a trap that some farmer has set for a skunk that’s been bothering his chickens! Weary fa’ the loon that set it here by the roadside!”

He shot another glance over his shoulder, the fatherly chauffeur, at the two lassies in his charge. Una had covered her ears with her hands. Pemrose was sitting tragically upright. Her face was pale. In her blue eyes was the glint half-baffled, but not routed, which lit her father’s when, driven to the last ditch of inventive ingenuity, he fought Nature for some discovery.

“Noo, what had I better do?” panted the chauffeur to himself. “Knock the puir thing on the head here now, afore the lassies? To drive on and leave him to die by slow inches in that ill-teethed trap—that’s na possible.... Ods! but he looks hangit-like—shamed—shamed o’ being caught—like—this.”

There was moisture in Andrew’s eye now. Automatically, almost—and looking round for a club—he had slowed down.

And from the ditch at the roadside, the wild mountain byroad, the red fox eyed him, groveling in his last ditch.

“All his tricks an’ snecks no use to him now—an’ that’s what he seems to feel, by fegs!”

The mist in the chauffeur’s pitying eye grew more blinding, putting out for him the flame in the fox’s, as the poor maddened waif-beastie dragged the steel trap shamefacedly to and fro by the three-rail fence, curving snake-fence, that bounded the byroad.

Suddenly, thrown into a new panic, new frenzy, by the sight of the halting car—such a juggernaut to his dimming eyes—he turned to that fence for the hundredth time and tried to climb it, dragging the skunk-trap, with him, but was pulled back by the six-foot chain ending in the indomitable clog and bolt that anchored the trap to earth.

“Oo-ooo! Ah-ah-ah-kak!” The last note of earth’s agony was in that gibbering howl which told of a hind-leg almost torn from its socket, as the wild thing fell into the ditch again and helplessly rolled there, biting at his slim, white-stockinged, blood-wet leg—at the trap, at the humbling dust all lashed to lather by his fine red brush and the foam of his dripping mouth.

“Oh! I c-can’t stand it. I can’t stand it. Do something! Do-o something.” Una was standing upright in the car, pale and trembling in the silky, rose-lined, fur coat which Andrew’s wife had tossed into the automobile at the last moment, with a pleading: “Put it on, my lamb, the morn’s chilly an’ ye look ‘blenchit’,” when she had come in, shivering, from the garden—from experimenting with the radio ring.

Simultaneously with her cry the red fox, in his new terra-cotta coat—poor little skinny ten-pound victim—ceased beating the earth with his bushy tail, that had a creamy powder puff at the tip, sat up on his haunches, ruff bristling, mouth stretching in a tortured grin over the bared, white fangs, chest heavily panting—and looked at them.

“Gosh! he’s all in. He—he looks as if he was making sifflication to us.”

The cry was wrenched from Andrew; his answer to that dumb supplication was to throw the throttle open and shoot the big car forward.

But, like a flash, Pemrose was upon him from behind.

“Oh! he is begging us. He is begging us,” she cried, clutching throttle and wheel herself, so that the big car rocked in groaning indecision. “We—we just can’t go on and leave him—leave him to die—slowly.”

“Who’s about doin’ it?” growled Andrew. “Sit down, lassie. Don’t tak’ the fling-strings or ye’ll hae us in the ditch. I’m just for driving on to the top o’ yon hill, there; then I’ll come back an’ free him—I’ll come back an’ win’-free him.”

The girl half loosed her hold, but a glance at the chauffeur’s leaking eye-corners and she was upon him fiercely again.

“You mean—you mean you’ll come back and kill him—knock him on the head with an iron ‘jack’ or a club. Oh! I won’t have it. I won’t have it,” she raved. “’Tisn’t the time for killing foxes, any way. We m-must, we can, we may free him now, somehow—somehow.”

She was jabbering like the wild thing, herself, all the while that something was struggling to the fore in her—hereditary resourcefulness—the inventor’s ingenuity.

Revelation came, as it always does, in a staggering flash.

She whipped round upon her girl companion, so white-cheeked and whimpering.

“Your c-coat, Una!” She seized upon the fine beaver, which had, presumably, been stripped from some trapped animal, too—but that did not at the moment matter. “Your fur coat! We could throw it over him, hold him down, while—while Andrew springs the trap.”

“Do ye think I’m a madded fool?” came angrily from the chauffeur.

“Oh! we don’t. We know you’re a brick. We know you’ll help us. Oh! don’t you—don’t you see how this would spoil all the trip?”

She shivered—and in the paling forgetmenot blue of the eyes near his own Andrew saw the blight that would fall over the hiking start, at least, and cursed his luck that they should meet up with the “black cow”—misfortune—this early in the day.

The fox still sat, making “sifflication.”

“But—but you must help, too, Una.” Pem was plucking the smart little costly coat from her friend’s shoulders, as she spoke. “You—you’ll have to help hold him down.”

“Oh! I daren’t. He might—bite.” Great, glassy tears rolled over Una’s eyelids, down her cheeks.

Did—did one of those passive tears, as it fell upon her bare hand, suddenly become a detector, a crystal detector, through which she picked up something from the air, by eye not by ear now, the memory, the ghost of a faint claim, it seemed, wafted from somewhere, made upon somebody—through a radio ring.

“Yes, I-I’ll help! Oh-h! it must be awful to be trapped.” She stumbled from the car.

“Warry—warry now!” Andrew was springing, at the same time, from his seat, drawing on thick gloves. “Hoot! I suppose a mon has got to make the ill-best of a bad job—but he’ll be an ill one to tackle, all tooth an’ claw.”

Already Pemrose, with the glossy huddle of soft beaver in her arms, was stealing towards the tortured thing that groveled and cackled again upon three legs—the fourth stuck out straight.

“Now, Unie, now quick—jump in—hold it down over him, tight,” she gasped “Over his head!”

And while girlish pluck pinned the coat—and the stifled form under it—to earth, Andrew’s quick hand found the spring of the steel trap, shaped like a bear’s jaws, and pressed it.

A convulsion under the smothering coat! A scraping—tearing and ripping!

They jumped all three.

All four! The fox jumped, too.

He had a free try at the fence now. But he was weak. He fell back—licked his leg passionately and tried again.

He was over. Looking neither to the right hand nor to the left, he was limping between waving grasses across the strip of rank meadow that separated the snake-fence from the woods.

“Fair gude day to ye!” grunted Andrew. “But ye might say: ‘Bethankit’!”

The wild thing reached the wood-line, brush waving.

Suddenly, before the trees swallowed him—and the undergrowth—he half-halted, half-turned—shot a backward glance.

“He’s a gentleman,” cried Pemrose. “That did mean, ‘Thank you’!”

“He’s left me to mend a big tear in the lining of my coat,” said Una. “But, oh! how awful to be trapped.”

CHAPTER VII
Fit for Fit

“Well, grace and growing to ye!”

Andrew, bareheaded, stood beside his car and waved his cap to the hikers, the brave band of hiking girls.

“Grace and growing! There, you’ve given us a ‘motto’,” said the Guardian, smiling at him.

“We’re ‘gracie’ without, as well as within.” Pemrose danced up to the gray-haired chauffeur, with the humorous eye—her own blue as the wild chicory, that wayside friend, by the mountain highroad. “How do you like our hiking rig—Minute Girl costume?” Thus she challenged him, thrusting out a bloomered knee.

“No flick-ma-feathers about it, but it’s ‘snod.’” Andrew stroked his shaven chin. “The mountains an’ ye will be fit-for-fit, I reckon.”

“Oh! if that isn’t a lovely compliment,” the response came with laughter—a perfect heart-shot, as the girl’s eyes danced off to timbered hills, the Green Haystack, Moose Horn Mountain, summits of the lesser Taconic Range, upon the threshold of the Green Mountains—to one dim giant, Mount Anthony, in the hazy distance.

“Fit-for-fit—chums, yes!” she caroled:

“Serene, aloof and calm they stand,
The gateway of our summer land,
Does one, unheeding, pass them by,
With careless or indiff’rent eye,
They stare, forbidding, cool and grim,
For they are not at home to him.
But we who love their ev’ry look
Like some enchanting fairy book....”

She threw out her arms towards them.

“We are their friends—they open wide,

To welcome Camp Fire Girls inside!

“That’s our marching song, part of it. She made it up for us—wrote it.” Pemrose glanced with fostering pride at Una, as she swung the dark poncho-roll carried over her right shoulder, with a rope crossing the left hip.

“What ‘Missie’ did! Miss Una!” To the elderly chauffeur his employer’s sixteen-year-old daughter was “Missie” still, as when she was six and he built her “dillycastles” on the seashore. “Hasn’t she the gift, now?” he murmured paternally. “But when it comes to the long tail o’ the day, will she be a home-body still upon the rough trail? I guess ye’ll all be drooping, ‘neb an’ feather.’ And she—she’ll be trailing that pack ahind her—I’m thinking!”

“Don’t—don’t be an ‘ill-dashed’ prophet, Andrew! If she does, we’ll help her out,” pledged Pemrose.

“An’—an’ when it comes to sleepin’ out, the night—in the dark o’ the wee ’oor, when—when restly ghosts walk that have to be shot through with a silver sixpence?” The old chauffeur winked. “An’, if a’ tales be true, that’s no lie!”

“They aren’t loyal to Uncle Sam if they wouldn’t compromise on a dime,” declared Pemrose. “Eh! Copper-nob?”

Gayly she flung one arm around a fifteen-year-old girl, in Minute Girl hiking costume, whose hair, bronze as the cat-whisker in the radio ring, held warm lights, now, as if the flame from her heart nested there.

“This is our Camp Fire sister, Lura Lovell, whose name by the Council Fire is O-te-go, meaning ‘Fire There’!” Pem ruffled the wavy “copper-nob.” “And here’s Tan-pa—‘White Bird’—Dorothy Bush. And our ‘Beam of Light’, La-tow—in everyday life Frances Goddard. Oh! yes, and more than a dozen others of the Victory Group of Camp Fire Girls.”

Pemrose pointed towards the red, white and blue Minute Girls, a score in all, including Guardian and Assistant Guardian, now on their toes, for departure.

“Fegs! ‘sonsie’ it sounds an’ bonnie ye all are, red-cheekit an’ red-lippit, ‘like the smith o’ Dunkelly’s wife’,” chuckled Andrew half to himself—though his lingering glance made an exception of Una. “And—maybe—ye won’t flinch before the fiery stick?”

“Eh! What’s that—fiery stick? What does it mean, anyhow?” The fire in Lura challenged the “stick.” “Hard luck! Hardship! Reality—eh?” She twinkled.

“Summat like it,” murmured the chauffeur.

“Oh! you can’t scare us with that.” Pemrose flung her arms round two of her “sisters”, rubbing a cheek, on either side, against theirs. “True ‘comerading’ can face any kind of camp luck; can’t it, my ‘hearties’?”

“Aye! she’s ilka body’s body, with her bonny, blue-lit face,” thought the chauffeur catching the beam from those blue eyes and throwing it back. “But the other—our lassie.” He caught his breath. “She’s ‘eye-sweet’! An’ she’s the black o’ her parents’ eye—meanin’ the apple. If hurt—should—come to her.”

One might say that Una was the apple of his grim eye, too—judging by the anxiety with which it rested upon her—the parting anxiety.

Una was looking, in somewhat homesick fashion at him, too, now, as if she was burning all her bridges behind her, as she tossed him the smart little fur coat, with its rose-satin lining torn by the red fox’s tooth and claw.

“Ask ‘Mither Jeanie’ to mend it for me,” she said, playfully alluding to Andrew’s wife, “and send it along to me, to the horse-farm. If we don’t get back until September and it’s cold among the mountains, I may need it. Good-bye Andrew—my ‘fuffle-daddy’.... I call him that since he tossed me, like a doll, into the back of the car and took all the battering—all the glass of the windshield in himself,” she murmured in Pemrose’s ear, turning away with a tear in her dark eye from the parting hand-shake with the chauffeur.

One and all of the band of twenty now shook hands with Andrew—all with the momentary forlorness of burning bridges, as they looked at the great purple-cushioned, radio-equipped touring car, symbol of civilization—at his long-coated form towering beside it.

Andrew’s eye was correspondingly misty: “Fegs! I’m sorry I threated ye with the fiery stick—as I couldn’t stick by ye to meet it,” he muttered dryly. “Well! fair good luck to ye, ma’am,” to the Guardian. “An’ may ye find yerselves happy an’ home-at, among the old mountains!”

The wild mountains were “home-at” with them—very much at home to Camp Fire Girls—so the echoes presently testified, catching up the blithe chorus written by Pemrose to Una’s marching song:

“Brace up your packs and march along,
And set the echoes ringing,
Till woods and hills and Camp Fire Girls
Are all ‘Wo-he-lo!’ singing.”

“All Wo-he-lo singing! Wo-he-lo for aye!” With the soft cheer on her lips, the arm of the blue-eyed girl stole round her “play-marrow,” Una, heart of her heart, chum of chums—play-marrow was Andrew’s word for that girlish affection which, begun in youth, is a star that never sets until the Camp Fire trail is done. “You’re not down-hearted: No-o!” she insisted, catching the lingering little cloud on the “eye-sweet” face. “You can’t be—honey. Look at the wild flowers.”

“Ha:

“Vervain and dill,

Hindereth witches of their will!”

laughed Una, beguiled by the bait immediately, as she stooped to pick a purplish blue spike of the wayside vervain—cousin to the garden verbena—to which a bee had clung, asleep.

“In one way she’ll be more at home in the wilderness than any of us—being near kin to the wild flowers,” smiled the Guardian, following, with her eyes on the tenderfoot among her Group—its exotic—Una—as the latter darted off after boneset and yellow sow thistle now.

“See the sow thistle is one of the flowers that close, go to sleep at night—and open in the morning, quite early,” laughed its captor, holding it up; “so I’ve admitted it to my flower clock—garden flower clock; bindweed, chickweed and pimpernel are some of the others—pimpernel, lazy little weather prophet!”

“No eye can see, no tongue can tell,

The virtues of the pimpernel,”

laughed Lura. “Come along, ducky, your brain is a regular flower basket.”

“With a ‘fancy’ legend wrapped round the stem of each flower in the basket!” murmured Pemrose, her finger to her laughing lip. “No wonder she thinks she hears sounds in the woods at daybreak—fairy singing.... Oh! what’s—that? Kittens—are they? No-o!”

“Coons! Three—three baby racoons trotting across the road!” The Guardian clasped her hands. “Oh! girls, we are being admitted to the fellowship of the wild.”

“Oh! weren’t they the funniest little gray things—no, buff—bushy tails—trotting from wood, oh! from wood to wood, to find their mother.” Every lip was gasping now, every eye penetrating, trying to penetrate the thicket of roadside scrub into which the wild things had vanished.

“Gracious! The mountains are being at home to us, indeed—welcoming us, as fit-for-fit,” cooed Pemrose exultantly.

“Making us pay toll, too, aren’t they—as fit-for-fit?” The Guardian eased the pack upon her back, the neat camper’s roll which carried much more than the poncho, warm sleeping-bag and personal equipment—the limit for her girls, most of them. “Just look at that mountain road before us, there, standing upon its hind-legs—and feeling for the sky!” she added merrily.

“And when we have wrestled with that one, then there’ll be another at the same rearing stunt,” laughed Dorothy. “Oh, dear! I have a hag-a-back already—a pain between my shoulders.”

“But ‘chivy’ aches and march along,
And set the echoes sing-ing,
Till woods and hills and laughing glens,
Are with ‘Wo-he-lo!’ ringing!”

broke forth the marching chorus again, tiding them over that snaky, brown hill and the next—landing them in the lap of luncheon—luncheon by a mountain brook—with a deer crashing in the bushes near by—and a black-throated warbler singing from a bush: “Oh! ’tis sweet here—’tis sweet here,” as a naturalist has translated his song.

“We’ll postpone lighting a fire and cooking a real meal until this evening,” said the Guardian, “when our first day’s ten-mile hike triumphantly accomplished, we hope to strike the Long Trail running from end to end of the Green Mountains.”

“But we only follow that for a short distance,” said Frances, “for five miles or so.”

“Just the listening radius of my ring!” Miser-like, Pemrose glanced at her pack, shrined in whose heart lay the jewel more wonderful than any boon fairy had ever bestowed, jealously sheathed, lest one homesick tear or the tiniest raindrop falling upon the new crystal should mar its magic.

“Perhaps we may come in on a concert with it to-night,” said Terry Ross, Assistant Guardian, baptized Theresa, ardently. “I’m just—dying—to ‘listen in’ on that ring!”

“No radio concerts until we reach Mount Pocohosette—our camp on the sidehill—at the end of our four days’ hike,” was Pemrose’s answer. “Una and I did pick up a little faint, faint singing with it once, but ... where is Una now?”

“Off searching for an evening primrose near that fence corner,” said Robin Drew, a bright-eyed girl. “She wants to find one all ‘tuggled’ up, to sleep, as she says. She can tell you the exact hour at which every wild flower opens and closes—those that do. Oh-h! I never knew a girl whose brain was such a flower basket.”

“I fancy her father hopes to find a little ‘sand’ among the flowers when he gets back.” Pemrose dimpled slyly. “There, I didn’t mean to be slangy,” with a sidelong, blue glance at the Guardian.

“Her father! Oh! think of what he’s doing for us, that camp on the sidehill, radio—horses—Revel and Revelation ... in more than horseflesh, too!” It was a general ecstatic outburst that creamed the cake and seasoned sandwiches—made the brook water effervescent. “Oh-h—to reach Mount Pocohosette—that horse farm in the bottom-lands!”

“Three more days’ hiking—and four nights, sleeping out, as a Rubicon,” laughed Terry Ross, a tall, twenty-year-old maiden, long-legged, slender-backed.

“Oh! we’ll cross it—head up to the last step,” protested valiant voices. “Don’t be too sure. Wait until the tail of the day—and the last long mile,” suggested others. “It’s only one o’clock now.”

Six o’clock—and a sun setting! Setting royally behind hills that rose, detached, pell-mell, like huge, green bubbles, on either side of a mountain trail! Hills clad upon their lower slopes by acres of feathery podgum—hairy as Esau’s hands—with dark spruce woods above!

Six o’clock—and packs weighing heavily! Una next door to trailing hers by its cross ropes in the dust—almost like the can at the old dog’s tail—but the hand of Pemrose or warm “Copper-nob” steadied it upon her back!

Six o’clock! And it was not their fit-for-fit song of the Mountains At Home that steadied pluck now, kept girlish feet from slipping backward on the trail but the song made sacred in mud and mettle by their brothers over there:

“Oh! it’s not the pack that you carry on your back,

Nor the rifle on your shoulder,

Nor the five-inch crust of khaki-colored dust,

That makes you feel your limbs are growing older,

It’s not the hike on the hard turnpike

That wipes away your smile,

Nor the socks of sister’s that raise the blooming blisters,

It’s the last—long—mile!”

CHAPTER VIII
The Wee Hour

“Oh! it’s not the dusty highway,

That—Camp Fire Girls don’t mind!

And it’s not the thirsty hiking,

There are always springs—to find.

Oh! it’s not the mountain climbing,

Our jol-ly packs are light!

It’s not even snakes nor ’squitoes,

It’s the—sleeping out—at—night.

Around the waning camp fire the wail of a parody rang, voicing or burlesquing the sentiments of a dozen Camp Fire Girls.

The other half dozen were loftily silent. They were seasoned campers—or supposed they were. They had dwelt much upon the hike on the bliss of the poncho-bed, with a mattress of pine or spruce boughs—the bliss that never clung to wall or bedstead of a paper-hung room.

rang the murmur, echoing, dreamy.

“It’s not the stars for big candle tonight; it’s the moon, a full, bright moon; there she’s rising now,” said a seventeen-year-old girl, Madeline Fitch. “How about a ring concert?”

“We’re too far from any strong sending station here, I think, to pick up anything by radio—even a murmur, with such a tiny set,” said Pemrose Lorry. “But I’ll try it if you like. Here, Unie,” to her girl chum, “you put the ring on; I’ll play ‘ground’—sink my heel into the edge of the spring—there. But, heavens! you mustn’t pickle the crystal,” she was gasping deliriously, a moment later, interposing a quick palm to catch the little tear of homesickness and novelty—swollen, perhaps by the remembrance of strange sensations experienced when last she had “listened in” on the ring—which came trickling down Una’s pretty nose.

“Father says a drop of water, a horrid little teardrop, would spoil even a galena crystal—and much more this new one. I have to be as careful of it,” the inventor’s daughter caught her breath, “as he is with some of his priceless laboratory treasures, his rare quartz tuning forks, for instance, that give the purest pitch of any sound.... Oh! I wish we were at camp now—so that I really, might talk with him, by radio—fancy holding a wireless ‘hamfest’,—that’s the word, not a ‘gabfest’—with him—a hundred miles off!”

The longing tear was in Pemrose’s eye now, a flashing droplet, but there was no fear of its pickling the sensitive “radio soul”, the new crystal; instantly dashed away it was as she hurried to loop her aërial round a distant tree—with a word to one and another of the girls to watch the tip of Una’s nose.

But nothing could be picked up from the air with the ring to-night, save occasionally a “dying tick”, as its owner put it, the swooning ghost of dot and dash, so faint, so very faint—remotely random—that it seemed to come from the other side of the world—or from the moon, itself, untranslatable signaling—and the experiment was abandoned in favor of turning in early.

“Oh! isn’t this—heavenly?” breezed “Copper-nob”, the torch in her heart, blown by the night-gusts, inspiring her lips as, presently, she felt the cool air, light as a kiss, upon her cheek, which nestled beside Dorothy’s in the poncho-bed, formed of two ponchos, upper and lower, upon the pine-bough mattress, on the ground.

“Hea-ven-ly—oh-h!” The general, blissful sigh went round.

“What a light blue the sky is—quite light blue! I nev-er thought a night-sky could be so bright ... and the tree shadows so black, ink-black, against it! If, only, I could paint it,” murmured an artistic girl, Naomi Larned, who was seldom or never divorced mentally from sketch book or palette.

“But what—what’s that?” Una was sitting up with a scream, dragging Pemrose, poncho-mate, with her—they had been lying down about fifteen minutes.

“Only a bat—barn bat flying round—or maybe—maybe he’s a cave-dweller,” murmured the other sleepily. “Isn’t he funny—just like an aviator, doing stunts? An aviator doing stunts!” she repeated it, nodding.

“Listen—listen to the funny noise he—his wings—make: ‘Eb-eb-eb-eb-ob-ob!’ Oh! I think he’s—weird—horrible.” Una shuddered, her face in the moonlight, white—shining—as the night-blooming cereus, lifted over the dark poncho-edge to the peopled sky.

“Now, ‘Jack’,” Pemrose used the rallying nickname, “you promised you wouldn’t be a ‘weer’, as Treff would call it, a fanciful ‘peerie-weerie’,” with a low, “dropping-off” laugh, “frightened of nothing—and getting every one worked up. Lie down-and go to sleep,” mumblingly. “I’m so—”

“Two of them!” shivered Una—and shook her. “Oh-h, mercy! they’re flying down close—close-near us. One almost touched me.” She stifled a low scream by biting at the poncho-edge.

The “weeriness”, like hay fever, spread.

Girls were sitting up all along the line, now, upon the moonlight bedding-ground, on the edge of a grove, where the taper-like stems of slim white birches, their spreading crowns, were the black and silver candlesticks that held the stars for bedroom candlelight.

Across that strange light blue of the sky, so remote from the azure of daytime, and embroidered with inky shadows, black patches were darting and zigzagging in wavy lines, now side-slipping downward, on a wing-tip, like a tilted aëroplane, turning a fantastic somersault, soaring again—to take, with lightning rapidity, a nose-dive after prey.

A nose-dive that brought them, each in turn, down very near to the row of dark ponchos.

“Goody—ginger! Just like aviators—stunt-flying! After insects, I suppose—and any little bird, nestling, foolish enough to be out—late!”

To Pemrose, rousing to watch them, that skinny-winged sky-cavalry, darkly maneuvering, was part of the wonderful fascination of the night—of the night-side of Nature just being turned outward.

So it was to most of the girls—camping girls.

To just one or two tenderfoots—Una in especial—the bats were vampires, when they flew too close—with the low, eerie “eb-eb-eb-ob!” of swooping wings.

“They—they make the sky look ‘ghoulie’,” she whispered.

And as night wore on and the ghouls sought their barns or caves, she did not easily settle down again.

“That black—black something s-stealing towards—us!” She was pinching Pemrose’s arm, once more. “Oh! it looks like a bull—a bear.”

“Elephant, perhaps! Can’t you see its tusks waving?” jeered her poncho-mate. “I’ll tell you what it is; it’s great black, stalking—worry-cow. Go to sleep.”

“All—the funny little noises!” rippled on the nervous tenderfoot, who now felt a Meg-many-foot, or half-a-dozen of them—clammy centipedes—crawling down her back, not silver-footed, either. “And the low boughs, swinging, they look like people! The birds—listen—they’re so restless, aren’t they—sleep restlessly! Oh-h, de-ar! what’s—that? What, ever, is that?”

It was the sharp, slicing “Whit-whit-whir-r!” of a night hawk’s wings. It was a frenzied, torn little “Cheep! Cheep!” with the momentary flutter of a tiny body—two dark bodies—in mid-air; a fidgetty bird scared out of the nest by the hawk’s proximity and caught in the night hawk’s talons.

Una bewailed the nocturnal tragedy, sobbing softly.

But this was the fiery stick of reality waving luridly across the cinematograph of worked-up sensations—she ceased creating worry-cows.

Girls really steadied down now, settling to sleep, only arousing, once in a while, to chase a stone from under an inquisitive elbow or hip, where they had flattered themselves the bedding-ground was perfectly clear.

And so it drew on towards the plaintive stillness of the wee hour, one o’clock, when, midnight past, the lusty Night seems to shake its dark tresses and settle down for a breathing spell, too, before morn-blink.

Pemrose was awake. She had been dreaming of the radio ring; that with her heel in the fostering wet, it had added to its magic the gift of transporting her—and she was back in the laboratory with her inventive father. She had let one of his rare quartz tuning forks fall and had broken it.

She awoke to the wee ’oor ... and the rattle of a chain.

“I—I m-mustn’t wake Una—at any cost. What is it—where is it?... It must be after midnight—now.”

Pemrose Lorry raised her cheek stealthily from the poncho-pillow. Talk of “wuzziness” now! Her skin began to ooze at every pore, chilly as the dew around.

It was the mournful clank of a chain again. She saw that “Copper-nob”, near her, was half sitting up, too, swaying like a feather backwards and forwards. She could almost hear the other girl’s teeth chatter.

Her own gave a frozen click, click—and set suddenly, as if in lockjaw.

It was no figment of the imagination now, nor yet a mist-fawn of the night—a pale, gliding mist-shape—there was a something white before her.

It bobbed and bowed towards her, about fifty yards away. It accomplished a weird levitation, ascending automatically into the moonlight—dropping again. And there appeared another white form, poised above it—to the faint, far rattle of a chain.

Lightminded ghosts, they teetered up and down, blanching the moonbeams, now checkered by a thin cloud.

And at the sight “Copper-nob’s” nerves gave way; she “loosed” a shriek that startled everybody.

But it did not exorcise the apparitions.

There they were, undeniable as ever, sketching their chalk-white outlines against the night—so that the heart of the stoutest melted within her bones—in the solemn stillness of the wee’oor—and her flesh crept.

“This is Ghost Craft ... and we’ve none of us—none of us taken honors in that.” Pemrose’s faint mischief was curdled by an eerie note.

“Ghosts that have to be shot through with a silver sixpence!” Andrew’s nonsense came back to her.

And the qualifying: “An’ if a’ tales be true, that’s no lie!” could not resolve into thin air the spectres before her.

Twenty pairs of eyes could testify to them, seesawing up and down in silvery balances of moonbeams—now one, now another tipping the scale.

And the small hour was very, very still. Not a sound troubled it, but the hollow clanking of that distant chain—picked up by ears near the ground, and ... rising sounds of hysteria among the girls.

Even the Guardian felt as if some insulation were stripped from her nerves. Each one sent a separate, tingling shock through her body.

But she got to her knees and then to her feet—the dark poncho clinging to her.

“Girls! this can be explained. This must be explained. If we don’t explain it.... Who’ll come—with—me?”

There was a groveling and grubbing among the ponchos.

“Let’s—go!” said a small voice then—the very small voice of Pemrose Lorry, “I’d like to tell Daddy how a ghost tips the scale; I suppose they weigh about as much as two pin-heads—or the dust off a feather,” speculated the laboratory sprite.

“No-o, you stay here, Theresa,” returned the Guardian to another volunteer. “You stay with the younger girls. We three will investigate this.”

For now it was “Copper-nob” who, loosing the inner fire with a timid: “Let’s go!” was tiptoeing in the Guardian’s wake along a plaided path of moonbeams.

And in the demeanor of the three, as the girls fell in on either side of the older woman, there was something freakishly suggestive of the noble Roman and his two companions: of “how well Horatius kept the bridge in the brave days of old.”

On across a strip of rank pasture they went, halting amid black, confusing shadows to see whether the ghosts would falter before the advance, or not.

But the spectres never wavered, alternately poised, shimmering sentries, against the sky, where the pasture ended in a grassy bank, which some crowning had topped off into a tall sod-fence.

Imponderable ghosts, weighing as much as two pin-heads, louder, more blood-curdling, grew the hapless rattle of the chain they dragged!

But somebody was feeling dizzily another freakish element in the situation.

Suddenly “Copper-nob”, whose training had been rather different to that of her two companions—more rural—went mad as a March hare.

She flung herself down in the heavy dew, arms limply outflung—feet kicking wildly.

“Goats!” she gasped. “Goats!” she shrieked. “Goats! Not Ghosts! Two long-haired, milk-white goats, chained together! One—one has got to this side of the fence, is trying to drag the other over. And the other won’t stand for it! Oh-h!”

“Nannie! Billy! Tug-of-war!” The failing knees of the two supporting heroines gave way under them too; they sank down—down—into the moonlit dew—and laughed until the wee ’oor shook.

CHAPTER IX
Dandering Kate

“Well! What a funny footprint! It’s a woman’s track, too, with spikes on the heel. Now, gracious! it couldn’t be that somebody else—somebody else has been trying my radio game, out here, listening in, in this wet spot, with a little portable receiving set?... That’s what it looks like! My-y!”

A breathless image of astonishment, Pemrose Lorry knelt in the underbrush near the trail, the scrubby tangled trail, broad enough to pass muster for a grass-grown road, with ruts in either side and a cart track in the center, which led from the girls’ camping-place of the night before—through an arm of woods—to the farmhouse on whose land they had slept.

Right on the trail, submerging it in one spot, was stagnant pond-water. Beside the pond was the curious footprint. Her face aflame, red as the Turk’s cap—flame lily, near—the girl knelt, examining it.

“I—I’ll wager that’s what it is,” she cried half-wildly. “Another radio amateur, radio fan, has—judging by appearances—been here, this morning, with her heel in the wet mud and her wire out to a tree—or smuggled away in an umbrella, possibly, listening in with a toy set, like mine—or probably with something larger—better—so far as results go. Oh, goody! ‘When Greek meets Greek!’ Don’t I wish we might run on to her.” She craned her neck, also red with amazement, as the painted wood-lily, searching the early sunlight, the woodland aisles.

“I don’t see why that mightn’t very well be,” said Una. “If our automobile is rigged up with radio, so that we can pick up messages within twenty miles, as we speed along, why mightn’t somebody have a little Kodak-like set, out here—and play with it out-of-doors, in the early morning. You—you aren’t the only lion,” laughingly. “In one of the out-of-the-way farmhouses there may be a red-hot amateur, like you; so many of them.... Heavens! What’s—that?” She jumped three feet.

Right in front of her was a bulky pincushion, a huddled pincushion, bristling all over with black and brown spikes, menacingly white-tipped.

And the pincushion inopportunely grunted.

She screamed. So did bronze-haired Lura—and Naomi, a brown-haired girl, who nursed a sketchbook.

“Gracious! A porcupine! Dandering Kate—as woodsmen call it!” shrieked Pemrose, startled from her contemplation of the mysterious footprint.

“Oh! don’t go near him—her,” panted Una. “It’ll shoot its quills into you.”

“Not—unless it’s attacked!”

“But—but it does into a dog.”

“Because the dog shoots his face into the porcupine’s overcoat,” laughed the inventor’s blue-eyed daughter, going nearer to the bristling ball, which startled the pincushion into a grunting shuffle for the long grass at the roadside, where it lay, curled up into a spiky hump-back, the barbed quills erect on a three-inch tail.

“I thought we’d see one somewhere in the woods this morning,” said Lura. “They’re generally abroad early, before the dew goes.”

“And in the evening,” added Pemrose. “They ‘hole up’ during the heat of the day, so father—”

She caught her breath, with a sudden stifled feeling of being “holed up”, herself.

Was it another Dandering Kate—the figure which, suddenly appeared by the roadside—the porcupine was not the only round-shouldered thing. Looking ahead under the shadow of maples and birches, overarching, Pemrose caught sight of another.

It flashed out of the woods almost simultaneously with a prolonged shriek from Una—who had almost stumbled on to a second grunting pincushion.

It wore a woman’s riding habit, leather-faced breeches, leggings, gray coat, with a red handkerchief knotted round the neck and felt hat jammed down upon the head.

But that—that which the coat covered; Pemrose—Lura—felt their eyes water.

It was Nature’s “grueling” pack, a lamb on the back, as mountaineers pityingly call a lump between the shoulders, not obtrusive—but obvious in the tight riding coat.

But what did obtrude itself, what plowed deep into their young breasts, was the flash of the eyes, very dark, very keen, against the green radiance of the wood.

It just crashed across Pemrose’s gaze, as it were, because for a moment, the tiniest moment, she seemed to see something known, the ghost of something familiar, in it, which, yet, was so wild, so adrift, so unknown, as to seem a misfit for the morning—a misfit for the woods, with their happy-hearted girlhood.

It was almost as if the horsewoman felt that, herself, for she vanished immediately, to reappear, a minute later, leading a bay horse forth from a bridle path.

With the bright, obtrusive flash of a heel now, a steel-shod heel, she was in the saddle—which had a camper’s pack slung across it—and riding off, with just one backward glance which lit like a brilliant moth on Una.

“Well—for goodness sake!” Pemrose stared vacantly—hands clasped. “Did you see the shining creeper on her heel, the bulky umbrella in her stirrup strap? So—so she’s the radio ‘bug’—amateur!” as if she could hardly find breath for the discovery. “I’ll engage she has a nice little receiving set tucked away in that umbrella, the antennæ running round the steel ribs. Oh! it’s true—no longer am I the only lion,” with a tragic chuckle.

“Only witch—rather,” corrected Lura. “She! She just came and went, like an apparition.”

“Don’t talk of apparitions:

caroled Pemrose, laughing all over, in quivering excitement, at the memory of how illusory moonlight, long-haired goats, half-bred Angora, with the novelty of the wee ’oor had—a few hours before—put phantoms over upon the imagination.

“Well—well! do you know that it isn’t goats we ought to think of now, but cows, if we re going after milk for breakfast.” Naomi waved her sketchbook—a rallying pennon. “They’ll say, the other girls, hungry girls, that we—we’d be good ones to send out after trouble, because we’re so slow in getting back,” with a fluttering dimple.

“But—but I say,” began the budding artist again, as girlish feet pursued the trail, “where’s the use of our all plodding on to the farmhouse? Can’t ‘Jack’—Una—and I wait here—and you pick us up on the way back?”

“Yes! Oh! this wood.” Una the ultra-feminine “Jack”, sniffed greedily. “This wood! It smells just like glorified strawberry jam; the wild strawberries are late here.”

“And there’s the most delectable little brook that ever you saw over there,” pleaded Naomi. “The shadows, reflections, in it: blue-greens of pines, greeny-greens of rocks, gray-green of the water, itself. And—and the light that never was on land or sea, this hour of the morning!” The cooing whisper was the very voice of the green-gold radiance, itself. “Una could hunt—wild—flowers—”

Was it—was it the light that didn’t seem to belong on land or sea, the light that seemed adrift as it flashed from under a riders hat, just a minute or two before, that stiffened Pemrose’s tart answer then.

“No-o, you don’t!” She decided quickly. “I’m leader of this expedition—and we stick together. Forward march—and no straggling! Good-bye, Dandering Kate!”

As girlish hands waved farewell to the spiky pincushions, the wood-road abruptly gave out in a field, which, in turn, yielded to a potato patch that led up to the farmhouse door.

Milk cans clashing together like cymbals, brought the farmer’s wife, sunbonneted, from a meadow where she had been helping with the first crop of hay.

“Yes, my sakes! you can get all the milk you want,” she cried, “but my son ain’t through milking yet, though it’s on for eight o’clock. He’s as awk’ard as a one-armed paper hanger this morning,” in a lowered tone, “you see his right arm has been pretty bad ever since the war. It was broken by a machine-gun bullet; sometimes he can use it—sometimes it worries him, ain’t no good, at all. You can go round to the barn yerselves.”

They did, with hearts beating slowly, like muffled drums, as they pictured that one-armed milker.

But suddenly feet moved to a quick step again, a merry quick step—though stealthy—as they caught the whistle and then the chant—“swanky” challenge—that came through the barn-door.

“It always was a good job; wasn’t it?” Suddenly a girl’s head was thrust mischievously near to his—a head that burned like a lamp in the dim stall.

“Always a good job!” White teeth flashed within a foot of his ear. “Oh! I can parlez-vous a cow. I’ve taken full care of one for a month.”

He started—the one-handed soldier. White jets flew, between his fingers, giving each girl a milk-eye.

“Here—just let me try. Let me ‘spell’ you for a while!”

“Copper-nob” pushed him off the stool. “I’m a Camp Fire Girl—with honors for milking. Watch me ‘parlez-vous’ her! Hove—lady?” This to the cow.

“Well! by George, I’ve ‘no kick coming.’” The ex-service man rose, with a glance at his Y. D. button. “I’m as awkward as a one-handed fiddler, this morning,” he confessed ruefully.

“And—and surely the others won’t mind, the other campers—if we keep breakfast waiting.” Lura from the milking stool looked up at Pemrose, “not when we tell them how—whom—we’ve been helping! ’Tisn’t as if we had ‘mooned’ round in the woods—” the milk was coursing richly now—“watching—apparitions—in red handkerchiefs.”

She broke off, cooing to the placid Jersey, for Pemrose seemed seeing apparitions at the moment, staring bewitched, at a mountainside opposite, where a figure on a small bay horse was slowly climbing a rough bridle path.

Her blue eyes, those of the inventor’s favored daughter, shone half-petulantly with the feeling that she was not the only lion in the desert, with fabulous hearing, if not roaring, powers, as she caught the far, bright flash of metal—of more than the stirrup from the rider’s right foot.

“But who—is—she?” The girl’s black eyebrows drew together. “If Andrew was here, he’d say she looked ‘fey’, unbalanced—rather unbalanced. Her eyes, they were the strangest—wild and bright. But she looks like a sort of ‘needle nose’, too,” with a sudden snap, “cunning in her face—and she rivals me with radio—plays with it out-of-doors ... who ...”

broke in “Copper-nob” triumphantly. “Look Pem, I’m down to ‘skimmings’ now,” as the milk thinned to a frothy trickle, “but the pail is three-parts full. Hove—lady! You’re a winner,” in grateful compliment to the Jersey cow.

CHAPTER X
Hidden Valley

“The night is heavy-hearted,” said the Guardian.

“It’s ‘up to us’, then, to put a good face on its heavy heart by being extra chipper,” laughed Dorothy Bush—a fair-haired girl. “We’ll be in luck if it doesn’t rain more than it has done,” she shrugged herself together, witch-like, “just little ‘neezly-noozly’ showers, that fit into each other even-end-ways,” with a brooding pout, “at the moment when you think each one is going to be over—bah! beastly.”

“The clouds have been following us all day,” wailed Frances. “And I don’t believe they’ve done with us yet. Who’s to light the fire?”

“Pemrose. I believe she could light a fire with a piece of damp bark and a snowball, as the saying is.” Madeline Fitch threw a chuckling glance in the direction of the girl with the blue-lit face, who was “ilka body’s body”, a general favorite. “Hereditary ingenuity, I suppose.” Madeline pursed up her lips. “If I had a father like hers.... Well! never mind, a fire will drive the dumps from Hidden Valley. There, I’ve named it!”

“I don’t like Hidden Valley. Gloomiest old place we’ve struck yet!” murmured Una glancing up and down the heart-shaped glen, hoarding the evening shadows between its narrowing head-walls.

“You—you won’t know it when we get a blaze going.” Pemrose was chopping away with a light axe—the handle symbolically carved—at a dead limb of a larch tree, to strip off outside layers, damped by the ‘noozly’ showers and get at the dry wood, inside.

Already she had her roll of curly birch bark, stripped from a withering bough, on the hike, before afternoon rain came on—and kept dry in her pack.

Soon the fire was lighting up the tall walls of the V-shaped valley, between two ragged mountains which seemed, at some time or other, to have thrust their heads up, promiscuously, out of the earth—just to have a look around. A peculiarity of most of the hills through which the girls had passed!

Away to the north loomed the rounded outline of a taller mountain, the Dome; and in the dim distance, before the evening shadows herded on the trail—the day’s long trail—there had been mighty glimpses of giant Mount Mansfield and Camel’s Hump.

“The old farmer whom we met, back there, said that this valley was where two brooks had ‘gouged out a hollow’, eaten the heart out of a hill,” remarked Terry Ross, Assistant Guardian, her brown eyes blinking at the blaze; “that we had ‘civ’lization’, at a ‘far-come’, on either side of us—nothing between.”

“Yes! he cheerfully told us that, here, we were ‘two miles an’ a half beyond God bless you’!”? came with a sidelong wink from Pemrose, who was using her vigorous young lungs as bellows. “Humph! He’s beyond the pale himself; his farm’s right here in Hidden Valley—not quarter of a mile away. If it should come on a reckless downpour, we may have to storm his old barn, before morning.”

“We must wait till he’s asleep then—otherwise he’d turn us out; he was the crankiest mountaineer we’ve run across yet; you—you could hear him ‘cur-murring’ a mile off.” Una knelt, stretching her hands to the fire that valiantly defied the tail end of a shower.

“Yes, he said this country was only ‘fit for b’ars’, that they ought to chase all the folks out of it,” pouted Dorothy; “then, I suppose, he’d be quite at home.”

“He seemed awf’ly peeved over something, out of luck, somehow. But don’t you remember he did drawl out—” Pemrose wrinkled up a moist little nose, with a smut on the end of it, to imitate the high-pitched twang of the old Green Mountaineer—“he did drawl out, looking us over: ‘Wal! I reckon you birds can stand more’n most city folks!’ Bah! this ‘bird’ can’t stand another thing until she’s been fed—with crumbs. Has any one filled the kettle?”

“Yes.” Dorothy produced it. “We filled it at the clearest of the two brooks, the one with the stony bed, which that peeved old farmer said made the noise of the devil’s pans and kettles—the devil at his dish-washing.”

“But what a ‘solemncholy’ old demon he must be, judging by the night,” laughed Terry Ross.

For now, indeed, the night was growing heavy-hearted—even to bitterness.

The moon, as she rose, was in mourning. Rain stole, sighing, through Hidden Valley. Thunder hummed-and-hawed, afar.

But the blaze kindled by a fire-witch, who wore brown honors for building a fire in wind and rain, put a fair face on everything—that and the toasted bacon, the steaming flapjacks, to say nothing of the evening star of anticipation radiantly in the ascendant.

“Well! this will be our last night of sleeping out,” said the Guardian, “our fourth and last, so even if it isn’t very comfortable, we’ll make the best of it. To-morrow, if we cover our ten miles—we made nine to-day—’twill bring us to Mount Pocohosette, the horse-farm at the foot—our snug camp on the side-hill!”

“And Revel and Revelation!... Revel and Revelation—in more than horseflesh, too!”? laughed blissful voices. “Oh! to-night we’ll just dream of the Long Pasture; the horses to be caught with chaff—no, oats—saddled, bridled.”

“The radio concerts of an evening! A morning ‘hamfest’—gossip with father—space obliterated,” supplemented Pemrose. “Let’s turn in early—and bring it nearer—all nearer! Hush! Here comes the dream man.”

They were not afraid of less flexible footsteps than his, to-night, as they piled the fire up and lay down beside it.

Two quiet nights in the open had lent a green seasoning even to tenderfoot nerves.

But some stronger “pep” was needed in Hidden Valley—as this side of midnight proved.

Eleven o’clock—and not the soothing Dream Man, but the black Rain Hand, was upon them—groping for their faces with chilling fingers!

“Goodness! It’s going to be a deluge—a bitter downpour.” The Guardian sat up, gasping under the wet blanket. “I’m not sure but that we had better break camp quickly, girls—fly for shelter—that barn isn’t far off.”

“Nor the old b’ar who said we were ‘beyond God bless you!’ either,” piped Dorothy glumly.

“Pshaw! he’d be ‘beyond praying for’, if he were to shoo us out,” came from Madeline. “Ugh! How cold the rain is! I was just falling asleep—dr-reaming of the horses.”

“Um-m. Novel experience, any way, breaking camp by flash light! My shoes! Oh! where are my shoes? My ring! I have that safe! One teeny drop of rain would spoil that new crystal—as a detector, a ‘radio soul!’” Pemrose was excitedly tucking away the ring and paraphernalia—tucking it away in her bosom.

“The fancy paper-rolls! Oh! don’t let the colored paper-rolls get wet—all wet an’ pulpy—then, there would be no flower party on my birthday!” wailed Una.

“Bah! You and your last straw! They’re done up in oilskin,” hooted Pemrose. “What—what are you looking for Dorothy?”

“My—toothbrush.”

“Oh-h! come; we’ve no time for tomfoolery.” Whereat every one laughed—the lightning, too!

“My-y hair-brushes; where did I lay them?” Rain was pelting pitilessly on Lura’s burnished “nob”, as she knelt, feeling round in the sodden grass.

“Before a storm everything goes wrong!” hooted the jeering thunder.

“Cheep! Cheep! Tweak! Tweak! Very wrong, indeed!” echoed the poor little birds in their rocking nests, complaining of the pecking rain-crow.

“But it isn’t as bad as if we had a tent to take down, girls.” The Guardian was searching for a silver lining, mislaid among other things. “That’s—weird. Pulling tent pegs in a hurry, tent collapsing, just shuddering down, canvas grating on the rough edge, something sure to be left under.... What!”

The tent had collapsed, indeed—the tabernacle of human spirits—and the silver lining was left under.

The flash light had gone out.

The flash light had fainted, at the very most inopportune moment that a craven battery could have chosen to give out.

If confusion had reigned before—and hurry-scurry—now it was extremity—the “neb-end” of extremity! The camp fire black as a “tinker’s pot”, with a dismal brew of shrieks and groanings! The rain-hand slapping right and left in the darkness! Faces running into trees, toes stubbed against stone and stump—wet hair caught on dripping branches that tweaked and plucked at it.

“But—but there was a second battery! Who had charge of—that?”

“Pemrose.”

“I’ll find it in a ‘twink’,” said Pemrose manfully. “I hid it under this bush—lest somebody should step on it.”

But the bush protested that she didn’t, laughing in her face, as lightning played through it—while she felt all round it in the wet grass.

“No-o—oh! dear, I remember—it was at the foot of this little tree.”

“Out again!” said the sapling—and deluged her all over, for her pains.

“Give it up,” said the Guardian desperately. “We can find our way to shelter, without it.”

“What! Go home and tell Father that I lost—mislaid—a battery, our only other live battery.” The hapless wail of the traitor was in Pem’s voice now—traitor to precise laboratory training, where vigilance meant safety. “Not—oh! not if I stay here till I dr-rown,” miserably.

She was groping round upon her knees now, others with her, in the black wet, feeling amid vine and scrub.

“I do believe they’re passing it from one to the other, the dark bushes—playing hunt-the-slipper—”

“The host of paradise are with us!” cried one suddenly. “She’s found it.”

The hosts of paradise are always on the side of light—even a “spunky” flash light.

With heaven reinstated in sundry hearts, led by a triumphant torch-bearer, the barnstorming party set out, a shadowy horde, wrapped in ponchos for raincoats.

“The light went out in the farmhouse quite a while ago,” said the Guardian. “Perhaps we can get into the barn, find the stairs, the ladder—find our way up into the barn, without disturbing anybody—”

“Without rousing the old bear from his lair, who said we were beyond ‘God bless you!’” muttered Dorothy vindictively. “We’re not. The hosts of heaven are with us still. The door’s open.”

“And now for clover—dry clover—the hay above!” cried Pemrose, swinging her flash light. “Oh! come on, girls. The menagerie—that’s nothing!”

For at the heavy reek of animal bodies streaming out through a broad doorway; at the snorting stamp of great farmhorses, rolling the whites of their eyes in nocturnal curiosity, at the grunt of cows rattling their chains against the stall-head, baaing of sheep—from somewhere the squeal of a distressed little piggie—Una and others drew squeamishly back.

“Steady now! Keep the hush up! We don’t want to wake that old bear of a farmer. The stairs—the ladder—is at the far end, I guess, leading up to the hayloft.”

Pemrose was tiptoeing along the straw-littered aisle, on the trail of her own whisper, the flash light in her hand a cynosure for every blinking, brute-eye in the barn; tap, tap, patter, patter, came the staccato stamp of sheep’s feet, saluting it, from the pen behind the horses’ stall.

The Guardian brought up the rear.

“Careful now! Don’t make a sound. Keep the hush—”

But eighteen barn raiding girls, seeing the midnight adventure now in the light of a huge joke, crowding up a dark and narrow ladder are not likely to be too circumspect.

A false step, a rung missed—and one was back upon the shoulders of the others amid an hubbub of shrieks, poorly stifled.

Simultaneously a near-by bedroom window was flung up. A hoarse old voice was shouting:

“Heaven an’ earth! What’s all this hally-baloo? What’s all this uproar, I say? Now—now you stay right there till I come!”

“Up! Up! Up—girls!” cried Pemrose. “If he tries to mount the ladder to turn us out—we’ll push him down!”

But as girls crouched in the hay at the ladder-head, arms down-stretched to oust the besieger, that besieger, when he thrust a wild gray head up into the light, showed signs of amazement—blank amazement—rather than hostility.

“My soul! So it’s you birds!” He wagged a crinkly beard. “You city birds that I met ’way back there on the trail—dark-benighted, wet-benighted!... An’ I thought ’twas Her. An’ s’elp me, if it had bin Her, I’d ha’ come within a cow’s thumb o’ shootin’ Her.”

He pulled his right hand, with something in it, up the ladder.

CHAPTER XI
Her

“If it had ha’ been Her, I’d ha’ come within the breadth of a cow’s thumb of shooting Her!”

“But who’s—‘Her’?” The Guardian thrust a peering face forward, benighted merriment in her eyes; so did other lively girls; this was worth a wetting.

“Um-m. If you ask me, I’ll say she’s as rank a witch as ever rode on ragwort—I’ll say so! The wife she was talking about her jest now, when the thunder woke us hoping she’d ridden safe home—with my slippers—posy slippers.”

Pemrose suddenly sat up stiffly—ear-hungry.

“Your—slippers!” It was a hen-like cackle from the hay.

“Um-m.” The farmer caressed his shotgun—growling like a bear with a sore paw.

“But who is She?” put forth the Guardian again; she felt that a lease of the hayloft for the night—perhaps breakfast in the morning—would depend upon the sympathy shown to a highly exasperated man, fresh from an unpleasant “curtain” talk.

“Wal! now, I reckon she’s a stray bird, like yerselves—a stranger, or almost so. She ha’n’t been around these parts much more’n a year—blamed heather cat, always on the roam! The wife she calls her the Little Lone Lady—my wife’s awful stuck on her—an’ I reckon she does come o’ grammar folks—edicate! Other o’ the mountain people call her Magic Margot, jollying-like—or the spell-woman, ’cause she can tell things—put over things—that other folks can’t.” He dropped his voice to a croon of nocturnal mystery.

“Does she—does she ride a bay horse—an umbrella in her stirrup strap, a red handkerchief round her neck—something shiny upon her heel—at times?” Pemrose’s breath came hotly—her hand was to her heart.

“Umph!” The sore bear nodded. “Oh! ’tisn’t the fust time I’ve heard the midnight shog, shog, of her bay cob’s hoofs stoppin’—heard her stealin’ up into this loft, to roost. But—never again, s’ ’elp me!” He brought his unseen feet down upon the ladder, with a vehemence that started a hayquake.

“Why! what has she done now?” It was a general chorus from the guild of glee, excited girls, done to death with weariness, yet tickled all over with the sensation that, much as the vacation had promised them, they had not expected melodrama.

“Gosh! yes. She was at our house to-day, jest a while afore I met you-uns on the valley trail.” The farmer thrust a red lantern up. “I was out diggin’ ’mong the ‘crony hills’, pertater patch; an’ she jest came it all over my wife with some palaver about a good offer we was going to get for this plaguy farm, where rocks grow—an’ every one of ’em rooted out means a back ache,” he mopped his face, “knowledge she didn’t have from no nat’ral source, you understand—the Little Lone Lady. She had some kind of a ‘fore-go’, too, ’bout a great cryin’ out there’d be ’mong all the animals ’fore morning. An’ the wife she was so carried away with her that I’m blessed if she didn’t give her a good fat chicken, to carry home in her saddlebag—she allers has that saddlebag bulging, too—an’ the pair o’ red slippers that she was workin’ with roses fer me—cut ’em down to fit her ... she got the red felt f’om her brother who works in an organ factory.”

So this was the load which the trail-bear had carried upon his sore head when he felt that the valley was beyond “God bless you”! There were smothered shrieks from the hay.

“Poor wronged man! You have all our sympathy—all our sympathy!” The Guardian touched his hand. “Can’t you get them back? Won’t she—disgorge?”

“Not much! Not, when she’s ridden off with ’em to her den, her little cabin on a lonely peak, ’bout nine miles from here. She lived there alone all last winter—when she wasn’t on the go, riding round among the mountains—living on crumbs, the neighbors gave her.... Oh! she’s a sleek-gabbed one, but sometimes I think she’s as cracked as she’s sly—and keen.” He sighed.

“It’s easy to see how she comes by her ‘fore-goes’ about the weather and so forth—a radio receiver in that bulky umbrella,” murmured Pemrose.

“Wall, anyhow, I ain’t ‘cock-bird-high’ to be caught by her chaff.” The farmer stamped again. “The women they go an’ see her an’ come back with tales o’ what they hear and see—my wife with a muslin mouth upon her, all stiff and starched, tellin’ about strange water-burn, little cloudy-bright rings an’ shapes floating up from it—some new brand o’ angels, I suppose, visiting with her, the Little Lone Lady.”

“Um-m. Phosphine, I guess, Daddy would say!” whispered Pemrose to the hay.

“I didn’t see none of it when I went to ask her about Paddy’s cough—you can hear him now underneath you.”

There was a wild burst of laughter at this give-away, mingled with the blowing noise of a windy cougher.

“Wal! as you ain’t Her and want to spend the night here ... you ain’t got no candles nor matches about you?” he asked suspiciously.

“No, nothing that could start a fire,” the Guardian assured him, intent now on seeing that the girls removed their wet shoes.

“Well! good rest to ye on the hay. Mebbe there’ll be a bite o’ breakfast comin’ to ye—for I vum ye can stand more ’n most city folks, though there’s one among ye that looks a dainty piece—not meant for any hard-sleddin’.” He raised the lantern, until its ray singled out Una, yawning upon the hay. “So-o long!” He backed down the ladder—gun and lantern. But, again, he thrust his head up and glared around. “Look out—folks!” he began; “this ’ere hay-loft—.” But, once more, he saw red, the red of his “rosie” slippers. “Gosh!” he gurgled, “lucky fer Her that she warn’t you; I swear to goodness! I’d ha’ come within a grain o’ shooting Her.” The lantern gave a final flash and disappeared.

“Well! now—now that old ‘Bunch o’ Spinach’ has gone, I guess we can settle to sleep,” gasped Lura.

“Don’t call—names,” mumbled the Guardian, who was seeing that Una got out of damp clothing. “Aren’t we lucky not to be Her!”

It was a new flash light, mornie-blink, stealing up the ladder and through the loft transom, some three hours later.

It fell on tired face, trailing limbs, tossing promiscuously upon the hay.

“What’s—that?” Una sat up suddenly.

“Only the rain. Another shower! Sounds—sounds like bricks upon a tin roof!” Pemrose yawned. “Well! ducky, didn’t we have a good night—what was left of it—in spite of that old ‘Hayseed’ and his slippers?”

“Poor old bear! No wonder he called himself beyond God bless you!” mumbled Dorothy. “Last night—didn’t it put the cream on experiences—camping experiences?”

“I’ll say—so.” Pemrose echoed the boy’s slang, cuddling close to her loft-mate, her dearest joke-fellow, Una, careful, in her tickled laughter, not to wake fifteen slumbering girls stretched like trailing plants around their Guardian—their queen of the meadow, raised slightly above them, upon a mouldy dais of hay.

“Isn’t she a—dear? A dear!” Pemrose gazed at the white feather of hair in the brown of the womanly locks, unbound. “Just the woman—I want to be!” dreamily. “The birds, do you hear them? Pecking on the roof!” She pinched Una. “Aren’t they loud—like scratching monkeys? Mercy! what’s—that? A—rat?”

“A rat! Oh! don’t—don’t let me see it,” wailed Una. “And we were so ‘comfy’!”

“A rat! A hor-rid rat, with—oh! tail by the yard,” screamed Dorothy, hopping round, in the dim light, from basement to bank of last year’s hay.

“A rat! Oh! the only thing—the only thing I’d ever want to kill is a rat.”

Did the sinister wish, a rebounding shell, hit Pemrose Lorry, herself—she careering blindly, too?

Had an earthquake struck the barn—or a bomb?

Suddenly the world, the hay, went up; and she went down.

Hay was in her eyes, her ears, her mouth, down her back—she would have made a mule seem a sorry hay-consumer.

She was clutching at it wildly with both hands—and finding it but thin air in her grasp.

In the feeble dawn glimmer she was sinking—being plunged into a shocking world underneath.

And where else she was to go, how far she was to travel in this awful underworld, she did not know, for she had alighted on a horse’s back—alighted in a huddle on a horse’s back!

And there came the scream of Dorothy from the sheep pen, amid a torrent of frightened baas.

“It’s Paddy—the horse with the cough—and he’s trying to rub me off against the stall!”

Even as the knowledge crashed through Pemrose’s brain she was twisting her groping hands fiercely in Paddy’s mane—in the musty gloom of the horse-stall.

Buried alive, she would carry on—as Dorothy was carrying on, judging by the sheep.

She managed to slip one foot from under her, get astride upon the dark, lunging farmhorse—a mountain in the gloom.

“Ha-a! Tha-at’s more like it!” She drew a hissing breath between her teeth.

But if Paddy was drawing comparisons, it was between making hay while the sun shone, greedily pulling down more of it until he was half smothered—and getting rid of the startling burden on his back.

Snorting malignantly, he rocked up against his thrashing stall-mate, Barney, trying to palm that grasshopper burden off on him.

Barney was all reeking excitement, too, in the close, musty quarters.

For a moment, one awful moment, the girl, jammed between their hot, steaming sides, saw herself beneath their mangling hoofs—her life trodden out in the stall.

She was in the lions’ den—and no mistake. For Paddy, great, clodhopping farmhorse, failing to dislodge her thus, swung his dark haunches, lunged with his front shoulder at the dark partition—to crush her there.

But, quick as thought—before his throbbing side could pin her, the girl’s little bare foot, darting forward, was nestling in the hollow of that brutish neck; five tickling, pink toes were stroking it gently—combing it soothingly.

“Treff told me, Treff—Treff,—if ever a horse tries to rub you off, dart your foot forward into the hollow of his neck!” By waves far subtler than radio, she was reaching out now, imploringly to that boy pal with the amber speck of humor in one gray eye—rider of the clouds and rider of the plains.

Across miles of mountain and valley his mantle seemed flung to her, the mantle of his daring, that cock-o’-pluck—so that, with her right leg stretched out, level, across the cross brute’s shoulder and five little toes seductively curry-combing, she was patting the other side of the swollen neck, with a:

“Steady—boy! Steady, there! Easy—now! Who the deuce can parlez-vous a horse? That’s me! Oh-h! five little pigs went to market.”

Was there ever the Paddy, yet, who could resist such treatment?

Two minutes later a farmer, coming in mad haste and trembling to the barn door, beheld, in the dim dawn a girl queening it in dun trappings of hay upon a perfectly docile farmhorse—which rolled the whites of its eyes at him sheepishly—the great jaws grinding upon a sheaf of hay.

“Good—old—Paddy!” Patronizingly she patted the shoulder that would have rubbed her out, rose to a standing position upon the broad back, her up-flung hand gripping the top of the stall.

Coolly she drew herself up, crept along the dark stall-edge, dropped from the partition into the manger and thence, with a light spring, to the barn floor.

“Where are you—Dorothy? Oh-h! where are—you?” she anxiously cried.

came a laughing voice.

“Wal! I swan to goodness there ain’t much ‘woolgathering’ about either o’ you.” The farmer slapped his leg, with a roar. “Oh! I started at midnight fer to tell you about that hayloft floor, jest bone-shanks, bare poles across, widish spaces between ’em—and the hay thinned out in places. But, land! what’s the odds?” He beamed upon Paddy’s rider. “I vum even the Little Lone Lady will never get the better of you.”

“She’ll never ride off in my shoes, eh?” laughed Pemrose. “But she was right about the commotion among all the animals before morning; wasn’t she?” as she flew to extricate Dorothy.

CHAPTER XII
The Shack Corner

“Q. S. O. Increase your power, O. M.—Old Man!”

In what had come to be known as the “shack corner” of the cabin on the sidehill—the radio shack—Pemrose Lorry uttered the challenge into the microphone, small mouthpiece, making merry with her father, a hundred miles away.

“Ha! That’s better. Your signals are coming in strong now. I have you tuned O. K.” Yet, still, she fiddled with the knob upon the dial on the face of the radio receiver; the knob which, beginning with zero upon the dial-scale, she had gently turned, varying the capacity of her condenser, the steel plates for storing up current, until she got her wavelength—the wavelength of the distant station sending.

In the hazy, morning sunlight stealing into the mountain camp, the camp upon Mount Pocohosette, seventeen girls and a Guardian watched her, bewitched by this new talking game, as she alternately threw the aërial switch to the receiving side, thus connecting her receiving set to aërial and ground wires, and then to the transmitter, forming a like connection.

“You’re coming in like a ton of bricks now,” she informed her distant father. “I could hear you with the phones on the table,” with a merry wink.

“Radio Amateur, thy middle name is Exaggeration!” laughed the Guardian.

“Always tell the other fellow what he’s doing, not what you’re doing yourself—then, if anything goes wrong, you can blame it on him—even if he is your most blessed Dad ... first principle of radio transmission!” She winked again—the amateur.

“Oh! if I were only—only—mistress of it, as you are.” Lura clasped her hands, her radiant “copper nob” shining like the bronze coils.

“I’m going to give you all a lesson presently, a lesson in radio—transmitting and receiving. But, first, I’m going to ‘parlez-vous’ Dad in code, a little.” The first and second fingers of the girlish amateur’s right hand now attacked the steely telegraph key upon the operating table, as the radio shelf was called, ticking off endless combinations of dots and dashes—a sealed book to most of the girls.

“Goodness! That code is as bad as the Hindenburg line; ’twould be as hard for me to work through it,” panted Lura, whose brother had been a soldier.

“Isn’t it the worst—teaser? I promised father I’d try to make something of it—but it just won’t stick!” Una ruefully tapped her forehead.

“There! Di-dit-di-dit! That’s a laugh—a radio laugh—if you only knew it!” chuckled the girlish operator on her high stool before the table—her black eyebrows meeting over the blue sky-beams in her eyes. “Father got off to me ‘Y. L.—Young Lady’—I told him I hated that; and he changed it to ‘O. W.—Old Woman.’ Well! there, we’re through our ‘hamfest’—gabfest—for this morning. Father’s rejoiced, tickled through, that we’re having such a wonderful time in camp—Camp Chicolee, as I told him we called it, from an Indian word meaning Horse; and he hopes I won’t try taking four-foot fences on Revelation—just yet.”

There was a general whoop of excited laughter at this, as girlish eyes turned through sun-framed camp windows to amber forms of scattered horses grazing upon the range, otherwise the Long Pasture down the mountainside, about a quarter of a mile from camp.

Pemrose was pulling all her switches as she spoke, the miraculous conversation ended, so that the bright bulbs, the incandescent vacuum tubes in transmitter and receiver gradually faded out from white-hot filament and grid, and cherry-red plate about them, to cool blindness.

“Oh! Revelation is—a prince of the Long Pasture!... But this!” She bowed her head upon the operating table. “It sometimes seems too big a Wonder. To think of hearing Father, his own dear, joking voice, a hundred and five miles off! I’m going to try and tune in on him morning and evening when he isn’t away, lecturing.”

For a minute she was held speechless by the thought, that blue-eyed girl, that never again, on land or sea, need she be hopelessly beyond the hearing of that adored voice of Pater and pal—of him who, with continents discussing his inventions, had bent his genius towards the manufacturing of a “listening” ring for her.

“Oh! it does make one’s heart slip around in one’s body, with the wonder—the miracle—of it,” whispered artistic Naomi, slipping an arm about her. “I, for one, don’t want to depend on somebody else to grind my music for me, tune in on my evening concerts and speeches—Sunday sermons—I want to do it for myself. Can’t you begin and explain it all now, Pem—tell us how wheels go round? Do!”

“If I try to understand how wheels go round, it sets my poor wits to woolgathering—so that the wool stops my ears: I’m not a bit technical,” protested Lura laughingly. “But I did—I did watch all you did, without moving an ‘eye-winker’,” merrily, “from the moment when you threw the lightning-switch outside the cabin.”

“Yes, that grounds the aërial, so that if lightning should strike—we’re likely to have big storms up here—it wouldn’t go through the set, through the camp.”

Toying lovingly with a knob here and there upon the dialed face of her receiver, the amateur’s blue eyes roamed off to the hills—still in curl papers of mist—she still gloating over that morning “hamfest” with her father.

“This is a wonderful set which Mr. Grosvenor has had installed for us—isn’t he a prince, Una’s father—but not quite powerful enough to talk with him overseas.... We ought all to learn to use it perfectly—just to thank him!”

Patiently she began to “handle” her recent message, or the method of it, all over again, going from switch to switch, throwing the two-bladed aërial switch to one side to send, to the other to listen.

“It’s a ‘slow-thumbed’ business; one has to be careful of one’s bulbs, so that they’ll live long.” She was turning the rheostat knob, to light those bulbs—having re-started her generator, with its powerful current—moving that rheostat knob very gently, as when she had called “1—V. Z. M.” her father’s distant laboratory station, so that those shining vacuum tubes glowed slowly from dim to bright—with an incandescent eloquence that sent its poetry right into the enchained girls’ souls.

She was glancing at ammeters and radiation meter, the first to see if she was forcing those shining tubes too much, the second to determine whether she was putting enough power into the antennæ running around the raftered ceiling of the log cabin, above her.

“But explain it to us—more—Pemrose; how the message goes out! I’m beginning to love the radio shack—this shack side of the cabin,” cried various voices in tuneful keys and different pleading words.

“‘How it goes out!’” The inventor’s daughter wrinkled her brows, trying to meet the tax levied upon her—her matchless inheritance. “Well! father explained it first to me with the hackneyed illustration of throwing a stone into a pond, showing how the waves spread out, at first strong, growing weaker—and how they may be intercepted in various ways; so it is with the radio sound-waves. He illustrated it in the laboratory, too, with a pair of tuning forks, how if one is struck, the other, if it is in tune, will echo the sound at a little distance. If they are not in tune, there must be a magnet between, for them to vibrate, answer each other, with a funny, ‘surgy’ sound; we’ve tried it—”

“Oh! but tuning forks are an old song; and that does not tell all the story about radio. Go on—it’s fascinating.” Dorothy picked up the microphone from the table against the log wall.

“Well! when your voice goes into that it passes along the wire connecting it with the transmitter at the rate of a few hundred vibrations a second.” The girlish radio fan touched the two-foot cabinet containing the sending set. “But that is not speed enough to send a message out into the air, so my blessed Dad says—strength depends upon the rapidity of the vibrations, so the voice passes into this incandescent tube—bulb—where the vibrations are increased, but still not enough to send them out. But they pass on into this other vacuum tube, called the oscillator, where the vibrations are a thousand—and more—a second.”

“Whe-ew!” It was a prolonged whistle-whistle of awe.

“But that, again, would be too high frequency—beyond audibility. But, somehow, the shining bulbs strike an average between them—Dad says it’s a sort of grab game—between them—very difficult for any but the Wizard to understand,” Pem’s black eyebrows went merrily up. “But they do hit it off and the voice goes out into the ether in audio-frequency waves; waves that can be picked up—heard—on the back of an electric carrier wave.”

“Gracious! I’m on the back of a carrier wave now—carried away. I’m riding a winged horse—and not old King.” Lura glanced down at the Long Pasture.

“But who wants to really ‘dig’?” laughed the girl amateur, pulling her switches to disconnect the sets again. “If any one does, there’s a buzzer on the table—code cards. About two-thirds of the stuff that’s sent out is in dot and dash. You can hear twice as far with it.”

“Yes, laugh in dots, cry in dashes, eh,” said Naomi. “Well—I’m ‘game’; I’ll try to be, although I do want to be out on the mountain, sketching—as it’s only our fourth morning here.”

“How—how about you, ‘Jack’?” Pemrose glanced at Una. “Fair play—your father!”

“Revel—Revel is waiting for her morning lump of sugar,” said the latter, pointing archly through the window at the amber shape and floss-silk mane of a dainty little thoroughbred, down in the Long Pasture.

Out there—out there, on the range, all was gayety, irresponsible idleness, for the moment: horses madly racing automobiles that glided by, on a mountain road below, snorting deliriously when brought up by a fence.

“Just look at that old Sickle Face, Cartoon!” laughed Una. “He thinks he’s a racehorse, a fast ‘darb’, as the caretaker, the farmer in charge of the horse-farm, says. But—but Revelation beats him to the fence—every time.”

“And the dear colts, all eyes,” murmured Lura. “The little, fluffy babies that run under their mothers; and the older ones, Blue Boy, Big Eyes, that kick so high; think they can kick—the—sky; don’t they?”

“Well! if we haven’t kicked the sky this morning, we’ve come pretty near it.” Dorothy’s chin was thrust out freakishly. “We will, when we really inhabit the shack corner—send out messages for ourselves and receive them. Oh! if we could only have a private code, like the Scout troops, some of them.”

“When you make your own of the ‘crutch’, then you can make it over.” Pemrose was fingering a code card. “Dot an’ dash—the crutch! The universal language! It requires ‘pep’ to handle it—the crutch.” Her blue eyes flashed. “Father made my radio ring as a prize for being able to tick off code calls and pick them up. He said that if I didn’t work hard at a discovery, to understand—and use it to the full—I was just a frothing-stick, whipping the cream that somebody else had made.” The girl’s eyebrows went up in laughter.

“And as none of us want to be that, I ordain a code lesson for this morning, instead of first aid or handcraft,” said the Guardian.

“We might have a private sign of our own to begin a message with, anyway.” Pemrose was ticking off that signal, five minutes later, pressing the little lever that wagged the tongue of the “buzzer”, just an ordinary electric doorbell, with a little dry-cell battery attached, upon the camp table.

“How would this do? Six dots, four dashes, for our Group sign. And—and we might add to the ordinary radio abbreviations a few of our own: that mountain off there—” the blue eyes gazed remotely through the window—“Little Poco, Little Brother Mountain, as we call it, would be ‘L. B.’ if we were sending a message dot an’ dash. Little Speckle—Little Sister would be ‘L. S.’ Oh! we may work out the whole private code in time ... then where will boy amateurs be?”

“We’ll have beaten them, to a frazzle,” purred Dorothy. “At least, they won’t be ahead. With the help of Cannie Nanny we’ll do it—this droning bumble-bee.”

She laughed, putting out a finger to stroke the green buzzer, with its tireless hum, doing duty, for instruction, as a telegraph key.

“What—what a thing an electric battery is!” Pemrose was muttering whimsically. “You can run everything with it—from a train to a burglar alarm,” merrily, “and a little one-cell buzzer. What do you think—Una?”

“Eh—what?” gasped the latter—her eyes had been turning listlessly to the Long Pasture and Revel, as she counted the minutes until the morning ride.

“When—when we go away to school, to an Academy, this year, Unie, we could have radio rigged up between our rooms,” put forth the blue-eyed amateur, “and talk to each other with our own private signs—as Treff and his chum do at college.”

The bait worked—the challenge in the name of her aviator cousin, that cock-o’-pluck.

Una’s pencil, like the others, began to show no less grit than lead in taking down hieroglyphics from the buzzer’s tongue.

Cannie Nanny, in the midst, became a center of gravity.

An hour later, when a riding party swung down the mountain, it was with a gay switching of crops, a new esprit de corps, the sense of a leap taken to keep abreast of bold boy amateurs—a leap in grace and growing.

CHAPTER XIII
The Long Pasture

“Here, Rev. Here, Good Boy! Oats—smell ’em!”

Pemrose, wild with the welcome of the mountains and the triumph of that late long-distance talk with her father—to say nothing of a step, at any rate, towards a secret code for Camp Fire Girls—was dancing all over the Long Pasture.

Temptingly in her hand was the flat tin, half full of oats, which she had taken from a bin in the gray shed at a western corner of the mile-long pasture. An outpost of the farm buildings, paddocks and horse-boxes, more than a mile below, was that weather beaten shed; in it tools were kept and farm implements used in the grain raising for horses, the bean and corn growing, upon the lower sidehill, the outskirts of the well-stocked horse-farm in the rich, green bottom-lands!

“Oats! Oats! Smell them—Boy! Maybe there’s a lump of sugar somewhere, too! Two lumps—if you’re very good!”

She patted the breast pocket of her linen riding habit, holding the pan of grain aslant.

Revelation approached warily, step by step, his beautiful bay neck outstretched, his long face eager—dark eyelids blinking.

Within a dozen feet of the temptress he halted, suspicious of the hand behind her back, pushed his nose out, the neck quite level, his breath coming in a white, investigating cloud.

Suddenly he tossed his head with the bright, chestnut mane, those long, silky eyelashes winking mischievously, wheeled and darted off, with a teasing snort which plainly said:

“Not this morning—thank you! I’d rather race automobiles along by the fence.”

“He senses that I have a halter with me,” murmured the radiant girl, keeping the right hand still out of sight and renewing honeyed negotiations with her left, displaying the oats, golden in the flash of mountain sunlight, spilling a little of it into her shoes, while the horse circled round her in wide rings, took a notion to walk slowly towards her—then, at ten feet, again, darted away.

“You’re a rogue, Revelation. But you’re not an outlaw—like Cartoon. But I suppose he isn’t really a bad horse—or he wouldn’t be mingling with human beings, up here in the Long Pasture—only Roman-nosed and stubborn.”

Pem’s glance roved now to a distant tall horse, a dark bay, with a long neck sawing restlessly in the sunlight, a sharp sickle face, almost a hatchet face, slanted sidelong, who hovered nervously upon the outskirts of the parleying group of girls and horses. With gay satisfaction, her eye came back to Revelation.

A Morgan bay, fifteen hands high, with a foxy coat of satin, in every lithe movement the thoroughbred, shy, sensitive, fast,—but kindly, good-natured, too.

She wheedled with the amber oats again, spattering it from the tilted tin upon the laughing air, while her horse, in ever narrowing circles, sampled the scent, nose away out, velvet nostrils quivering into mischievous smiles—at the slightest movement to catch him, he was off again, heels flinging.

“You’re as naughty as can be, this morning, Boy. You’ve raced autos too much—while we were handling the ‘crutch.’” The girl’s eyes danced, blue as the sky-ways above her. “Can’t you take a lesson from your mother, Revel? But I suppose you’re just a Revelation of what’s hidden in her—only motherhood, mincing motherhood, keeps it down,” she laughed to herself, turning to glance over the mountain pasture—a third of a mile in width.

Everywhere the same catch-as-can game was going on, with oats and halter, everywhere challenge and parley, at the sunny end of the range that is, at which the horses had congregated!

Harmony, Fox, Galatea, old King, full of pasture play and human curiosity, running along by the fence, in turn, to ogle a tempting girl, with, somewhere, a halter concealed about her, then archly taking the “fling-strings”, putting fifty or a hundred yards between them and a morning ride, kicking blissfully, as they ran!

And the colts, the enchanting colts, from the fluffy infant, with hair inches long, running beside or under its mother, to the shaggy gawk, with big, watery blue eyes, who thought he could kick the sky.

“They’re all—all full of mischief this morning,” whispered Pemrose between her teeth. “Una is the only one who has a ‘soft snap.’ Revel stands still to be caught. And Unie—‘Jack’—scores in another way, too, she owns her horse. Oh! what would I not give to call you mine, Revelation—teasing imp though you are.” Pem’s knuckles pressed her lips, to hold in the longing. “Ah, here comes the farmer—Menzies, who has charge of the horse-farm—and his little son, Donnie, Menzies to give us lessons in riding and jumping—Donnie, with a tan puppy under his arm! What! Revel—Donnie! Curls—what!”

Pemrose’s eyes were wide and round as the colts’ now—limpid, shining. They were fixed upon a group, thirty yards away, where of all the girls—with some experience in horseback riding before—who were to learn this summer to catch and bridle their own mounts, Una was the only one whose apple fell easily into her mouth. The only one who did not have to run or pant—or spill oats into her shoes!

Except on rare occasions Revel, beguiled by a lump of sugar, would stand still, gentle image of motherhood, to have the halter thrown over her short, fair head by her girl rider.

A beautiful little horse she was, with her coat of cinnamon silk, her form more chunky than that of her six-year-old son, Revelation—neck thicker, shoulder heavier.

And now—now, to the group, two figures were added: Menzies, the horse-breeder, and his tiny son, not yet four, whose flaxen curls, in this out-of-the way region, were, like the colts’ fluff, still unshorn.

Una had exhausted her bribe of sugar—was waiting for the other girls to catch their horses. But Revel knew where more was to be found, Donald had some, generally, in the pocket of his little blouse for her. But Donnie was, at present, taken up with displaying the pup under his arm. And Revel found other amusement.

Stealing up behind the child, until her soft mother breath was on his cheek, gently she nibbled at his curls, taking them one by one into her “nuzzling” mouth, letting them stray through it—heaven’s hay.

Other horses, Harmony, Fox—Flying Fox—were curious about those flaxen curls, too, had come near enough to smell of them; Revel alone fondled them in her mouth.

“What a—picture!” breathed Pemrose. “If Unie has one friend that she loves more than me, it’s Revel—and on her back she is seldom afraid. Oh-h! this is a won-der-ful morning. It puts even radio in the background.”

She was out of breath and she stood still, leaning against a side fence watching that sunlit group, mother-horse, child, newborn dog—even the wonder of riding the air with a whisper on the back of a carrier-wave paling beside a rare moment in earth’s picture gallery.

All the Long Pasture was a picture gallery that morning, dramatic representations of girlish life and pluck, vivid horseplay.

Presently, while Donnie, resenting the babying, snatched his head away and fed Revel with a lump of sugar, instead, from his tiny breast pocket, Pemrose resumed her game of catch.

This time Revelation, being a good horse if gay, allowed himself to be coaxed. He lessened the ten-foot barrier to five, sniffing at the dribbing oats. In a trice the girl had him by the forelock. With her left hand on his long head she was pressing that down until her foot was on his neck—otherwise her elbow—while with her right hand feeding him the oats.

When that was gone she slipped the halter over his nose, on to his obedient neck, buckled it—led him over to the fence, to saddle him.

But just as she had thrown that saddle on, before she could tighten the girths, her breath began to come thick and fast—very thick and fast.

Donnie having fed Revel with a sweet lump and jerked his curls from her, with a remonstrating: “You don’t t’ink hair’s hay; do you?” let her gentle head find his pocket for herself—and extract a second lump of sugar.

Somebody was watching the trick—Cartoon! Cartoon not destined to be ridden to-day; though not an outlaw, he was a churl, with his stubborn Roman nose, flaring nostrils, fiery breath, his sharp triangular face—almost a hatchet face.

Cartoon was creeping slyly through the pasture grass, with a low snort, his head not only high, as Revelation carried his, but the chin in a little, touching his chest—and the greedy meaning there.

“Don’t give Revel any more sugar now, Donnie-boy! She’s had enough.” Una was drawing her horse away. “Here! show me the puppy. Have you one for me—I’d like a dog?”

“Of course he has.” Donnie’s father turned his head from where, at a little distance off, he was showing Dorothy how to post, rise gracefully in her saddle, hold her whip well back. “Of course he has a a pup for you, Miss Una. Which do you want, a male or female?”

“’Tisn’t—’tisn’t either of those,” protested Donnie indignantly. “It’s an Airedale!”

There was a laugh. Una drew Revel off towards the fence. The farmer moved away, starting Dorothy off on a preliminary canter round the pasture.

The eight who were to ride this morning had, by this time, captured their mounts.

It was then that Cartoon, stealing up, sniffed his opportunity. His sharp nose, rooting in the air, said: “Sugar” and told him that the sweets were in the breastpocket of a little child.

It was then that Pemrose, watching afar, felt her “rooting” breath suddenly become a snort, an excited “Weugh!” like his.

Leaving Revelation with the white saddle-girths dangling, she started to run across the pasture, crying out as she did so.

But Cartoon was quick—greedy and quick. Taking short, mincing steps in his excitement, his breath coming in very short puffs, he stole up behind the child, lowered his high head and began feeling him over—rooting softly with his nose near the tiny pocket.

Donnie started and saw, not Revel’s fair “nuzzling” face near to his, but the dark, ugly, Roman-nosed one.

The child gave a scream and plunged away—tripped in his terror and fell.

The horse plunged, too, with a baffled snort, wheeled crossly, lashing his heels out.

“Oh! God help—” breathed Pemrose, in the utter horror of helplessness—for she was many, many yards away.

And then the angel of God appeared—appeared so suddenly, in such an unlooked-for shape that Pem, dazzled, saw two of her—and three of Cartoon.

It was a girl with wide dark eyes in whose blaze the angel of God had bared his scabbard, his scabbard of deliverance, a girl with face waxen-white as a snow-flower—a girl who “went through life as daintily as if she were picking a flower”—who was snatching Donnie from the proximity of those lashing heels—within an inch of being struck by them herself.

“U-na!” Pemrose’s hand went to her cold cheek—she was fairly stricken still, out in the middle of the Long Pasture.

“Goodness! I—I don’t know how I did it,” said Una, sinking down.

CHAPTER XIV
Revel and Revelation

“Well we’re going to ride over to the Gap—Eden Gap,” suggested Pemrose.

Revelation and she were, as usual, leading the way along the narrow mountain road—and beside her was Una on Revel.

“They go so well together, don’t they, mother and son?” said the latter, stroking Revel’s silky mane, “Revelation, with his coat a brighter chestnut, slighter, taller—faster—although I think Revel could hold her own in a race, too, in spite of her being so gentle—and lady-toed,” with a little laugh, “turning out her toes a little in that mincing, lady-like way. Watch her! Oh! I’m never quite so happy as when I’m on her back.”

“And you seem to be braver there than anywhere else,” thought Pemrose. “How did you ever get the courage to do it, catch Donnie by his little arms and drag him, almost, from under Cartoon’s heels,” looking silently, sidelong, at her friend, “you with all your little ‘whim-ma-garies’—foolish fears and fancies?” flicking at her horse’s neck, with a smile.

They broke into a canter, leaving the rest of the riding party behind.

“Wha-at a summer we’re having!” gasped Una next, as they reined in, to round a turn. “It—it’s the first time I’ve been with a lot of girls. And—the mountains!” She waved her riding crop.

“There—there are no words,” murmured Pemrose breathlessly. “All—all the old ones have patches on them!” She winked at her own bankruptcy, gazing up at a softly swelling mountainside, radiant in July green and silver, the silver of innumerable flashing birch trees, with a few maples thrown in—above them the dark emerald of spruce and pine.

“Look at the hardhack,” Una panted. “Isn’t it lovely? The roadside just pink—magenta! And, oh! there’s arrow head, white arrow head, wading into the water, down there.

“It’s as fond of the mud as you are—when you have the magic ring on.” It was a dark eye which winked slyly now, as Una pointed down a tangled slope that bordered, on one side, the narrow road, or bridle path, at a shallow pond, just snow-flecked with the broad-leaved arrow head. “And, oh-h! such violet asters! And, look there! purple deer grass—its heart of gold. Love-ly!”

There was a little break, a little catch in the voice of the girl whose brain was a wildflower basket.

“It—it makes everything so different, out-of-doors, when you can really identify the flowers and trees; not be, as the Guardian, says, a Mrs. Malaprop among them, going round all the time, miscalling them—or with a ‘]what-d’ye-call-’em’ on your lips.” Una laughed now—and there was a new, a wild-bird frolic in the laughter of this girl who went through life as daintily—as lovingly as if she were “picking a flower.”

“Wake up, Revel!” she said. “You’d never be a Mrs. Malaprop anywhere, would you? You’d always be a good Camp Fire Girl—you’re so knowing.”

And Revel shook her fair head and, snorting—blowing a cloud of silky breath over the compliment, as the girls, in their pretty linen riding habits, cantered onward again.

“Look! Look! Mount Mansfield off there—mighty Mount Mansfield! We’re on higher ground now—and you can just get—a peep—at it,” panted Pemrose by and by, her bare hand stroking Revelation’s neck, as they slackened pace again.

The trail was climbing, the curving mountain bridle path, broad enough, in most places, for two to ride abreast—and far away in the distance there were the cloudy outlines of the giants of the Green Mountains, Mount Mansfield—Camel’s Hump.

“And the hills to the right of us n-now!” It was an ecstatic little cry from Una, her lip-corners curving up towards the dark, curly eyelashes. “See! Two of them, just—just like big green bubbles—twin bubbles, as if they had been blown there, tossed there!”

“But the boulders!” said Pemrose, a minute or two later. “Just as if some old giant had been playing pitch-and-toss with them on the hillside! Goodness! the farmers must have a hard time.”

“That’s why I’m giving my birthday party—for them,” whispered Una, bending forward towards Revel’s silken ear. “Ha! We’re leaving the rest of the party ‘in the dust,’—far behind,” she laughed, resting her hand on the pommel, to look around. “Dorothy is riding more easily to-day, on old King—you can’t see daylight between her and the saddle,” with a quivering grin.

“And Lura can keep her balance without holding on like grim death when her horse wheels quickly round a turn,” said Pemrose, glancing back, too. “Isn’t her ‘copper nob’ wonderful when she’s riding, bare-headed—a lamp to the way?”

“There! Oh! there’s another lamp to the way. Cardinal flowers! Cardinal flowers—down by the brook, there!” Una’s quick eye caught the blaze of vermilion through the scrub. “Oh! I must get off and pick some.”

“Keep them for the Wild Flower Party—your farmers’ party—pageant—the day after to-morrow; we can ride over, again, and get some,” Pemrose argued. “It’s to-morrow that we plan to have a picnic—a supper up on the old Balcony, on our mountain, where you stand on the lip of nothing.... Mercy! What! Oh—tumbleweed! Dry tumbleweed!”

It was a big, brown pompon of the feathery weed, broken by the wind from its stem and bowling gayly down the trail.

It was Revelation shying nervously, side-stepping down the slope, his neck curved restively—his eyes trained sidelong upon that trail tumbler, as if it were a King of Terrors.

It was a girl clinging desperately with both hands to the saddle.

“Whoa! Whoa—Boy! There! There!”

Breathlessly Pem—recovering—put him on to the trail again.

“Goodness! If he didn’t take my breath away. Maybe I haven’t ridden quite as much as I thought I had!” with a little, fluttering grin. “There—there, you old Goose, look at it, so that you’ll know it again; it isn’t any different off the stem from what it is on!” She pushed the horse’s nose downward towards the great, fronded balls of the same weed growing, meek and green, beside the trail.

“Revel took no notice of it,” Una complacently patted her horse’s neck. “Well, we’ll soon be at the Gap now.”

They sighted it, a few minutes later, as they rode up the valley, a narrow, rock-girt pass between two mountains, rising precipitately on either side.

The trail, broad enough in some places to be quite a respectable piece of natural road, had shrunk now until there was scarcely room for two to ride abreast.

On the left was still the green slope, starred with wild flowers—ablaze with hardhack and broad-leaved fireweed.

To the right there was now a curving snake fence, four feet high, the boundary of some estate or farm, with ten feet of grass between it and the beaten trail.

Beyond the fence was a broader grass strip, fringed by a narrow timber belt, a screen for the rugged mountainside that rose behind it.

Ahead was the Gap, flanked by its towering peaks, with their silvery rock elbows, framing, as in a miniature, a glimpse of still loftier peaks, beyond; of rich, green bottom lands between—and over all the glory of a lamb’s wool sky, in mid-July.

“Oh! now—now, all the words have got patches on them, indeed. One can’t find any to fill the Gap with!” Una laughed. “But there! Oh! look there.” She rose in her saddle so suddenly, so wildly, that even Revel resented it, shook her fair head protestingly.

“Above—above the Gap! Right over it! Against—the sky!” she cried. “That—silver—speck, tumbling speck, what is it?” And now the thong of her riding crop, frantically waving, seemed, from afar, to loop the speck.

“I believe—I believe it’s an aëroplane! Aëroplane doing stunts up there! A—a thousand feet above the Gap!” Pemrose’s heart was stunt-flying too. “Oh-h! now. See there! Turning somersaults! Flying upside down. Maybe it’s Treff! He’s dare-devil—enough.”

Just as the “zooming” bats had wheeled and turned somersaults against the black and blue night-sky, on the girls’ first night out, so this jolly air king was having his free frolic in the sun’s eye, cutting all sorts of festive capers, or flitting, a radiant dragon fly, from peak to peak, above the hills.

It gave the crowning touch to the landscape—and skyscape. For it was Life: Life joyous, dominant—devil-may-care.

“Look! Look, girls! Oh, look!” Una pointed him out to those behind. “Stunt-flying—an aviator! Isn’t that gr-reat?... I guess it is Treff—that ‘nickum’ cousin of mine—and his new ‘bus.’ Oh, I hope he isn’t going to have any more fiery ‘notes’ to-day!”

“I’ll engage that’s who—it is.” The color was flooding Pemrose’s cheek. “When I got his ‘radio’ a few nights ago—radio message—he said something about ‘hopping’ over here for your birthday the day after to-morrow—and the Flower Fuss, as he calls the party. Ha! There he goes now, dropping down—dropping down, a few hundred feet!”

“He’s flying in our direction—no, down towards the horse-farm,” said Una. “Probably he means to stay there, for a few days. Hear—his purr! Whew!” She turned suddenly a little pale. “If he comes nearer the horses won’t like it.”

The familiar buzz of the aëroplane was, now, only five hundred feet above the trail. The solitary air king was flying southward, along the route by which the girls had come—but down in the direction of the farm.

Suddenly, however, he seemed seized with a fancy for reconnoitering the wild hillside screened by the narrow birch belt, on the other side of the bridle path from that on which he had been winging!

Abruptly he wheeled. As abruptly—as mischievously—he “zoomed” down—until he was only fifty or sixty feet above the trail.

Well! if he was tired of playing mountebank to such lukewarm spectators as the hills, he had lively enough witnesses now.

Every horse was suddenly jumping sidelong—madly—down the slope; those that weren’t backing, crab-fashion, with a frantic show of hind-legs.

Even Revel shied—demoralized.

But all this—all this was too tame for Revelation.

He had saluted tumbleweed by taking to the slope. He greeted an aviator by taking the fence.

Together with the others he had swerved to the left of the trail—and a few feet down that grassy slope—but there he turned and in mad bounds made for the fence upon the right.

The girl upon him felt as if her head and shoulders were being dragged backward—the rest of her going with the horse.

She had never taken a four-foot fence before—or come anywhere near it.

But there was a mischievous boy, up there, who did stunt-flying a thousand feet up.

She set her teeth. Never once did she grip the saddle. Reuniting her body by an inner jerk, as it were, she rose to the leap—and waved her hand to the aviator as she went over.

“Well! by gracious, that girl is an all-round winner,” chuckled the boy in the sky, as he penitently pulled his “joy-stick” towards him and soared again in a great hurry.

Her head back upon her shoulders again, as it seemed, Revelation’s rider galloped him a little way, wheeled him and with a lift of the reins, saucily high, put him at the fence again, bounded back on to the trail—into the scattered group of girls and horses.

“Awfully—awfully sorry to have stampeded the outfit!” It was a boy-aviator advancing, three minutes later, with a merry mixture of East and West upon his tongue.

“So—so you ought to be!” stormed Pemrose, her cheeks blazing. “Didn’t you—you see the riding party—recognize us?”

“Didn’t recognize you until after I had ‘zoomed’ down—and then it was too late,” confessed the daredevil. “I wasn’t paying attention to the riding party. I was stealing a march on somebody else.”

“On who—whom?”

“Merciful—green—hop-toads!” The boy threw up his hands, invoking every hop-toad in the grass. “Oh! the funniest little figure it was, over there on the hill, just back of the trees. I had been spying on her, from aloft, through the glasses. She was standing, still as a stump, upon the mountainside, an umbrella held behind, not over, her—and I caught the flash of something bright, steely, upon her head.”

“Head-phone,” murmured Pemrose. “No doubt she had something bright on her heel, too, and that in a wet spot!”

“Radio bug! I said to myself. So the wilderness has ’em, too!” The brown speck winked. “By—by flying low, as I did, across the trail, up the hill, I might have got a peep into the umbrella—just for fun!”

“Just for fun—you played a nice trick on us,” sniffed Pemrose.

“I didn’t see into the umbrella, but I saw her face to face, after I had flown off to a distance and made a landing. She had mounted her horse then. And by Jove”—the boy’s chest heaved under his khaki; he flicked the helmet-strings dangling, about his ears—“by Jove! she was the strangest... Ha! there she goes now—climbing the trail.”

It was a pathetic little figure upon which all eyes were now turned; the sunlight on it seemed almost heartless as it rode slowly up the mountainside, with the umbrella in the stirrup strap—the something bright upon the heel.

Pemrose’s grip tightened convulsively upon her rein—as when she had taken the leap.

It was the same figure that she had seen before in a woodland aisle, with the piercing eyes—keen and brilliant, but lonely, drifting.

“The Little Lone Lady!” she breathed to herself.

Treff’s gaze looked softened, too. He tapped his forehead under the aviator’s helmet significantly.

“You’re a radio bug, all right—what else you may be, I don’t know—but, all the same, there’s where you’re wanting, Sister!” he said.

“Well! I say, this is a little bit of all right—isn’t it?”

CHAPTER XV
Wheeled Through Life

“Well! I say, this is a little bit of all right—isn’t it?”

Treffrey Graham, aviator, Polytechnic student, youth of nineteen in whom East and West met on breezy ground, for most of his life had been spent on the other side of the continent, lay upon the rocky Balcony half way up Pocohosette Mountain and indolently kicked pebbles down a sloping ledge, over a precipice’s brink.

“So—so this is what Pemrose eloquently calls ‘the lip of nothing’,” he remarked. “That rolling stone struck something,—bedrock—I guess, five hundred feet below.”

“The Balcony is the brow of nothing; the edge of the ledge is the ‘dod-lip’—pouting lip,” laughed Pemrose, with a little shudder, as her glance shot down an inclined plane of seamy rock merging into the precipice forty yards below the moss-draped Balcony on which she sat.

On one side of this natural platform a fireplace had been built, with a rough windbreak of piled stones, to prevent the flames from wildly running amuck at the will of the evening breeze sweeping up the mountain.

This was a device of that inveterate camper, Treff Graham, whose camp fire, with that of an erratic father, had blazed on far prairie and mountain peak, in most of the picturesque spots of his native land.

“This is a little bit of all right,” he murmured complacently; “you were good to let me come in on it—and on the Flower Pageant to-morrow night—after my ‘dumb stunt’ yesterday—stampeding the outfit.” His lip-corners twitched.

“We ought not to have done it.” Pemrose stabbed at his brown hand with a pine needle—they were skulking among some bushes in the corner of the rocky Balcony farthest from the fire, she sitting—he lying, breast downward. “I like a boy who has a brown speck on the pupil of one eye, just one—he has to have a sense of humor,” she murmured to herself.

Treff was airing his humor upon Una—his cousin—just now.

“Say! oughtn’t they to be tried first on the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals?” he suggested, pointing to a rough sheet of tin, dotted with little creamy mushrooms of batter, which Una, supported by Naomi, was slipping on to a red-hot iron grating between the stone arms of the fireplace.

“The biscuits you mean? Seeing Una mixed them!” Pemrose blinked at the two.

Treff nodded. “The surprise to me is that she’s ‘sticking it’, at all, as we fellows say,” he muttered, staring critically at his dark-eyed cousin, a white rose when she started upon this camping trip, a red carnation now. “The touch of hardship in the first days’ camping, before you reached here, hiking, sleeping out at night!” he rambled on. “A girl, like her, brought up in a flower-pot! If it had been a boy, he’d have kicked the pot to pieces long ago.”

“That’s what she’s doing now—trying to do,” broke in Pemrose. “She still has her worry-cows,” laughingly, “foolish fears, but she’s ‘sticking it’ at cooking and camp lessons—even at code, telegraphy, that horrid teaser, to her,” with a little shrug, “just because her father asked it. And—and she wouldn’t be Una without her little ‘crinkams’,” merrily.

“Her ‘fancy’ curves with a trimming of blue funk!” The boy’s lips were pursed. “She never could pull herself out of any mess.”

“She pulled Donnie away from Cartoon’s heels.”

“Bah! That was a mere flash, a fluke; it surprised herself more than anybody else.” He blinked through the bushes at his cousin. “The trouble with her”—the young aviator whistled shrewdly—“is that she has just been wheeled through life in a cushioned chair—and she always will be. If anything happened to the chair, she’d just—drop through,” with a collapsing shrug.

“But she’s the dearest girl, for all that!” fired up Pemrose. “Think of this pageant—party—she’s giving for the mountain people to-morrow night—her birthday, you know! She has been planning it for ages, a lovely Wild Flower Pageant, to be given in our open-air theatre,” grandly, “down the mountain, where a grassy bank forms a natural stage, with trees for a background. And our dresses—if they aren’t fetching!”

“I’ll say so—when I see them,” murmured the lad, with a fervent glance.

“It’s to be a representation, as far as we can, of that blooming democracy, Una’s flower clock.” The blue eyes winked—but there was dew on the lashes. “And it’s all because—because, she has heard, her father, others, talk, of the hard time the mountain farmers, have, clearing land. And she wants to remind them that where rocks ‘grow’—and back-aches—flowers grow, too,” quiveringly; “find the beauty around them, for them—perhaps, in future, they’ll see some of it, when the day begins, the hard day.” Pem brushed her hand across her eyes now.

“Pretty idea—if any of it sticks,” muttered the boy.

“And Una has coaxed out of the Guardian almost all the money that was left for her, for her own entertainment, to spend it upon ice cream, oh! and all sorts of ‘eats’ for them—their wives and little children—who have so little in their lives—that’s—lovely.”

“Well! with ice cream for a fertilizer—” began young Treff.

“Come! You’d better not sneer. You’re to be scene shifter—general electrician, properties’ man—”

“Merciful hop-toads! what else?”

“Anything you like—‘Hop’,” laughed the girl.

“Well! there’s one comfort, I shan’t be the only ‘hop-toad’, not if that old farmer comes who chased you up a ladder—and then let you fall from a hayloft on to a horse’s back.”

“And who came within a cow’s thumb of shooting us, because his wife gave his slippers away to.... Oh! cock-a-luraloo!” The girl jumped up. “There’s supper! And I’m hungry.”

“So am I,” acknowledged Treff. “It’s low tide in me, I confess.”

But it was a high tide while the feast lasted—a sweeping tide race of fun and laughter, joke and story.

“We might have had a concert up here,” remarked young Treff, when he was disposing very appreciatively of his last biscuit, the biscuit sneered at in its doughboy day, “we might have had the ghost of a concert up here—if only you had brought that—that talisman ring up with you.” He looked down at Pemrose’s right forefinger, without the insignia of her father’s genius. “Humph! when it comes to radio, you’re the ‘Nello’.”

“‘Wireless’ for winner, eh?” laughed the girl. “Somehow, I don’t think you, really, believe that I can get any results with the witch-ring, at all,” laughingly. “And I can! I can! Up here, we’d be too far from any strong sending station I’m afraid. A five-mile radius is about my limit, even for dot an’ dash—for any faint little gleamings of speech or song it must be nearer—” the black eyebrows went up over the rapt blue eyes—“and then—then it’s a whisper, seems to come from the other side of the world, or—or from the farthest little blinking star,” dreamily. “But Una—Una and I did—the morning we started—pick up something, just the faintest little ‘queak’,”—half-laughingly—“singing ‘queak’—but we made words out of it; didn’t we?” She glanced flutteringly at her friend.

“Awfully funny what you do pick up, at times,” said Treff, “from all the hotchpotch, all the stuff, broadcasted, shot out into the air, sometimes by amateurs not licensed to broadcast—but who do it, just the same. I cut in on some ‘queaky’ singing myself, a few nights ago.” He locked his brown hands at the memory, looking down from the Balcony ledge. “Some honey-head—radio bug—amateur, I guess, was shooting off something about ‘dewy flowers’—as well as I could get it—and ‘holding’ somebody ‘in a hand—by the hand.’ Now, what little girl....” The brown speck winked.

“Oh! go on—was there any more?” breathed Pemrose gasping—and she dared not look at Una.

“Oh! I kept getting snatches of the same ‘blarney’, whenever I could blank out other sounds.... I’ve rigged up a pretty powerful set at our camp, you know—wire enough to send a message to Mars.” He kicked a stone down the ledge.

“Go—on!” There was a queer little tickling in Pemrose’s throat.

“Well! later—later it seemed as if the ‘bug’ was blowing about radio: I caught the word ‘Air’ distinctly; and something about:

... ‘Waves you cannot see,

Bring you, at last—nearer to me.’

Funny—”

He stopped. Two girls were sitting bolt upright upon the Balcony ledge, one staring blankly with blue eyes—the other fearfully with black.

“Where’s—Una?” said the Guardian, ten minutes later. “She ought not to go off like that, alone.”

Under cover of the general clearing up, one girl was missing.

“She has never had the chance before,” said Pemrose. “In camp, we hunt in couples,” gayly. “But she’s off after harebells, I suppose. Some of the loveliest—loveliest bluebells you ever saw growing just on the edge of the precipice—a wing of the precipice, over there near the wood! Shall I go and look for her?”

“I’ll go, too,” said young Treff, as the Guardian nodded.

“Oh! do let us stop, for a minute, to look at the view.” He caught at Pemrose’s hand, presently, to steady her upon the shelving rock. “Una’s all right! There she is!”

“The Guardian is going after her, too,” murmured the girl. “She wouldn’t be the one to help ‘wheel Una through life’— but she feels her a handful on her heart, just the same.”

“No wonder, as Uncle Dwight, Una’s Dad, has fitted up that jolly camp for you. Done it in such high-powered style, too—radio, horses, everything! But the view!” The young aviator caught his breath. “Fine—fine as from that Lenox Pinnacle, where I pulled you up out of the Devil’s Chair!”

“And cut me afterwards—Jack at a pinch!” dimpling mischievously. “But the Pinnacle—the Pinnacle was nothing to this,” breathed Pemrose. “Three—three tiers of mountains, rising one behind the other! Oh-h! they look like three orders of angels; don’t they?”

“In the sunset they are—‘ripping’!”

The faces of both were transfigured as they gazed breathlessly off at green, spangled foothills grading up into tinseled peaks, which, in turn, did homage to the mighty, misty Archangel—Mount Mansfield, in the distance, with wings of pearl.

“He seems to be waving his Big Trump at us,” said Pemrose.

“‘Say it with music’!” gasped the boy, his ear pricked towards the woods. “What—what’s that. A murmur? Queer murmur! Didn’t you hear it?”

It was, indeed, as if faint music—the vague ghost of murmuring music—was being wafted to them from that golden trump.

“Merciful hop-toads—green hop-toads!” It was Treff’s characteristic explosion. “What does it mean? Where does it come from—on the wind—up the mountain—from the woods?... But the wood doesn’t—own—it.”

“No-o,” gasped the girl. “It isn’t the trees—nor any bird—nor insect.”

“It’s as distinct from them—” the young aviator was breathing heavily—“as—my soul! as the voice of a song sparrow down by the surf. What.... The wind’s fetching it up to us—helping it. If—if this isn’t eerie!”

They stared blankly, boy and girl, each into the other’s face, trying to tear thence the meaning of it: of that wild, wandering organ note—ghost of disembodied music—a succession of piping notes stealing upon the breeze up the mountain—hypnotizing, beguiling.

Now the dim spruce wood below them became, as it seemed, a “roaring buckie”, a hollow, reverberating sea shell, faintly throbbing with old ocean’s murmur! Now, from it came a wee, high piping—undulating piping—as of elfin singing, against which no evening sound in Nature could hold its own for sweetness.

“Well, I’m ding-wizzled!” Treff blew his bewilderment from eyes, ears and nose together—blew it upon the roseate air. “At this hour—by George! it makes one’s heart slip around in one’s body, like—like—”

“Una’s—Una’s is slipping round in hers!” Pemrose caught her lip between her teeth. “Look—will you? There—she’s off into the wood, to find it—find out what it means! She so timid!... Una—come back!” she cried sharply.

At that moment there leaped into the blue eyes something that rather dazzled young Treff.

It had the flash of a bridge over a torrent—a flinty bridge.

Not for nothing had this girl a father who had bridged even space itself with his discoveries; it was her nature to build bridges—span the incredible.

“Una—come back,” she cried again—and sprang down the mountain towards her friend, in her the same feeling that had possessed her yesterday, as if her head and shoulders were being jerked backward, the rest of her going with the horse—with something runaway. “Una—that’s that’s nothing! I—I believe I know—” in half-mystified tones—“I believe I could—”

As if a spell were broken, Una turned. On the very verge of losing herself among the thick spruces, thick as hops near the precipice’s edge, she paused uncertainly.

The lovely harebells she had gathered, growing in such profusion in this wild spot—a bunch almost as big as her head—stood out, like a fluttering bluebird, against the green.

Suddenly she tossed them from her. With a frightened cry—an awakening cry—she began running blindly, climbing recklessly—not up towards Pemrose—but in the direction of the mothering arms of the Guardian, wide open to receive her.

But, again, she was “sparrow-blasted”, mystified—quivering to the core now. And the sunset drew a red muffler across her eyes.

She caught her foot in a moss-seamed crack of the sloping rock that skirted this right wing of the precipice.

In the effort to dislodge it she set herself rolling.

Before a hand could reach her, before an eye could take in just what had happened, she was rolling downward—a scapegoat doll—from the brow to the lip of nothing.

CHAPTER XVI
The Lip

It was the Guardian who reached her first, almost stepping over the edge of the abyss herself—in her recklessness about anything but saving the girl.

So quickly, had that girl rolled down the moss-seamed rock, a dummy—a bundle of inanimate clothing—that such wild clutchings as her poor hands made at moss and grass and helpless leaf seemed but mechanical twitchings!

Automatic twitchings to those who watched her, without a cry—lest a cry, should cut the last chance!

But in the human dummy, when consciousness is swooning, there is a something which looks after that last chance.

Over the first fold of the terrible lip, in the very teeth of the precipice, earth-embedded, there grew a little tree—a stunted little midget of a birch tree.

That which took care of Una’s last chance, clutched it—and hung on.

It bent—bent like everything—but it did not break.

And in the same minute the Guardian reached her, realizing her own rashness, her own danger, just in time to start back, kneel down upon the edge of nothing and, leaning over, grasp the girl’s wrists.

“Lord, don’t fail me. Don’t let me turn dizzy,” moaned the woman, clinging in her agony to a tree, too—the Tree of Life.

It was a branch of that Tree which answered—a very vital branch.

Almost instantaneously a presence was beside her, a fearless presence. A lad who could do flying stunts a few thousand feet in the air was stretched out at her right hand, his shoulders over the brink.

His voice, though edgy, was perfectly cool.

“Keep quiet,” he said tensely. “Hang on. Great guns! hang on tight until I can get a good grip of you. Now—now I have your wrist, just hang—as easily as possible,” to the girl into whose up-staring dark eyes a glazed reason was coming back. “There—I have you. Now we come! Let’s lift her up!”

A human chain of girls lying flat, had meanwhile formed, was holding on to the Guardian’s feet; if she—or Una—had sounded the depth of the waterfall, hundreds of feet below, it is probable that all would have done so.

Thanks to the little birch tree and that limb of daring, young Treff, all were, presently, safe back upon the Balcony, Una wrapped in Pemrose’s arms.

“There now, darling! There now—don’t look down,” cooed the latter. “You’re s-safe now. Quite safe now. And wasn’t the Guardian a ‘brick’?... Treff, too—oh! Treff, too, of course,” with an arch wink at the latter, “but he’s seasoned—he’d stand on his head in a soaring balloon—I—believe.”

“Not ex-actly,” protested the hero a little breathlessly. “Stunt-flying a thousand feet up would—would be a three-legged race on a Sunday School picnic, compared to that ledge there—a girl hanging over—mean proposition,” behind his teeth.

“Ugh!” Pemrose shuddered. “Why—why did you go wandering off by yourself like that?” She clasped her girl chum tighter.

“Wander-ing—off!” But, with that, Una sat up; and now it seemed as if the recent shock was but the unsealing of a greater terror behind it, in her eyes.

“Did you hear-r it?” she gasped, pushing herself away and staring at Pem. “Now—now you heard it for yourself,” in feverish triumph. “That strange hum; that pip-ing sound. ’Twas—’twas the same that I heard in the wood, at home. And you wouldn’t believe me! I wanted to find out where it—came—from. But it isn’t earthly,” in a low whimper. “I think it’s trying—trying to get—hold—”

“Not earthly!” hooted Pemrose. “I could make it.”

“I c-can’t believe you,” hiccoughed the girl, who had been hypnotized into following it.

“Make it a dare—will you?” challenged the other—although, perhaps, with a tiny “niggling” doubt in her blue eyes. “What will you bet me that Treff and I together can’t ‘pull off that stunt’?”

That night a great scientist’s daughter talked long with her father by radio, handling her message as cleverly as she did before, for the edification and envy of her companions.

It was a pact between them that on certain mornings and evenings—after dark, in the latter case—they should try to tune in on a conversation with each other.

To-night, again, the experiment was an exciting success, for expense had not been spared on the “outfit” installed in this mountain camp by Mr. Grosvenor for the diversion and development of summering girls—his own rather ineffectual daughter among them—and at the laboratory end, a hundred miles away, was a powerful sending station.

As the girl pulled her switches, after good-nights had been exchanged through the air, with much badinage of “Y. L.” “O. M.” and jokes about hearing with the phones on the table when they were over her straining ears, Pemrose Lorry turned to her young knight and abettor, Treff Graham, with the white light, just shut off from the bulbs, switched on in her eyes.

“Father—father says we can get the wherewithal at Roslyn College,” she cried mysteriously. “He’ll telephone to one of his friends who’s conducting a summer school there. And it’s only seventy miles away. But—” anxiously—“could you go and come in the same day? The Flower Pageant will be to-morrow evening.”

“Yes, and that would be a ‘peach’ of a time to loose the pipes. Crowning feature! Seventy miles! Why that’s only a little hop,” protested the youth blithely. “I’ll be back with the pibroch, sleeping pibroch, in the tail of the plane.”

CHAPTER XVII
Wild Flowers

“Wake up, wake up, to greet the day!

Is what the morning glories say

And open at the sun’s first ray.”

It was Una, a bell-shaped white flower, striped with pink, the light, filmy costume divided into the three-lobed corolla and five-sepaled calyx of the erratic little wild flower which, in traveling, always goes in a contrary direction to its sun-god, although it rises with him—Una, trailing triangular green leaves, who came floating on to the outdoor stage.

Spectators wildly cheered the girl Morning Glory as she flung her green tendrils over a rock, symbol of beauty, indigenous beauty, to eyes tired with fighting Nature for a farm-hold in a region where Mother Earth seemed at times to set her foot down grimly and say: “Here, I don’t want men, houses, corn fields; I want my uncut forests, boulders—untamed mountains.”

“Ain’t it a purty play-act, though—a dum fine show?” gasped the old farmer who had “come, within the breadth of a cow’s thumb of shooting her” when he believed her flower-like feet to be those which had walked off in his floral slippers.

“Gosh! when, at early mornin’ the sweat’s rolling off’n a man, grubbing up rocks an’ stumps, and each one taken out means a fresh back ache, I dunno as I’ll miss the little morning glory trailin’ over the rock—jest opening its eye to the sun—seems as if, from now on, I’d see an’ not trample on it,” he murmured pathetically to himself.

“Well, it’s rising sunblink now, Si. Look!” said his wife beside him—his impressionable wife, who had on what he called her prim, muslin mouth that went with her Sunday dress—she pointed to the glaring mock-sun rising, red, flamboyant, behind pine tree and beech that, formed the background of the natural stage.

While in a bosky dell Treff Graham played Sun Father, manipulating those flamboyant effects, obtained by wiring the backs of the trees for electricity, in a twilight that by a long stretch of the imagination might be made to serve as dawn, not evening, another horological flower of those that favor the sand-man, was murmuring her winsome Reveille.

“I am the eye of summer days,
Once a great poet sang in praise
Of my gold heart and pink-tipt rays.”

“Daisy! Day’s Eye!” applauded the farmers’ wives delightedly, as fair-haired Dorothy flitted forth through the artificial sun-gates, a lovely composite of white ray florets rimming a shining, yellow heart.

While the Guardian, in lacy white as tall meadow-sweet, queen of the meadow, was explaining to rustic ears—of which about fifty pairs, in all, had assembled in the open-air theatre—that the yellow heart was a whole flower family in miniature, another girl, in azure, glided from behind a beech tree on to the stage with its borrowed plumes.

“By every dusty roadside see
The bright blue flowers of chicory,
That wayside friend I choose to be.”

“Wayside friend—mark ye! Wal! I wouldn’t say that she hasn’t got her wish—would you?” The farmer—the farmer who would no more trample upon the morning glory—winked slyly, nudged his wife, jerked his thumb in the direction of broad tables among the trees, whose ware and glass suggested junketing as well as pageantry.

“That’s you, Si; always thinking o’ foddering!” expostulated his wife—the wife who succumbed to spell-women and “fore-goes.” “Dear me sass! what have we here—golden mouse-ear.” She expanded into delight. “I was a-picking of it in the woods only yesterday an ’twill light ’em on into September—devil’s paint brush the children call it.”

“I light the mountain’s grassy knolls
With stars of gorgeous hue,
Burnt orange in a sky of green
Instead of gold in blue.”

It was Lura who, as tawny hawkweed, that wild flower of many nicknames, delivered this account of herself—her “copper nob” shining as burnt orange, indeed.

Dandelion, poppy, humble chickweed, lovely wild rose, field marigold, pimpernel, others—all the sleepy flowers that favor the sand-man—were represented.

But, as they were for the most part early risers, it was the one thorn in the wild bouquet to Una, whose fête this was, that she could not have a perfect representation of her garden flower clock—to find a flower whose awaking corresponded to each number upon the sundial she had to turn to garden aristocrats.

But when early pond lily, late evening primrose blended together in the dance, the final dance of breeze-blown wild flowers, going through the pretty pantomime of falling asleep—nodding—heads upon each other’s shoulders, the thorn was sheathed.

“Oh! hasn’t it been a success? As long as I live I shall love to think of this—my sixteenth birthday.” Una clung adoringly to the Guardian, a lovely Morning Glory, tender, dreamy, her eyes going down among the spectators to single out faces of little children, mountain children to whom even a moving picture display was a rare treat. “They’re all on tiptoe for the ice cream now,” she said, feeling little pulses in her throat at the pleasure she was giving. “But—what’s that?”

Was there a bee in the bouquet—the wild flower bouquet? Had every honeybee that visited the real flowers upon the mountain that day, in return for sweets acquired, stored up in the blossoms its hum, to be reproduced this evening?

From behind the scenes stole a murmur, faint at first, swelling, surging, until the air was full of it—that elfin hum.

“Oh-h! where is it coming from—now?” Una stiffened distractedly, shivering—blanching.

“Patience—just for a moment, darling!” said the Guardian—and put an arm round her.

“The—the Murmuration, by heck!” the old farmer was exclaiming: “Is it a bee-hive, a wild bees’ nest, anywheres near?” He started up, staring everywhere in the gloaming. “No-o, ba gosh! ’tain’t any bee swarm—bee tree—it’s too sweet. Sweet as honey from St. Peter’s garden!”

In the gloaming he looked half-wild.

“Sit down—you fool!” His wife caught him by the coat-tails; her prim muslin mouth was all pleats and puckers, as if she could tell the source of the honeyed hum, if she would—and that it did hail from St. Peter’s garden—wasn’t earthly.

Other of the farmers’ wives shared her air of awe—of mystery—as if the air held something untellable—but, for them, not quite unfamiliar.

The fascination grew upon their faces as the silvery murmuration became a wild, sweet, wandering organ-note—a faint piping, as of elfin singing, trembling off into inaudibility over spell-bound heads—while rough hands clutched at the air, as if, could they but reach up high enough, they could bring it back again.

“Gosh! I’m bewiddied—I am,” gasped the farmer, beginning to think that, possibly, his wife had more insight than he had.

Upon his bewilderment broke a laugh—elfin in its mischief, but human.

Forth from the background of trees danced a girl—a girl arrayed as a bluebell—a mountain harebell.

She carried a rather heavy box which she set down behind the footlights—among the quivering Wild Flowers. She pressed a button. The stage—all the open-air theatre for a couple of hundred feet around—became a reverberating sea shell. Another! All the elves in Christendom were piping!

“Behold,” cried Pemrose Lorry, “the source of the elfin music; a simple arrangement of tuning forks, magnets and a battery!... There, Unie, isn’t that what you heard, last night?”

“It sounds like it,” admitted Una doubtfully, her pulses galloping, beginning to gallop, as she thought of the Lenox garden at home.

“Weird enough in the gloaming—eh?” laughed a youth who knelt by Pemrose, flourishing his hands as if he were pulling the joy-stick in his plane. “Oh! we’re proud of our fairy music, pipes of Pan—anything you like to call it—we had a great time rigging them up, after I got back with the stuff. You see the forks—there are two pairs here, one low-pitched, the other high and shrill—are not in tune, not quite of the same pitch, each pair, so that when that pair is set vibrating, the magnet between them carrying the sound, it—it makes a wave with a hump in it,” gleefully, “that hollow sea shell crooning—elfin ringing.”

“But how—how did you hit it off, clever children?” The Guardian was flatly gasping.

“Oh-h, such an old story to me,” dimpled Pemrose, “being brought up in a laboratory! Father has every musical fork imaginable—experiments with them—up to those brittle quartz ones which, set vibrating, give an angel’s note, so pure and high. Some of them he loved to take out of doors, at times, and match the pitch against Nature’s sounds. We’ve tried it in the woods—and often down by the seashore, where we could almost—almost hit it off with the tide—have a duet in the same key,” laughingly. “But—up here—who could have been doing it?”

“Some eccentric musician with the same hobby,” suggested the Guardian. “There are camps here and there upon the mountain.”

The girl nodded. “Dad hasn’t tried it for a long time now, our pipes o’ Pan,” she said, with a tremble in her triumph—her face blue-lit, as always when she spoke of her father. “He has been all taken up with his inventions. But, sometimes—before—if I teased him, he’d take those rare, wavy quartz tuning forks along, with their sound that nothing in Nature could match, so pure, so crystal-clear it was! Heavenly!” The blue eyes dimmed. “Perhaps, whoever was playing with it, last night—playing Pied Piper....” She glanced at Una. “But who was playing—with—it?” Passionately the question forced itself again.

From the low-pitched tuning forks was suddenly struck a murmur, vague, unaccountable, carried by some magnet into her finger tips, her toes: “I wish—I wish Una’s Father and Mother were back,” it said.

CHAPTER XVIII
Mondamin

“Hurrah! Isn’t it fun to see our bonfire put the stars out?”

It was Dorothy who gave vent to this extinguisher, piling on more dry brush and resinous pine logs until not a spark in the firmament, planet or fixed star, dared to vie with the blaze below—upon the wild mountain top.

“And when it dies down a little and the flames blow aside, you can see old Orion, up there, stretched lazily, on watch,” said the Guardian. “Well! whose ear is the most nearly roasted? I don’t mean an auricular cavity,” laughingly. “I mean ‘Mondamin.’”

Mondamin, great Corn Spirit, they were toasting him, in style, upon the summit of Mount Pocohosette, while the two lesser peaks, Little Brother and Little Sister Mountain, as the girls called them, retired into the shadows of right and left.

Carrying, each, half-a-dozen ears of the sweet, early corn, in its coat of bishop’s purple, procured from the outskirts of the horse-farm, the girls had climbed the mountain in the golden September afternoon, by a trail which sidetracking Balcony and precipice, led almost to the very top.

Twenty-six hundred steep feet above sea level, fifteen hundred above their cosy camp upon the sidehill, with its exciting proximity to the Long Pasture, they had cut down wood with their Camp Fire axes, piled high the brush—for it takes much fuel to toast Mondamin—and brought water wherewith to wash him down, from a little lake of the clouds which could almost compete with the famous one of that name upon Mount Mansfield.

Mount Mansfield, giant of the Green Mountains, they had waved him goodnight before their bonfire put out the stars, so that lazy Orion’s nose was, for the most part, out of joint.

A teakettle sang its song upon a little red nest of its own, to the right of the main blaze, around which eighteen girls, each with a browning corn-ear upon the end of a stick, were preparing the jolly corn roast.

The first corn roast of the season—above the clouds!

The wind, now sibilant, soft, now swelling to a summit roar, sang through dark spruce and mountain ash of the heights—bringing out the red cheeks of the latter, the ripening berry clusters.

The mystery of night, young night, the girls had never before so felt it—so reveled in it.

Sparks played, firefly-like, among the trees. Potatoes hissed softly among red embers. Flames flickered upon great piles of husks, rosetting Mondamin’s bishop’s purple, his silken undercoats of pale green and cream, stripped off before roasting him.

Ever and anon, a toasting chorus to him rang out, led by Dorothy—the mountain top guild of glee, laughing girls, airing their own improvisations:

“Snap and crackle, blazing bonfire,
Pile the brush and pine logs high,
Till the flames wax bolder—bolder,
Scaring stars out of the sky!

Roasted he was royally and absorbed—devoured—too, with various accompaniments, while the flames sank to a flicker—and Orion came into his own again, with a belt of dark clouds around him.

The wind muttered strangely now; muttered a “fore-go”, if girlish ears had been attuned to its meaning.

Faces, black and buttery—not beautiful, but very happy—gathered round a core of red, soon to be extinguished, when the descent of the mountain should begin.

“It’s too bad that we didn’t bring ponchos and sleeping bags—spend the night up here on the mountain top,” said Dorothy. “We’d have been comfy enough in that open camp, over there—although it has no front wall, only two gray wings, with a gap in the middle.”

“How many of those camps you do run across among the Green Mountains,” said Pemrose, “nearly all left generously open for the ‘next fellow,’” laughingly; “some quite snug, with gray bunks and doors—others with no face, like that!”

“And haven’t we sampled the hard knocks,—hard bunks—too, by sleeping in them?” murmured Madeline. “Well—hard or soft—it has been a great old time. A wonderful summer! And now it’s—nearly—over.”

“Some queer things have happened, too,” half-whispered Naomi.

“Nothing very exciting since the night somebody played Pied Piper upon the mountain—and coaxed Una almost over the precipice-edge! I wonder who....” Lura leaned forward to stir the fire—her murmur breathlessly low.

“It was the same sound—the very same—I heard before in the garden—at—home.” Una shivered a little, caught in a rose-lined pocket of darkness—as the night became more overcast.

“But now, pshaw! it’s so easily explained.” Pemrose shrugged her shoulders impatiently, poking at the fire, too. “The Guardian was right—just some crack-brained musician, off on a holiday, seized with a fancy for sorting sounds out-of-doors,” laughingly, “testing old Nature with a tuning fork—or a variety of them—to see what key she sang in—what pitch she liked best. If father and I hadn’t done it before—”

“But early—early morning.” Una’s whisper was still restless.

“Trying to get the exact key of a bird’s song—waking song!”

“Seems to me the bird didn’t get much of a chance!” The dark-eyed girl’s whisper was whimsical now; that slight, near-sighted peculiarity in her right eye, which the girls pronounced “fetching”, was fixed half fearfully, as she stared into the fire, but she was trying—Una—to get the better of what Pem called her little “crinkams”, her cousin Treff her cowardly curves.

“Well—well, we haven’t heard it again,” said Madeline.

“I—I thought I did—one night, near camp—one starry night—”

Perhaps only the fire caught Una’s broken whisper, now, for the wind suddenly shrieked into its ear, so that the flames leaped up again noisily.

“Goodness! I hope we’re not going to have a storm,” said the Guardian. “That would be too bad after all the fun.”

“Huh! The thunder-plump comes on so quickly here,” hooted Madeline. “Seems as if the mountains just heaved a long, sullen breath—and comes the storm!”

“Ouch! angry teeth, already!” quivered another, as the night wind took her by the hair—and lightning grinned below her.

“It is coming, sure enough—and we never would have time to get home before it!” Girlish forms cowered towards the fire now, trembling—trembling before the night’s angry teeth.

“If I don’t mistake, ’twill make every storm we’ve witnessed before seem mild as a Sunday School picnic—even the one the night the flash light fainted,” said Pemrose, creeping round the fire on hands and knees, to sit near Una.

Presently, when the storm broke upon them—or below them, rather—they were locked in each other’s arms, cheek to cheek.

“They’re always ‘twosing’, those two,” Dorothy threw a little grimace into the fire’s heart, as she shrank into her heavy sweater. “Pemrose would stand up for Una against everything in the world—a good thing, too, for Una could never stand up for herself!”

But, as a matter of fact, every girl would have stood up for Una—would have shielded her with a warm breast from mountain rain and storm—and Dorothy knew it.

“I suppose that’s what it means to be ‘born in the purple’,” she murmured impishly to herself now; “it’s all gratitude to her ‘high-powered’ father,” with a low gasp, “for this wonderful, wonderful summer: radio concerts, horseback riding—everything! Una isn’t spoiled, though, I’ll admit; she loves us all, but she just swings like a pendulum between Pemrose and the Guardian.”

She had been privileged to go out alone with the Guardian—Dorothy remembered that now—on sundry occasions when the other older girls had undertaken climbing feats that were a little beyond her endurance—or her energy—as when they had stormed Little Poco, Little Brother Mountain, a precipitous peak, with a face rough as Esau’s hands—to interview the spell-woman.

They had not found her at home. And, contrary to custom, her camp on Little Brother’s shoulder was not wide open for the “next fellow.” It was securely locked.

The girls, led by their Assistant Guardian, had come back almost hysterical with fatigue, anathematizing the inhospitable “heather cat”, whose roaming propensities were familiar to them, for occasionally they saw her again—the Little Lone Lady—with Nature’s heavy cross, the lump between her shoulders, climbing some lonely bridle path, always on horseback—the camper’s pack across her saddle, the bloated umbrella in her stirrup strap.

But the interests, the growing pastimes, of their camp life were too many and varied—chase and capture in the Long Pasture, riding the air with a whisper by telephony and telegraphy, as most of them could now do—for them to waste much thought upon that lonely—eccentric—little figure.

Yet, somehow, it rode before Pemrose to-night upon the lightning’s vivid broomstick; she caught herself wondering what its background had been—what sort of life had left it imposing upon the superstitions of mountain people—living upon their crumbs, in return.

At a certain point in her speculations the girl, staring into the fire with eyes of blue patchwork, started—snorted. She always did snort and shy, like Revelation at trail tumbleweed, when she thought long upon that figure of a waif-woman who dabbled in radio like herself.

“I’d like to see the inside of her umbrella,” thought Pemrose.

And with that the world fell in beneath her. The clouds, for the most part below them, were ripped by a terrible light.

Like a thief in the night the mountain storm was on—and it was such a thunderplump, sudden, banging electric storm, as these girls had never beheld before.

A blue-black darkness herded them together around their cowering fire—feeling as if the Day of Judgment were upon them—and every minute that bruised darkness spit flame; a flame so dazzling that the eyeballs caught it and saw by it after it had passed.

“We must seek shelter in that wooden camp,” said the Guardian, putting her arm around Una. “The rain—I suppose it will ‘rain pitchforks’ presently—may drift in upon us, but at least we shall have a roof.”

And from there they watched the world pitchforked beneath them—torn, racked, groaning, blazing.

“Goodness! It’s like fifty days of judgment rolled into one,” moaned Dorothy—and hid her eyes against the Guardian. “Hide me! Hide me!”

But the trees in the dark forest beneath them found no hiding place, no rocks to fall on them and cover them from the wrath of the sky.

A blazing fireball fell among them and one tree, sometimes two, jumped into the air—clearly in the glare the girls saw them—then fell, riven.

“Oh! those fireballs they seem to open my head ... every time one strikes,” said Pemrose—a weak, bird-mouthed twitter.

Una sat still as the planks beneath her, cheeks as white as the sudden white light which, at the heart of the storm, weirdly cleft the clouds—and reigned for minutes upon the mountainside, upon the torn, staggering forest, and in the sky.

“Oh-h! this is aw-ful. I wish I had been a better girl,” whined Dorothy. “The black tops of those pines! There—there goes another fireball.... I can’t bear to see them strike.”

“‘When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee ... and through the rivers they shall not overflow thee,’” said the Guardian finding nothing more applicable to her steadfast faith. “We may be thankful to be, so far, above the storm—only the lightning climbing—”

The lightning, forked, blue, zigzagging up and down the shuddering mountain, as the white light faded, counted every coral berry-bunch on the mountain ash, every needle on the grinning spruces; but, although it was so vivid—so lingering its dazzle—it was but the tail end of a flash which climbed to this summit camp on old Pocohosette, two thousand feet above the valley—almost three thousand above sea level.

“Oh, my! The horses! The horses in the Long Pasture! I wonder how they’re taking it? If one of them should be struck! Rev-el-a-tion!” Pemrose felt as if the fireball, now striking, was in her heart.

Far away, on a hilltop, a barn blazed.

“Revel!” whimpered Una. “Revel!” It was the first sound she had made. “If—anything—should happen to her-r!”

“Oh! come,” said the Guardian; “don’t think of such things.” She, forthwith, pinned a smile upon her lips, which the lightning, as promptly, unpinned.

“I—I can fancy them all crowding together against the fence,” droned Pemrose again, “and nickering nervously—even Cartoon. And the little, trembling foals hiding under their mothers! I wonder whether a mother-horse would desert its baby?”

“In danger, I hardly think so—although I don’t know that it has ever been tested,” said the Guardian. “Ha! Now for the rain! The deluge! I doubt whether our Ark will ride that, as it did the lightning.”

The black rain clouds drifting through the lightning-ripped dusk, like soot through smoke, floated higher than the thundershutters.

Presently, girls were shrinking into themselves, trying to dwindle to the sheltering capacity of their sweaters, cowering in corners, the Guardian attempting to shield her brood, as fingers of rain came seeking them out, curdling courage.

They had escaped peril of fire bolt and fork-lightning which, to-night, had killed many a noble tree. The thunder storm was now abating.

But to spend the night here, unprovided—on the sodden floor of an open camp! Or to attempt the descent of a washed-out trail through those blindly dripping forests!

Well! it was the first time that the Guardian wished herself back at her teacher’s desk—in the stuffiest schoolroom imaginable—wished that she had not undertaken the charge of eighteen girls through these summer months.

It was the first time that the girls, themselves, felt flinching—breaking—before the “fiery stick” of reality with which Andrew had threatened them—of deadly hardship.

“And there may be a washout below us on the mountain, between here and camp,” said the Guardian feebly, “an impassable washout. We’d better wait for a while, anyway, before attempting the trail.”

Slowly the sodden minutes dragged along, to the jeer of the rain sweeping past the camp, occasionally into it, pecking, a merciless rain-crow, in every corner.

It took all the grit of the boldest hearts to say to themselves: “What of it? The rain isn’t going to ‘come it all over me.’ I am a Camp Fire Girl; I will not flinch nor falter!”

The Guardian felt that she had one thought that cowed her, Una: Una whom she had hoped to return proudly to her parents, a few days later, rosier, healthier in body, if not hardier of soul—Una, possibly, laid up ill, as a result of to-night’s exposure.

By-and-by—an hour had passed—she was heavily, miserably, debating within herself as to whether it were better to tackle the washout with draggled girls on foot, or to try to light a fire again—stick it out on the mountain top until morning.

“We’ll have to wait a little longer, anyhow, before we could possibly find anything ‘spunky’ enough to burn,” she murmured almost deciding upon the latter course.

Again the wet blanket of watching fell upon the camp. Suddenly—it was well on into the second hour—a corner of it was lifted ... lifted by a sound.

Light—light so dazzling as to be unbelievable was stealing under that blanket of misery.

“Klopsh! Klopsh! Klopsh!... Klopsh!” There were distant heavy sounds upon the mountainside. Something—something was struggling upward, in heavy travail.

“We saw bear signs upon the mountain, coming up,” moaned Una, “stumps—torn—apart; bushes—”

“Hush! Hush—listen!” The Guardian was sitting bolt upright—with a look upon her face such as young Moses, of old, might have worn, when he saw deliverance for his people.

“Klopsh! Klopsh! Klopsh! Klopsh!” And now—now, with that nearing, splashing crescendo mingled other sounds: whistling and complaining of branches, upper branches, the sullen swish of lower boughs, through which a passage was being forced; a rattling of little twigs against.... What?

And not one—not one of the wet and weary girls dared yet even to name it to herself: “Wagon!”?

Then, suddenly, one of them was on her feet and out of the cabin, flash light in hand, in time to see a great, reeking farm horse, eyes rolling, jaws foaming, lip rolled back from the dauntless teeth, plunge forth from the mountain top spruces.

Game leader, he was followed by a sweating, snorting wheel horse!

“Tandem,” gasped Pemrose Lorry—and reeled against a tree, which splashed her all Over.

“Well! I reckon this storm would make the Day o’ Judgment seem a Sunday School picnic, eh?” roared Donald Menzies, who managed the horse-farm for Mr. Grosvenor.

A giant figure, six-feet-four, in oilskins and sou’wester, he wavered before the girls’ eyes—a beatific vision.

“Pile in! Pile in!” he shouted. “Miss Una!... Where’s Miss Una?”

“I guess the rest of us might have dr-rowned before he’d have come all the way up the mountain—after—us,” pouted Dorothy. “Well! if we aren’t the princess, we’re lucky to come in on her innings. Girls! A great hay wagon—dry hay—a rubber covering to spread over us.... Talk of the seventh heaven!”

“I’d rather have this than—heaven.” Lura was creeping under that dark rubber blanket in among the fresh, sweet hay, so dry and warm.

“Gosh! I started in the thick of it,” Menzies was proclaiming. “An’ hard work I had to make the top, with this mud-crunching outfit.” He pointed to the dripping leader, whose whinnying snorts told the story of that upward, raving struggle, amid peril of fireball and falling tree.

“Did you walk beside them—climb beside them, all the way?” asked the Guardian.

“Yes’m. And I could hardly hold ’em to the trail, even then, lightning searing their eyeballs—trees going up around ’em! But Mr. Grosvenor’s daughter! To think o’ her being exposed up here!” The farmer’s voice rocked to the swish of the “shoe-bree”, the water that filled his waist-high boots.

“Pshaw! ’twouldn’t hurt her—didn’t hurt her. We were above the storm—for the most part,” declared Pemrose stoutly. “This is the cushioned chair in which Treff said she was wheeled through life—always would be,” she murmured to herself, with a cogitative wink, settling down beside Una in what stood just now for the lap of the “chair”—luxury’s lap—this year’s perfumed hay. “To-night, aren’t we in luck to occupy it with her?”

“I can’t get ye back to yer camp ’fore morning. A washout on the old mountain ’tween here and there!” The farmer was wheeling his sputtering tandem, drawing the fifteen-foot hay wagon, now full, girls blissfully cuddling close to each other, putting the rubber covering between them and the last peckings of the angry rain-crow. “But, luck with us, we can reach the valley—the horse-farm—by a roundabout trail ... though it may be a ‘wild-bear’ game, going down,” with a grin.

“Some tear-in-two jolts I expect,” prophesied Lura. “Ouch! Beginning—already,” as she fell over on Naomi. “I always wanted to ride behind a tandem—never thought ’twould be like this!”

“That tall leader is a hero. I’m in love with him.” Dorothy lifted a corner of the rubber coverlet, to peep out at the black form of the plunging horse, tackling the miry, downward trail, lightning tickling his ears, spent thunder hooting at him. “Oh-h! the wild-bear game is beginning, indeed,” she screamed, a minute later, as the whole mud-crunching outfit stuck fast in a quagmire.

“Don’t mind if ye overhear some swearing in the teeth o’ judgment!” growled Menzies whimsically, hauling upon his groaning tandem, in to its knees. “Hi! there, you Yank,” to the game leader, “You’re all right; you’ll come through.”

“The Yanks are pulling through—pulling out!” gasped Pemrose. “But, goodness! what an Adventure this is!” as the wagon resumed its way through the torn, dark woods.

“Lucky for ye all that this happened to-night—if ’twas bound to happen,” murmured Menzies, ages later, as the mountain trail plunged downward into a gutted road. “To-morrow, I’d ha’ been away.”

“Oh! do you expect to be gone long?” asked the Guardian, leaning out, with grateful interest.

“No, ma’am. Not with two o’ my help missing,” came the grim answer; “one off on a vacation, t’ other on his back with a ‘busted’ leg, broken by a kick from a bad horse down in one of those concrete boxes—outdoor boxes.”

The girls, listening eagerly, knew well those great concrete-lined “horse-boxes”, where outlaws moped and half-civilized horses, not good enough to be trusted up on the range.

“I guess, for one night, my son, Sanbie, and old ‘Burn-the-wind’, the blacksmith, can hold the fort,” laughed Menzies. “I’m just making a flying trip to Bennington, to buy grain,” came back the floating accents; “double header—thinking of selling Revelation.”

Double header! Kill two birds with one stone! But that stone hit something in its way—the heart of Pemrose Lorry.

Sell Revelation! The horse she had ridden all the summer. The horse who had come to know her so well that, while he still coquetted with oats and halter, once she had him caught, and saddled, he would look round at her out of his almost human eyes, curiously saying: “Well! are we going now? I’m—ready.”

Now was when she got her tear-in-two jolt. Her heart jumped like a riven tree—sank blighted.

And here was where Una scored again; she owned her horse. Revel would be sent up to the city, for her to ride.

“But it wouldn’t be ‘sporty’ to show it—show anything,” murmured Pemrose to her riven heart. “I’m too lucky to have ridden him—all—summer!”

“Best—best horse in the Long Pasture,” went on Menzies’ musing croak. “Expect to get five hundred for him. Only waiting till Mr. Grosvenor gets back to clinch the bargain. And he’s expected home to-morrow; isn’t he, Miss Una?”

“Ye-es,” nodded Una sleepily, from the hay. “Ha! Farm lights, at last!” She roused a little. “Horses stamping!”

One horse stamped upon Pemrose’s heart all that night. She felt sorry she had given it to him, to trample, thus.

“But I believe he’ll miss me, too—Revelation,” she said to herself. “Sometimes, when we were out riding, if we lay down under the pines, he’d come and feel me over with his nose, to make sure that I was there; I believe he’d have driven off anybody who attacked me.... Ah! lucky Una.... But it wouldn’t be ‘sporty’ to show it.”

It came almost as a relief, affording an excuse for pent-up feeling, that when the campers got back to their own log cabin, at noon the next day, a second loss confronted her, over which she might puzzle and rave without breach of code.

“Look! Look! Look!” she cried—and became, in a moment, the center of a sensation, whirlwind sensation. “Somebody has been in here. In here to-day! There’s a window open in our sleeping room—marks on the floor; and my picture of Una, the one I had by my cot, is—gone.”

CHAPTER XIX
A Girl Brigade

“Smoke! Smoke!” It was a cry from Frances Goddard and Naomi, the artist, together. “Smoke! Smoke! Don’t you smell it? There’s a brush fire—somewhere.”

“It seems—near! The air’s thick—getting thicker,” the responsive scream was from others, “oh! choking thickness.... Heavens! The—shed!”

A banner of flame flung forth challengingly to the night air, at the moment, left no doubt as to where the heavy reek was coming from.

The gray shed at the corner of the Long Pasture!

Twenty campers, twenty in all, had been preparing for bed—Devotions over. Devotions and the singing of the Camp Fire hymn, so dear to girlish hearts:

And, lo! in a moment it was a consuming fire they were called upon to fight.

A fire—the realization swept these twenty chips of that grand old block called Woman, like a wind which made their teeth chatter—a fire which had unusual elements of horror in it.

“The Pasture! The Sidehill! The Horses!... Revel!” The last blanched cry came from Una.

“If—the grass catches, they’d have hard work to save them. And the farmer—the farmer is away—at Bennington. And his assistant was kicked by a horse, has a broken leg. Only his son, Sanbie—seventeen!... Long before help could come from the Fire Warden—anywhere.... Girls! Quick! Dress! ‘Up to us’!”

They were scrambling into their clothes again in a hurry, even as the Guardian spoke.

“Plen-ty of water! But the stream’s oh! a hundred feet from the shed,” panted Terry Ross, Assistant Guardian, helping Dorothy into her sweater—then tugging on Una’s, fine and soft as the figurative cotton wool in which this girl-heiress had been always wrapped. “Buckets, girls! Every bucket you can find!”

“Only—four!” Pemrose’s eyes in the emergency had the blue of the blind, or bottled gentian, cowering in the smoke without,—the heavy reek driving upon fickle gusts up the mountain or across it, now with the awful carmine on its wings.

Girls moaned softly at the sight. But there was no confusion. They were accustomed to fire drill.

“Our camp may go, if it spreads up the mountain. But—the horses!... Brooms, too, to beat out the fire; dip them, wet them, in the stream, as you run! Scrub—evergreen scrub—that’s good for beating out a brush fire; break it off as you pass.... Could it, possibly, have been that awful lightning?”

“The storm last night! Nonsense!” Thus Terry Ross, Assistant Guardian, answered the excited chorus, which had in it no disorder. “The fire seed couldn’t have smouldered so long. The barn we saw blazed right off. But the wood of the shed—that may have been damp, still, from the deluge—didn’t dry up like the scrub and grass ... caused the heavy smoke. But—now!”

Now the flames were rising red-mad—and gaining every moment.

Pine, spruce, hemlock-scrub, the girls tore it off, broke it off as they ran, those who, at the Guardian’s heels, were not armed with buckets or brooms—in six minutes from the alarm the vanguard had reached the corner of the Long Pasture, the eastern corner where the tool shed, a gray twenty by twenty structure, had withstood gales for forty years.

But they were not the earliest fire fighters.

“There—there’s old ‘Burn-the-Wind’,” said Pemrose. “‘Burn-the-Wind’—and Sanbie. They—they’re getting the stuff out—stuff out of the shed!”

Mowing machine, tractor, harrow, plows, the two male figures were hurling them out, the latter a long-legged high school boy—the former a gray-haired, bare-armed blacksmith—the “wind” was now having its turn at “burning” him. Both had galloped, barebacked, up from the farm. “Burn-the-wind”—the nickname sounded cheering, in a fight frivolity has its uses—who could, at seventy-odd, shoe a horse with his eyes shut, was not in other respects very spry.

It was Sanbie of the shankums, the long ungainly limbs, who had a “leg-on” in the red fight.

He had played the one can of chemical, with the little hose attached, upon the flames—and still they gained—red-mad.

The grass around the shed was catching—had caught.

“Water!” They heard him shriek, Guardian and girls, as they reached the scene. “Water! Buckets! Oh! fill ’em first and think about it afterwards.”

“He’s game,” gasped Pem. “If he was burning up himself, he’d joke. Ugh-h!” She coughed and sputtered as the red smoke caught her.

“Here—here’s another bucket,” screamed the Guardian. “That makes five. Ten of you girls fall in, form a line, quick—bucket brigade,—ten feet between you to the stream.” Already, at a hundred-foot dash, she had filled two buckets herself, passed them to Sanbie who tossed them up to the blazing roof. “Eight girls beat out—beat out the brush fire, the grass ... take care you don’t get in among the frightened horses. Terry and I will help the men.”

The “wickering” horses were a menace. They added the last element of wildness to the scene. Bunched together, in terror or curiosity, they rushed up to the fence, along by the four-foot fence, at a corner of which was the raging blaze. Necks arched, whinnying low and nervously, or snorting madly, they would come to within fifteen feet of the Red Horror, stamping even upon the lighting grass; the leaders, then, in a panic, would wheel and dart off again, circling, cavorting round—the mother horses stamping protest, with their fluffy foals beneath, or their half-weaned colts beside them.

Somewhere among them was Revel. Was that her plaintive “wicker”, her whinny? It sounded as if she had been caught—protestingly caught—in the darkness, the spark-swarming darkness, thought Una as, with a frenzy of saving her more than anything else, the girl who had been wheeled through life, softly shielded, took her place in the bucket line.

Across the pasture to the little bush-fringed stream the night was seized with a changeable blush, now a deep, furious black-burning that faded out into moonless darkness, mystifying darkness, as the water dashed upon the shed roof beat the flames down.

There was not much hope of saving the gray old building, but, burning furiously, it was a fire-brand to the whole mountainside.

“Maybe, this isn’t some blaze! Bring on the ice water. Talk of your broiled lobster, I’m a pretty good imitation!... Oh! shake it up down there—in the brigade. Slide the buckets along—along—slide ’em faster ... faster, if you can!” It was Sanbie’s prayer, with ever the note of levity, to meet the flames’ hiss.

And the brigade of ten rose to meet it, in ever-shifting line, the momentary head of the procession of girls, stationed ten feet apart, passing her full bucket to the Guardian, in the forefront of battle, who handed it on to the scorched men—they throwing it as high as they could on to the hissing roof—then the bucket was passed back to the breathless girl who wheeling, made for the stream with it again.

Thus making the most of their five buckets, Dorothy, Naomi, Beulah, Robin, Frances—others—had all, in turn, headed the single line, for a burning half-minute, seeing the brush fighters working in the red glare, beating in towards the blaze.

It was Una’s turn now.

Her eyes very wide—fugitive and dark—her skin, naturally white and transparent, glowing like a filmy lamp shade in the glare—panting—she gave her brimming bucket into the Guardian’s hands.

“Well done, dear! You girls are—doing—splendidly. Look out for the horses, as you run back,” breathed the half-charred older woman, grasping the handle.

The fascinated horses were at that moment making another inquisitive rush. They galloped up to within fourteen feet of the center of excitement, threatening the brush fighters.

Their “wickering” snorts circled round Una in the fiery seconds while she stood waiting—waiting for her bucket to be returned. Awful seconds!

A beam fell in and frightened them—frightened her, too—as flame and sparks flew up; they wheeled and dashed off a hundred yards.

“I wonder if Revel was among them,” breathed the trembling girl to herself. “That sound she made a while ago—I’d know her soft ‘wicker’ anywhere—it sounded just as if she had been caught—caught against her will.... Oh-h! I must save Revel. If the whole pasture were to blaze....”

Grasping the handle of her empty bucket again, she wheeled, too, and made a dash for the distant stream edge. The brilliant patchwork with which it glowed as the beam fell in darkened now into ebony gloom—the red checkers fading out when the flames sank again.

“If the fire spread through the whole pasture, Revel might not think of jumping the fence,” she whispered to herself again, with the soft earth-din of the horses’ hoofs in her ears—in her brain, it seemed, maddening it.

The ground was hummocky here—low mounds! And she was running very fast, as she had never run before, to reach the stream-edge, leaving other girls’ fleet footsteps behind.

In a dark little bush-belt girdling a mound she suddenly tripped—there had been nothing to trip on before. The bucket rolled away from her, down into a hollow, black as a pit.

The swift fall was stupefying. She lay for a minute—numb. A dark, soft form brushed by her—she felt it was Dorothy, next in line to her, and made no outcry; they were saving Revel.

Picking herself up, presently, she groped for the bucket—found it.

What! was the metal handle on fire, too? Red hot. It stung her—stung her furiously.

She rubbed her fingers across her lips.

CHAPTER XX
No Answer

“Una Grosvenor!” A weary Guardian, who had done the work of ten women, in saving the sidehill, in saving thousands of dollars worth of thoroughbred horseflesh, in saving the whole mountain, was calling the roll—a panting victory-roll.

One after another her girls answered, some from the charred, wet ground where they had wearily thrown themselves flat, without another breath in their bodies.

It came to the last name on the alphabetical roll; a name which to each of them had a sort of lily-like aroma about it, savoring of a choice lily who toiled not neither did she spin, nor look after young brothers and sisters, nor earn her Camp Fire favors, yet who lacked nothing lovely that Life could give—for whose sake a grim horse-breeder would drive his tandem up the mountain in the thick of a raving “thunder-plump”, to save her from exposure.

“Una Grosvenor!... Gros-ven-or!”

There was no answer, save the pounding earth-din of the horses’ hoofs, still circling, restlessly—their blowing snorts, now quieting down.

“Goodness! it’s as if she had dug a hole and buried herself,” said the scorched Sanbie who, counting his burns upon the grass, forgot for a moment the solicitude due to his employer’s daughter.

“Hush!” said the Guardian sharply. “She must be somewhere near. Nothing could have happened to her.... Oh! I should not have let her take part in it at all. She was too precious.”

“T-too precious!” sighed the hiss of the dying flames mockingly, curling where a shed had been—it was the only answer.

“Una! Un-a! Where are you? Oh! where are you, dear? Can’t you answer? Don’t play with us!... Who saw her last?”

But it was not like Una to play. Her nature was more woven of fancies than frolic—even were frolic thinkable at such a time. And so the Guardian felt, with a thousand pricks of burning in her body now, as she put the desperate question as to who had seen her last.

“Let me think; I guess I did—I may have done so,” said Dorothy. “I was the next girl to her when she passed the bucket to you at the time that beam fell in—and the horses kicked up such a shindy. I was behind her, as she ran back to the stream, to fill it again—she was running very fast. But when I got to the brook, in the dark, I couldn’t find her so I helped Naomi fill her bucket—and we passed that back along the line. Sanbie was yelling to us to ‘shake it up there!’ so I thought I did—right,” wailed Dorothy.

No one had any later news—not Pemrose, her play-marrow. She had been fighting brush fire.

“Perhaps—perhaps she fell, slipped and hurt herself or fainted—fainted with the fright and rush,” said Theresa. “We’d better scatter and look for her. She couldn’t, she couldn’t have been kicked by one of the horses—trampled?”

The pasture burned anew at the thought, shriveled to a cinder, it seemed, where the fire had been conquered, with the withering of girls’ hearts within their breasts.

Dividing into two search parties, one led by the old blacksmith, breathing like his own forge, furnace-fed, the other by Sanbie—both of whom knew the ways of excited horses better than the womanhood which had helped them—they searched the Long Pasture, from end to end, hummock and hollow and found no trace.

Nothing but a wooden bucket in the dim brook—where it had been whirled a little way downstream and caught among stones. The water had played over it for an hour. It told no tales.

“Ding-me-davel—knock me flat! The stream isn’t deep enough to drown her!” puffed the exhausted blacksmith, drawing his bare arm, with the whipcord muscles, across his forehead, dripping as it had never dripped over an anvil in his life.

“Some pretty deep holes further down,” moaned Sanbie, licking his burns, like a dog. “Gosh! now you see her—and now you don’t,” peering into the darkness. “There’s hardly any breath left in my wind-works.” He looked piteously at the Guardian. “But we can’t do much without a strong lantern—light—I didn’t bring one, galloping up; carried behind him, ’twould have startled the horse. Now....”

Now, with hands scorched raw and lungs a desert, the young fire-fighter was circling in the darkness until he cornered old King, most good-natured of the bunch of horses on the sidehill—fast, too.

Jumping on without even a halter, weaving his blistered fingers in the cool mane, he started to gallop back to the farm.

It was ages before he reappeared—while Guardian and girls searched wearily in short circles—long ages before he reappeared with his dark lantern carefully screened, so that no ray flung from behind ahead, might startle even old King into shying into the ditch.

And now his parched “wind-works” were swelled to bursting with a discovery which, for a long minute, rocking deliriously upon his bareback, he could not bring forth.

“Hea-vens!” he gasped, at length. “Seems as if Something had visited us. I counted the horses, coming back, Revel’s gone, too.”

CHAPTER XXI
The Call of the Air

In the dawn-blink the gray dawn-blink, Pemrose Lorry sat before her radio instruments. All night long, when she was not out searching upon the mountain, she had been sending out the call-letters of every station, near-by, within her New England district, seeking to get one where she “came in strong enough” upon the air, to ask whether any one had seen a girl upon a bay horse passing.

At last came the answer from one mountain farm, “blanked out”, at first, by a whining in the set.

“Bah! like chickens squealing—that tube-howling!” she murmured restively to herself—and dropped her head, with a dry sob, upon her receiver, for she remembered how Una had once laughed at that simile.

But the air had played true. Her call had gone home, home to hearts among the Green Mountains. That young farmer had not even a telephone. Radio was his one ear, listening afar to the world’s pulse. “Mr. Grosvenor’s daughter—only daughter!” He flung himself upon a tired farmhorse. A new Revere, he galloped to the next farm—to the lonely one beyond that. He held up every belated pedestrian.

Among these mountaineers whom the lost girl had entertained at her flower party, were strugglers whom her father, out of his munificence, had helped; now, it was a loan obtained on easy terms for one who wanted to fight Nature for a farm and oust the “growing” rocks with backaches, again it was a mortgage paid up on the eve of foreclosure. “We’ll find his daughter, for him, if she’s above ground,” so stern men pledged themselves.

And, here and there, the mountains burned with lights, following upon that call of the air.

But, as yet, no signal had been sent up to say that she was found.

During the earlier part of the night, following upon the arrival of Sanbie and his lantern, Guardian and girls had sought up and down, but without a clue. Una was not in camp. She was nowhere. Girl and horse had vanished in the darkness as if the mountain swallowed them.

“Perhaps she got distracted with the excitement—the terror—of the fire and started to ride home—all that distance,” suggested one and another of the girls blankly.

Pemrose shook her head: “Never! She never would have done that. Una is timid and fanciful, doesn’t depend on herself very much—has never depended on herself—but to ride off, and leave me—us—in danger fighting fire....” The girl shook her dew-wet head again, choking.

And the Camp Fire sisters admitted that her play-marrow, heart of her heart, knew her best.

“But, still....” Here came the Guardian’s ordeal, from which she must not flinch, but which, at the bitter moment, she would rather have died than face. “But, still I had better go down myself to the horse-farm and telephone her home. Her parents have just got back.”

And now, in the dawn-blink Mr. Grosvenor was expected here, at any minute. The Guardian and Sanbie, in whose young heart the laugh seemed forever frozen black by the consciousness that he had better have let all the choice “stock” on the mountainside perish than incur this loss, were out searching slope and stream-edge hopelessly again.

Weary girls, purple-lipped from exhaustion—heavy-lidded—white-cheeked, had been condemned, as they felt it, to rest, or try to rest, a little.

Pemrose flatly rebelled. “If anything, has happened to Una, I don’t want to live,” she said in her passionate, tearless way. “I—I shouldn’t want to live on,” with a quaver, “but I suppose—they’d make me.”

Who was to enforce the boon of Life? Her father—her other joke-fellow—play-fellow—Treff?

There was a sudden sound of hoofs without the camp, hoofs slipping upon rolling stones—striking flinty flashes out of the dawn, the pale, primrose dawn?

Pemrose was at the door, feeling suffocated.

A haggard youth threw himself off a lame horse. It was not Sanbie.

“Treff-ff!”

The boy as he saw her face, held out his arms to her. She threw herself into them. She caught him by the shoulders convulsively. And in the dawn the tears came—washed her blue eyes in a silent flood, a silent, helpless stream.

“Treff!”

“Una! Have you found—her?” His voice was hoarse.

“No.” The girl shook him. “You-ou! How did you know? Have you—heard—”

“Anything about her—no! But I got your radio. Cut in when you were talking with Station Y.V.Z. that farmer-fellow. Picked up enough, just enough to know who was missing. Oh—heavens!” The young aviator threw up his hands, rocking, groaning—looking as if the destruction of his plane by fire had been a light “note”, compared to this. “Dad—you see he had been telling me things—s-such things!” he finished lamely.

“W-what had he been telling—you?” Through the girl’s lips, bruised by suffering, the whisper could scarcely creep.

“Merciful hop.... I mean don’t ask me; I don’t know where—how—to begin. He only got back from his fishing trip last night—Dad.”

“Yes?”

“And he got me so worked up—talking, talking—that I couldn’t sleep, so I was just making an owl’s night over the outfit—radio—for fun, you know—” the young fellow threw out his hands again—“when I tuned in on your talk with the other station. After midnight then,” he licked his dry lips, “but I made a howling dash for the nearest farm, borrowed that ‘plug’,” pointing to a lathered, drooping horse—“at night, wouldn’t trust the plane.... Water! Is there any?” He caught at the collar of his khaki shirt.

“Oh! heavens—if I could only—begin to tell you, b-but—but I feel up-choked.” He drained the last drop of water.

“Don’t be a mope.” Pemrose grinned it at him, in fury. “Una!... Una!”

“Well, you know that little figure we saw, queer little figure on horseback, the day—the day I flew over the Gap, stampeded the outfit—woman I said looked as if she wanted it ‘here’?” He touched his forehead.

“Yes! Oh! I don’t know why, but, somehow, I’ve been thinking of her, on and off—all night. The—Little Lone Lady—all the names they give her!” The girl’s teeth were just chattering now.

“I mentioned her to Dad last evening, described her, you know—the slight deformity, the big, queer eyes, made you feel as if she had a ‘nick-in-the-neck’ somehow—a peculiarity within, as without—oh-h! I’ve met her once or twice on the trail—since—then.” He panted heavily.

“And—and Dad he just leaped to his feet and caught at the camp table, so that he pulled it over: ‘I’ll bet my life,’ he said, ‘I’ll bet my living body! it’s that queer stepsister of Grosvenor’s—back—again ... not that I would have called her queer long ago,’ he went on; ‘she had some strange gifts—powers—that may be as natural as radio; she influenced all our young set, in which she was, with them; she had a way of telling what was going on inside us, boy, what we were thinking of—and sometimes what was going to happen to us, too, that took our breath away.’

“Then—my gracious! he described her as if he had seen her only yesterday—yesterday.” The boy caught at his collar again,—at his working throat. “She was the daughter of Uncle Dwight Grosvenor’s mother, by a first marriage, he said. Her name was Margaret Deane.”

“They call her ‘Margot’ here—some of the mountain folk,” screamed Pemrose.

“And she always lived with Uncle Dwight, swayed him as she swayed the rest, but he—he’s my uncle by marriage, you know—married father’s sister, and that sister, Aunt Carolyn, simply couldn’t bear her. And when Una was born—this was after Dad went out West, but he heard about it since he came back—the feeling between the two women grew, for this peculiar step-aunt just worshiped the baby, would sit staring at it as if she saw something akin to herself in the little mite—Una—and wanted to bring it out.

“At last Aunt Carolyn couldn’t stand it any longer. She told Uncle Dwight that his stepsister had got to go. She wouldn’t have her child brought up under such influence. They were keeping it dark, until they could find a nice home for her—but she cleared out of herself, without saying good-by.”

“And haven’t they seen her since—oh! since long ago?” Pemrose was staring weirdly.

“No—nor heard from her, either. She drew a little money that she had, not enough Dad says, to support her, eked it out, he supposes by using her strange powers in distant cities, as—as this woman has done among the mountain people; and, in time, got to eking them out by trickery; she’d be a witch at that, he said, for she had a good education—knew something of chemistry and physics.”

“But Una—Una—you don’t think—” Pemrose was catching at her throat now.

“Well—when I told my old Dad about that ‘elfin music’ we heard on the old mountain—how we showed it up, played ‘choir invisible’ with tuning forks—his lips worked for quite a while silently—you know he was a terror at queer tricks himself—then he turned a sly cheek on me and said: ‘That may have been no crank of a musician, boy, out testing bird-songs, or pine-songs—or pipes o’ Pan—or any of the rest of it. If this queer little figure is Margaret Deane and she’s lonely—longing to see Una, the baby she so worshiped, and thinks the parents won’t let her, she would be quite likely to work upon Una’s curiosity—or her “hifalutin” imagination—in some fantastic way ... if only to pay your Aunt Carolyn out. Or, perhaps, to get the girl off by herself into the woods. She would have done it even when I knew her—and she isn’t likely to have gathered balance, “a rolling stone.”’”

“But—but you don’t think—he doesn’t think—that she would go the length—the length of carrying Una off—doing anything to her?” Pem’s voice rose to a shriek now.

“I can’t help feeling that she has something—something to do with it.” The boy choked. “Dad was frightened, too, when I woke him—told him. He said for me to tear right over here— he’d follow when he got his car out of hospital.”

“But how could she—even in the confusion of the fire? The last Dorothy saw of Una her bucket had rolled away.”

“She managed to stupefy her in some way, slide something into her—perhaps rubbed it on the bucket.” The boy was roughly pacing the floor. “Got her, in a dazed state, on her horse.”

“But why—why ... such a hor-ri-ble thing—”

“Brooding resentment, perhaps,” said Treff moodily, “to get even with her parents. Maybe a wild yearning to get Una to herself for a while. Maybe because she has become quite unbalanced—Dad says people of her temperament generally do.”

“But Una—” Pem was fairly screaming now, her hands clutching at the pale air, opening, closing—“Una—why! she’ll go mad herself, carried off like that—by a strange, wild woman—away from us all. And she’ll be so helpless,” it was a choking sob, “any other girl, Madeline, Naomi, Frances—even Dorothy—might think of something to do—but Una—”

“No-o, the bottom will be out of everything; she’ll just drop through.” Treff stared gloomily out of the window. “But we’ll find her—together.” He caught at Pemrose’s hands. “Oh-h! there isn’t cover enough on the old mountain, nor kinks enough in the brain of that crazy creature, to prevent.... Gosh! Automobile wheels on the road below—her father! I—I’d rather crawl through an air hole, five thousand feet up, than have to tell him this!” The young aviator’s neck writhed in its khaki collar. “He idolizes Una—and his sister ... always a sore subject, Dad said!”

“That’s why-y he looked so worried that day in the sun-parlor, when Una had a story about hearing something strange, unearthly, in the wood; she reminded him of his stepsister.” Pemrose’s lips were uncontrollably twitching.

“Well!” Treff was bracing himself for an ordeal, “I guess old Andrew hasn’t let much grass grow under that car—has got here as fast as God and gasolene would let him!”

“Andrew!” It was a new cry from the girl’s lips. “Oh! Andrew would go through fire and water for her; she makes him think of his own daughter that he lost away back in Scotland. And he was brought up among mountains—wild mountains!

“He knows these hills, too—has fished among them—sent father and me the trout, last year.” Pem’s hands were clasped against her lips, as she watched the climbing figures. “Oh: Andrew! he can hear so far, see so far ... it’s as if he saw into things, too.”

“He’s a canny chauffeur, anyway,” said Treff.

But it was no chauffeur who stood among them now, while Treff’s story was repeated to Una’s stricken father; it was a Church Elder and a passionate Highlander to boot—released from all ceremony and convention.

“Gosh! I wouldn’t give much for Margot’s chances—wretched kidnapper—if he tracks her among the mountains and finds that she has injured Una, directly or indirectly; he’d wring her neck, as he’d wring a hen’s,” said Treff, half-aloud, watching the ex-chauffeur’s grim face.

But the latter was thinking of rescue, not revenge now; of the girl who in her sweet democratic way had called him her “fuffle-daddy”, the girl who was eye-sweet, the girl whom his wife and he had taken to their hearts as a symbol of their own daughter.

He clasped his hands. He flung his long arms to heaven—towering among the reassembling search party.

But the prayer which he prayed was the same which had sprung to his lips when, a shepherd-boy among his native hills, he had missed a tender one from his flock:

“Noo, gin onything be lost or strayed—gin ony lamb be lost or strayed, may the Almighty in his mercies fetch it back!

“An’, noo, I’m awa’ to find her!” said Andrew, the Scot.

CHAPTER XXII
On Little Sister

In a gray bunk of a mountain camp a girl lay, like death.

The pink flush of dawn stealing through a small square that stood for a window brushed her face, like a wing—and only made it more pallid.

Near by a woman stood staring at her; a woman whose transient likeness to herself, as the light caught her face, too—her too brilliant dark eyes—made her a thousand times the more terrible.

“Don’t shrink from me—honey,” said a voice whose scorching wildness had a low hiss in it, like the hiss of flame around green wood in a fire. “Don’t—oh! don’t turn away from me; I have been trying to draw you to me for so long—influencing you, influencing you at a distance; some day I knew I would get hold of you—have you to myself, to myself, for a while—no matter how your parents might guard you.... And now—now—I have!”

The eager flame died down; and the poor green wood in the bunk, lay charred by it, until the very sap in its veins seemed dried up—life blood, as it were, ceased to flow.

“I have hovered near you—near you for a year, precious—ever since I came back to these mountains, my own hills where I was born.” The woman’s figure, so pitiably “hulgy-backed”, round-shouldered, came to the edge of the bunk.

The kidnapped girl twitched, twitched spasmodically—a quiver only noticeable in her toes and in the dark, curly eyelashes flickering upward for a second to the red, spotted handkerchief around her captor’s neck, but so full of horrified repugnance that the latter involuntarily retreated a step.

“I—I came to know your ways; I would watch for you early in the morning on the edge of the wood near your home—which used to be my home until your mother turned me out; but now—now I’m even with her!” It was a bitter snap. “I watched you among your flowers, dew-wet flowers—and wondered whether you had ever heard of me.... No-o, I suppose you didn’t,” sorely, “but I’m your Aunt, Una, your father’s sister—half sister, I suppose, the world would say—but I loved him as a brother and could influence him—the powers I had!” The woman’s dark eyes flashed.

Una shrank flatter—flatter—until in her abject terror she became one with the wooden bunk.

“But you, when you were a baby, a mite of a dark-eyed child, I loved best of all—and your mother, she feared my influence over you. She turned me out. I have had no home for fourteen years. I have been lonely—hungry. But—always—I have dreamed of you; that, some day, I would have you again, quite to myself—darling!” It was a hungry sob.

“But I suppose people will say I was mad—mad—to carry you off, like this, and because of means—means I have taken to try and draw you to me—”

“You—ar-re—mad,” whispered something in Una—and her flesh crept.

“I knew your parents would not let me see you, but distance—distance is no longer such a barrier, when a whisper can cross it.” In the wildness of the woman’s look there was now a mixture of practical shrewdness, normal enthusiasm, as her glance roved to what Una, in a lifeless way, perceived was the “shack corner” of the cabin—radio instruments upon a bench, or shelf, nailed to the log wall.

“Oh! I’m not behind any amateur in that art,” said the Little Lone Lady, with a flash of cunning, as if she had made use of it a good deal. “Sometimes, as I rode near and far among the mountains, visiting people—poor and rich—who wished to see me, I talked to you by radio. Occasionally—occasionally I sang to you, as I did when you were a little baby, sometimes—sometimes from a station quite near your home.”

The woman opened the door now to let in the daylight. Her eyes went feverishly to the sky. Her wild croon floated back to Una:

“Uk-k!” It was an unintelligible cluck from Una; the little “stand” in her right dark eye was weirdly set, in even blanker terror than before—she lay in the bunk as in a coffin.

Her captor looked at her; and the half-tender, whimsical smile which had played about her lips, blew away like an erratic breeze.

“But—but this isn’t my camp—” she tried to straighten her round shoulders—“and—and when you’ve had some refreshment, honey, we’ve got to ride on—on—your own horse is here—to where you and I can be together—together—hidden for a while.... The Gypsies would hide us, their encampment is over on Bald Mountain,” she muttered, speaking aloud to herself, as she fidgeted round the cabin. “I’ve done favors for them.... And search parties will look for her on the other little mountain first, anyhow, if they suspect me, at all,” she added, with that flash of needle-nosed cunning before which Una’s cold flesh crept.

The woman was ferreting out a water bucket, as she spoke, moving, indeed, as if the camp, a pine-log cabin, was not hers, although she had made her own of it and kindled a fire there.

It belonged as she knew, to two young city men, college professors, who had locked their cabin before going off on a fishing trip, to prevent amateurs from meddling with the transmitter and receiver of a very powerful sending station with which they experimented overseas.

Somehow, however, “Magic Margot,” with the cleverness of a burglar, had found entrance through a connecting woodshed, the night before, because she saw that the half-drugged girl whom she was holding on her horse could go no further.

“No! Even if the farmers should suspect me, at all—connect me with her disappearance,” she flashed a sidelong glance at Una, “they would not be likely to look for her here first, on Speckle Mountain—Little Speckle Mountain,” muttering more vehemently as she stirred up the fire on the hearth and lifted the bucket.

“Speckle Mountain ... Little Speckle Mountain!” Una was not distinctly conscious of hearing anything; and yet the words sank into her subconsciousness, as she lay perfectly passive, almost a dead girl, while her captor opened the door, with a final:

“The spring is some distance off, dear one. But I shan’t be very long. Try to sleep a little—before we ride on.”

She was closing the door as she spoke—tying it on the outside.

Suddenly, as if remembering something, she slipped inside again, fastened a steel creeper upon the heel of her shoe, took a bulky umbrella from a corner—an umbrella that looked as if it had an unnatural growth among its ribs, with bright ear-phones dangling from it, flashed one half-doubtful glance at the stark girl in the bunk—another at the complete wireless outfit upon that rough deal shelf—and was gone.

In the same dim subconscious way that she had absorbed the remark that she was on Little Speckle—Little Sister Mountain—as the girls called it, Una felt the meaning of these maneuvers soak in through her clammy pores: she had become too familiar with radio practices, during the summer, to miss it.

She was still beyond conscious thought. But, relieved of the flame of that scorching presence beside her, lying a poor, staring dummy, upon her back, against the rough logs above her, she began to see pictures—and caught her breath convulsively at each.

She saw the grass of the Long Pasture burning. She saw the gray shed ablaze. She saw herself, running with others, to the stream, to fill buckets. She saw black, shadowy forms of circling horses, stampeding, galloping; even here, in the bunk upon Little Sister, she seemed to hear the soft earth-din of excited hoofs—to wonder whether Revel was among them.

But, no—no, Revel was here—a captive, too!

The last picture painted by daylight, growing daylight, possessed her; she made her first hoarse sound, after night-long silence—a cluck! She saw, did she see, herself tripping where the pasture was very dark, felt the bucket roll away from her—now her cold hands clutched at the sides of the bunk—roll away down a mound, while somebody shouted—shouted: “Shake it up there, Brigade!”

She saw a flurried girl picking up that runaway bucket, felt the handle sting her, sting fiercely, saw her rub her fingers across her lips, sucking them a little ... saw the fire become a red phantom, the meadow a white mist.

She knew that in the same bewildering mist, not unconscious, but numb, powerless to resist, she had been led by a firm arm to her horse and lifted upon it, while, as in a dream, the rush and noises of the fire went on.

And there had been a long ride up a mountain, while a hand held her on Revel—guiding the horse by a lead strap.

Only now was she remembering—thinking! Beginning to think!

“And—she says we must ride further—further—where they won’t—where they can’t find me. Gypsies—Encampment! Bald Mountain! And she’s mad—mad! Maybe, ’twas she who made those strange sounds in the wood.... Oh! I—I’ll go mad, too; I’m so-o frightened—”

The poor green wood of girlhood rolled over in the bunk, fairly hissing in the flame of that scorching presence still beside her—she felt it beside her.

She had a feeling that out of such a fire nothing could come alive. She couldn’t, anyway—if it was really She who lay here, at daybreak, in a lonely mountain-top cabin, with two gray bunks on either side—and a red fire-cheek upon the hearth.

But, no! The nightmare was too monstrous. The bunk held only a shell.

The real Una, the guarded girl, was away, far away, with her Camp Fire sisters. Why! she could hear them singing, singing their good-night hymn, before the first foot of the nightmare caught her—before smoke rushed up the sidehill and the glare burst forth in the Long Pasture:

Ah! she had loved that hymn—dearest of Camp Fire songs.

But suddenly—suddenly—her whole being became again a fiery stick, shriveling, consuming, for, watching that changing fire-cheek, the red glow upon the hearth, while daylight broadened, she realized that it was Una—incredibly it was—who lay here, in a beyond-the-beyond of utter terror—helplessness.

Una who would be put upon her horse and forced to ride further, away from father, mother—Pemrose—trapped—trapped....

“Master!... Master of the Hidden Fire!” She was feeling for the life-tie, at last—wide awake, at last—gibbering, clutching with her cold hands at the gray sides of the bunk, the outer bunk of two—with, somewhere, a memory of a red fox trapped by the roadside.

“Master! Master! Master!” Was there a Sheltering Flame? A Hidden Fire? Anything that could save a girl now—burn up the trap?

“Master! Master! Master!” She called it out loud, kneeling up in the bunk, in the yellowing dawn, catching with both hands at her breast, her blouse. “Master, help me! Save—me!”

Where did the light come from; it seemed to flash all round her, beyond daylight.

“Help yourself,” it said. “Save—yourself! There must be something you can do. Think—hard!”

And the light fell full upon needle and dial on the face of the radio transmitter, against a log wall, eight feet distant.

She cowered in the bunk, cowered, as if she had been struck, looking up in a ghastly way at the familiar antennæ running round the logs above her head.

“I never—could!” Yet, somehow, she was out of the gray bunk where she had lain, coffined—the girl who would have to be wheeled through life in a cushioned chair.

“Master of the Hidden Fire! Now! Now!” She tottered, gripping its side—but she reached that shining “shack corner”, the shelf with its wireless litter.

Amid a medley of plugs and jacks, used for connecting varied circuits, amid shining brass and bakelite, was a little telegraph key. Study, practice, at Camp Chicolee, had made it a pal—almost a pal.

“If—I only ... could! But I never could—remember! But Master of the Hidden Fire!” She tumbled on to a high stool against that shelf, the table nailed to the log wall, dropping her head amid the litter. “We—we had a private sign we always used, we girls. She has a little receiver in that umbrella, I know; if I speak, she’ll pick it up ... dot an’ dash, maybe, she can’t! Oh-h! what first: light the bulbs, start the generator.”

Mechanically, with a glance at that dark generator under the table, garner of power, she was throwing the switch, turning the rheostat knob in the panel of the transmitting set, not slowly, carefully, as she had been taught to do, to prolong the life of the bulbs to which she was turning on the strong current.

Much did a girl in her kidnapped plight care about bulbs—bulbs that talk overseas!

She slammed the rheostat on full, so that the fairy filaments in those electric bulbs—the sending vacuum tubes of the powerful transmitter—just leaped from dim to brightest—almost in a moment to white heat, the grids and plates about them glowing cherry red.

It was a cheerful cherry. It blinded her—her dull eyes.

But it gave the girl with a face like a white cameo, who had been kept all her life, as a gem, in cotton wool, a sense of power she had never known before.

“Master of the Hidden Fire!”

She began to feel she was on top.

Quite steadily she did the next half-familiar thing, closed the aërial switch, connecting the whole set, cast a glance at the dial with the needle on it in the face of the panel-like transmitter, to see if now the miracle was working—the powerful set in action.

“It is. The needle moves.... The message! If I can only send it out, tell where I am, Pemrose—somebody—will g-get it! If only my head weren’t so ‘whirley-hirly’!” piteously. “Our sign, the sign with which we always begin a message: Di-dit-di-dit-di-dit! Dah-dah-dah-dah! That’s—it. Six dots, four dashes.” The two first fingers of her right hand, pressing the key, were ticking it off now, while her swollen lips murmured, talking aloud, like her captor. “Now—if I can only give my name—or the first letter of it! They’d know. ‘Dot-dot-dash’: di-dit-dah; yes, I guess that stands for ‘U’. Where—am I? Oh! on Speckle Mountain—I never can spell that all out ... and she’ll be coming back. What—what was the abbreviation we had for it: ‘L. S’?”

Straining memory to a white heat now, she ticked that off—both letters clearly.

“But—I must give it again. Pemrose—that’s what she said. Three times. A distress signal! And that woman—”

Again—again—she ticked it off, the bulbs glaring at her until she felt their incandescence in her brain—light-headed, delirious—as if she were sending herself out into the ether, while she tried to add to her message and give the call-letters of the home-camp, beginning at the wrong end, as she would be sure to do.

“She—she’s coming!”

Just enough presence of mind remained for her to pull the switches—turn the rheostat knob again.

“It will take a few seconds to cool off. But she can’t call it back—the message.”

Slowly those radiant bulbs, the shining vacuum tubes dimmed—became blind eyes, the cherry-red plates fading out.

But the current turned off from them was switched on—for ever—in the eyes of the girl-prisoner, little white filaments glowing in their lamp-like blackness as she shot back to the bunk.

A knife, an old camp-knife, lay on a stool in the way. She whipped that back with her.

CHAPTER XXIII
The Ring

“I tell you I’m not going a step further—not going to ride any further—until I stop and ‘listen in!’ This—this lit-tle ring-set,” chokingly, “that’s why I brought it—brought it on the search.”

“But, heavens, dear-oh! I know you’re in torture about her—but it seems like—Jove! like shooting off peas at a battleship ... a time like this.”

The nineteen-year-old boy looked distractedly at the white-faced girl, who flung herself off her horse upon the mountainside—her eyes a “blue day”, flinty—determined.

“But it isn’t: it isn’t just fiddle-faddle—fooling! Your ‘soft-boiled peas at a battleship’!” She stamped her foot.

“I didn’t say anything about ‘soft-boiled’,” contradicted the youth. “And I’m as anxious about her as you are.”

“But, look here! it isn’t wasting time.” She caught at her throat. “Father’s—father’s new crystal, you know—more sensitive than galena!”

“Oh! I know your father is a Wizard.”

“Then—be a dear boy and do this for me,” Pemrose looked up at him, sidelong, coaxingly; “loop this aërial around that tree.”

The boy was accustomed to find those blue eyes “too sweet for music”, as he freakishly put it; before the agony in them and the wild suspense, he found himself weakening.

“But—but we ought to tear right up there.” He pointed along the rough bridle path to a steep summit above. “It—it’s on this mountain, Little Poco, as the farmers call it, that miserable thief-animal, kidnapper—horrible aunt—who stole Una’s picture before she stole her—has her shack—cabin—so-o they say.”

“The farmers, three or four of them, are searching this m-mountain.” Pemrose tried to speak calmly. “Her father has ridden—is riding—up the other trail to the top. And we don’t know—we don’t know that she’s here, at all, or near here. Word—word has gone out to every radio station in this district, describing Una, asking whether any one has seen a girl on a bay horse—so early in the morning we might be able to pick up something, a hint of news; even—even this tiny—receiving—set—”

She looked down at her outstretched forefinger—at the amber, bakelite ring, coiled with the hundreds of turns of hairwire; at the “radio soul” of the great inventor’s new crystal, shining softly—softly in the early light.

“Oh-h! I say—drop this foolishness and ride on.” The boy-aviator threw up his hands. “See! The horses—they don’t know what to make of it. Cartoon is looking round at me—like a nervous individual, with glasses on.” He tried to laugh.

Cartoon was bending his stubborn Roman nose to the edge of the dark mountain swamp now, to nibble—failing to make sense of the halt.

Revelation, long, lean, fast—shining in every hair, wet amber—rolled the whites of his eyes, too, at his girl-rider, with a remonstrating: “Well! aren’t we going on? Why stop here, on the edge of a black bog, where I’m in to my hocks—the mountain before us?”

But for once, Pemrose ignored that prudent horse-sense.

“Will you stretch the wire, the antenna, out to the tree for me? Or must I do it myself?”

She pressed the fishing-reel, coiled with two hundred feet of outdoor antenna—upon her companion, slipped the steel creeper upon her heel, driving its spikes into the wet ground—the radio headpiece, carved with Camp Fire symbols, upon her head.

“Merciful—green—hop-toads!” The boy ground his teeth. “Folly—raving folly, but I suppose I’ll do it.... Oh! so ear-rly in the morning, of course you may pick up a murmur—dim murmur—but as for anything important!” He shook his head—needing badly the support of the hop-toads, as he uncoiled the bright, bronze wire upon the air. “Not six o’clock—y-yet.” He glanced around.

Six o’clock—six o’clock on a September morning, lacking that a little, and a girl standing, presently, with her heel in the mountain bog, with her aërial out to a gnarled pine tree—one of the scattered pines and maples around her—with the red of the mountain fire-weed on her hectic lips—a little faded, a little drooping, a little yellow at the corners.

All around her the golden-rod dreamed—a shining dream.

“She’s more stubborn than you are—old Sickle Face!” The boy bent to Cartoon’s ear, flinging his arm over the horse’s neck, as he watched her. “This is—mulish.... Oh-h! you may come in on a whisper, I suppose—just the parings of a whisper from one of those boiled owls who—who sit up all night over it and keep on into daylight—I’ve done—it—myself,” he softly hissed.

“Oh-h! hush.... Your—racket!”

Pemrose was standing with her aërial out to a gnarled pine-tree.

“Well! I like that. My whisper couldn’t be heard a foot off.... Um-m! I’ve kept the hush up long enough. Are you getting anything?” he stormed, a minute later—a low, growling storm.

The girl amateur’s lips grew a little more faded, a little more drooping, at the corners.

“Just a ghost—ghost of dot an’ dash,” she pleaded. “Very f-faint—far—”

“Bah! Give it up then—come on!” He jerked Cartoon’s head up. “Let’s get going! Give up this foolishness!”

She half withdrew her heel from the black swamp—then drove it deeper, the bog swishing around her.

“I haven’t been five minutes yet—barely five.” She glanced down at her little gold wrist watch—calm link with normal life—it was one which Una had given her.

“And I suppose you’ll waste another five—ten.” He resigned himself to staring at the dim forest, pine and maple half way up the mountain side, dark spruce above—in between the golden-rods dreaming—dreaming against all the black spots on the horizon.

Was he dreaming with them? His heart began to creep, to creep along the waiting minutes—as it had not crept when he felt his plane side-slipping under him, knew that he was doomed to a fiery fall to earth.

The girl was pointing a finger at him—pointing it straight. Something had come into her face which made his knees bend above their khaki leggings.

“Have.... Are you getting—anything?” Only his moving lips, his stretched neck asked the question.

A nod! A nod in which strange, bright crystals formed in the blue eyes, to reinforce the listening one upon the finger. Above them the black eyebrows were drawn together fiercely. The face, in its straining effort, was pale as the meadow-sweet around.

“Then—then stick with it,” he heard himself say hoarsely: oh! he was sharing the golden-rods’ dream.

The horses seemed sharing it, too—they softly snorted.

“Oh! can’t you—can’t you say a—blamed—thing?”

“Una!... Our private call—I got it.” The crystals, dissolving now into tears, rolled down a face, set as ice.

“I can’t—believe—you,” raved the boy, half silently—sullenly.

“Faintly—clearly—distinctly—I got it: six dots, four dashes, the first time. Second—that was indistinct; I picked up ‘U’; I know it was ‘U, di-dit-dah’! Third time, ‘S’, I think; ‘L. S: di-dah-di-dit: di-dit-dit’! Oh-h!” The fireweed lips were trembling awfully.

“Location! Location—try to get it!” The aviator’s whisper was weird.

Silence ensued, moments—ages.

“Location—I did get it! It’s—Una. She seemed to be trying to spell out ‘Speckle’—I could only pick up a letter or two. But ‘L. S’, that was our abbreviation for Little Speckle—Little Sister Mountain, over there; sending a ‘radio’—a message—we always sent it, code or speech.... Oh! she’s not here, at all—and, somehow, I knew she wasn’t all the time. She’s on Little Speckle—at some camp on Little Sister—and she has managed to send out a message ... Una!”

A gulf yawned between the girl and boy into which all their previous ideas dropped—out of which rose the most wonderful sunrise they had ever seen; they stared at each other stupidly across it.

“Oh-h! you may ride north, south, east or west, if you like—but I’m going over there.” Suddenly Pemrose Lorry tore her spiked heel out of the mud—out of the ground connection which had done its work.

“Oh! unhitch the antenna—quick,” she screamed.

“But—it beats me—” The boy hesitated a moment—blankly.

“Nothing did ‘beat’ you! Even if I didn’t—didn’t get the ‘location’,” she stamped her foot, “those two letters, the bungled rest of it, there’s only one strong station really near enough for me to pick up anything—distinctly—with the ring. That—that’s the new one over on Speckle Mountain, just rigged up by college professors—can’t see their camp from here—closed a few days ago, when we rode up there. But—now....”

She was restoring the ring to its case—that to her breast, as she spoke, preparing to mount her horse.

“Oh! you—you may ride to the top—go to the right and follow your left ear, if you like!” The blue eyes snapped at him impudently—as did the girl’s crop—in the incredible excitement of the moment. “But I—”

He was going to the right, unlooping the aërial from the pine tree—in a bewitched, protesting way.

“But, for heaven’s sake! look out how you go—where you’re going,” he cried, five minutes later, following Pemrose on horseback down the steep trail. “Don’t—don’t try to run him downhill! Better get there late than not at all!”

For the girl rider had started Revelation off at such a pace that he stepped upon a rolling stone and almost slipped upon his haunches with it, down the pebbly trail—sparks flying out, a galaxy, from his hindfeet.

“Hold his head up. Try-y to hold his head up. Bah! going down, Revelation will leave Cartoon in the dust.” The boy rider ground his teeth.

“I’ll change with you, if you like!”

“Do you think I’m such a cad—such a bounder?”

But the passionate sincerity of the offer did more than anything else to convince Treff Graham, aviator, that this whole thing was more than a mere dream of the golden-rods.

Sparks flew in front of hoofs now—whole constellations of them—hind feet slid, Cartoon grunted stubbornly, the white star on his forehead moody.

“Yes, going up, old Roman Nose, you could hold your own, because of muscle; going down you’re not ‘in it’ with Revelation—not so nimble. But, heavens! if that girl doesn’t ‘come a cropper’ before—the—bottom.”

Treffrey, stroking his horse’s throbbing neck, grunted, too, appalled; for his girl-leader, her hand on her saddle, was whirling round on him again and the blue triumph of her eyes in the chalky whiteness of her face made him feel queer.

“Do you realize,” she cried—and rose in her stirrups, “do you realize that if Una sent out that message—and I know she did—she isn’t dropping through, as you said she would, she’s coming through?”

“By the powers o’ pluck! It begins to look as if she was crashing through.” The boy-aviator rose, too, high in his saddle—and in the moisture of his eye, as its humorous brown speck flashed, there was all the world of difference that yawned for him between helplessly dropping through and crashing through an enemy, colors flying—the difference between cripple and soldier, glory and defeat.

“She—she has to be gently wheeled through life—everybody looking out for her!” hooted Pemrose—just as if she had not thought the same thing herself. “Why! she’d make many a boy look foolish. She’s a—Girl. A Camp Fire Girl!”

She said it again. He said it, too, when, an hour—and more—later, a hard climb accomplished, riders standing upright, at times, forcing the stirrups back, to help struggling horses, the top of Little Sister was gained ... and an empty camp.

But what was this fluttering in the mountain wind, an indigo butterfly—a bit of blue rag.

“It looks—oh! it looks as if it might have belonged to Una’s riding habit.” The back of Pemrose’s hand struck her lips. “She—she had riding breeches on, that color; I helped her into them when the fire broke out—first thing handy!”

For a moment she felt as did Jacob of old when he, seeing his son’s rich coat, thought a beast had devoured him—to what evil thing might this fragment of blue cloth, finer than that of a girl’s sisters, testify?

“Perhaps she bit it out, gnawed it—cut it out—left it as a clue, a clue to searchers.” Treff was cornering the fragment.

“Oh-h! do you think she could have done that?”

“If she had presence of mind to send out the message—she could.”

The boy-aviator’s face wore a look now as if the spot on which he stood, might be holy ground.

The next moment he knew it was.

He was kneeling, bareheaded. Pemrose was sobbing wildly, kissing the ground where among rank grasses, held down by a stone or two, were a few drowsy wild flowers, of the sort that close sleepily at night—open in the morning.

Dandelion, daisy, a white clover blossom, its triple leaves unfolding, a glow of orange, a little sprig of tawny hawkweed—devil’s paint-brush—picked behind the camp.

“Mercy! She must have looked round for them, arranged them so—so that anybody who knew her, would know it could only be she who did it—at least, we girls would—that she had been here—lately!” Pemrose could hardly speak now.

“And led that awful kidnapping aunt to believe she was only playing with them!” The brown speck in Treff’s right eye, his seat of humor, blazed as it had never blazed before—through a mist.

He knelt, an unkempt figure, in khaki riding breeches—mud-splashed shirt.

“But—but her little flower clock! A ‘teeny’ bit of it!” The hand of Pemrose caught at her throat. “Oh-h! I can’t stand this. Where is she now?”

“Wherever she is, she’s on top. And coming through!” The aviator drew his sleeve across a wet face. “And we—we must get right after them. Just a minute for the horses to draw breath—’twill pay! Do you—know—what this reminds me of?”

His voice dropped with his eyes to the flowers.

“No-o.”

“My old Dad, he was such a queer fish,” the young dare-devil’s voice had the frankness of utter emotion now, “he could have given this hor-ri-ble step-aunt pointers on queer tricks. Was a sort of a skeptic, too, didn’t believe much in what he couldn’t feel or see. But—but, after that last mad escapade, when he stole your father’s record, and lay in agony out in the Man Killers trail, while you took care of him, he said to himself—then—that there must be Something Very Fine back of it all—finer than the girl herself—see?

“He began to think and search—and find. My old Dad!”

Across the fragment of a flower clock the girl’s hand stole into the boy’s.

He covered it with his other palm—held the finger tips for a moment against his lips—then leaped to his feet, to search anew.

CHAPTER XXIV
The Race

“If it weren’t for the trees, we ought to be able to see them now. But—merciful hop toads! this trail is crooked enough to break a snake’s back, isn’t it?”

Treff Graham grasped it, ducking low to avoid the tall bushes and small trees that almost swept him off his plunging horse as he followed Pemrose down the shoulder of Little Sister mountain.

The girl had started off recklessly at a fast trot—a chameleon-like trot that was now a slip now a wild plunge—Revelation feeling with his fore feet for a footing—and now a coasting gait in which he slid upon his haunches; then the pace slackened, to become again the slip and slide and plunge in which girl and horse, flashing amid the bright fall foliage, turned all sorts of colors in the early light.

“Are you—are you coming?” she shouted impatiently over her shoulder.

“Sure—thing! As fast as I can come!” bellowed the boy; and then he swung his whip and whooped, as the trail grew for a moment easier.

“Camp Fire Girls on top,” he yelled. “Look—there!”

Rising in his stirrups on the plunging horse he pointed to two white arms stretched in benediction from the tallest tree upon the shoulder of Little Sister.

“If anybody found a trace of her, he was to signal the other search parties,” young Treff had said, two minutes before. “The sign was to be two smokes—or a white cloth waving. We haven’t time for the smokes—and a handkerchief won’t show up very far.”

“My sweater—my jersey!” Pemrose had gasped. “I can ride on in my blouse.”

“Camp Fire Girls on top, eh?” Treff let out another Western yell, as he pointed to the cream-white arms burgeoning in the wind. “And, by heaven! they are on top,” he cried. “They have crashed through. Una—what this summer must have been doing for her! And nobody suspected it.... There’s another bit of blue rag!”

With a rearing swerve of his horse he plucked it from the bush on which it had lit; the fine bit of cloth, true blue, cut or gnawed from a girl’s riding habit—perhaps by the teeth of the girl whose brain had been a fragile flower basket.

“I suppose she felt that there was no use in putting up, trying to put up, any open fight against that kidnapping relative,” he said. “The only thing she could do—all that she could do was to leave such clues as she could behind her. Well! we’re on their track, sure enough. Horses’ prints in that swamp there, Revel’s among them, I’ll be sworn—toes turning out! They’ve ridden down the mountain on the opposite side from that on which we came up—and this—this is the blamed ‘cheekyside’, too—of all the cross trails—”

Already he was falling behind—gnashingly behind—upon the clumsy and “winded” Cartoon, on the difficult trail that zigzagged over the mountain’s shoulder among birches and red maples a few inches in diameter, from twelve to fifteen feet in height.

But the slender little trees, herding together, could screen from view any riders making headway upon the lower stretches of that corkscrew trail.

“If only Una could know that we’re after her—hotfoot!” he raged to the tormenting branches that swept his face.

And one minute later the world rocked to the cry:

“There they—are!”

There they were, visible, plainly visible, at an almost perpendicular angle, half-a-mile below, the little round-shouldered figure on the bay cob dragging another dark object along, the hanging-back figure of Una on Revel—Revel rolling wearily, as the trail widened, and tugging upon the lead strap.

“Ha-loo!” The yell which the young aviator discharged, then, just tore at the mountain’s heart, calling on every echo in heaven and earth to help it to reach the unwilling fugitive, the agonized girl, there below.

Agony was in another girlish heart, too. The whole mountain blazed like a brush fire, as she saw them.

“Are—are you with me—still? Can you—see-ee....” she called back.

“Yes! I’m—coming. As fast as I can! Careful—now! Better l-late than not at all!”

But that was the moment, the harebrained moment, when the boy rider, all burning up within, too, disregarded his own maxim.

The trail, the winding trail, was steep enough, but here and there upon the mountainside were little precipitous cross-cuts by which a daredevil could cut corners, gain an advantage, strike in on the trail again, with a saving of a few hundred yards.

One presented itself at the moment—a mere gash, lined with stones as big as the rider’s fist.

“Gee whiz! If ’twas a thermometer, the mercury would have hard work climbing it, even in July,” was his freakish thought, thrown off by the laboring excitement—the wild heartache, too—within. “Going down, I’ll risk—it!”

He put Cartoon at the stony “thermometer”—and in three seconds horse and rider were seeing stars.

Cartoon had slid and fallen. And a young aviator was testing the stones with the back of his head—finding them more heartless than the flower clock into which he had once tumbled.

“Stars, moons and suns!” He sat up, gasping, rubbing his poll, while the whole firmament whirled about him. “Merciful hop.... I hope you’re not done for!” He blinked, half-stunned, at his horse.

But Cartoon, trembling all over, grunting like a cyclone, had escaped with bruises.

“Well! we’re out of it now,” groaned the boy. “But Revelation won’t lose them; he—he’ll come up after them ‘as tight as he can.’”

Dizzily he was leading his horse down on to the trail again—while a girlish cry rang back in piteous accents.

The stony clatter had reached Pemrose. Even with those flying figures ahead, now seen, now unseen, upon the mountain’s lower slopes, she reined in among the baffling little trees.

“It’s all-ll—right. I’m coming—along. Don’t—lose—them!” She heard her companion’s fumbling cry.

And now she knew, as she seemed to have known from the first, that when it came to the last pinch, the last dash for Una’s safety, it would be a race between Revel and Revelation.

She was out on a road now. The trees were taller on either side of her—but with great gaps between them.

Heavenly in color they skirted the way: orange of a sugar-maple against the quivering blue-green of a balsam, coral of a swamp maple, the tender green of soft pines: and all reflected in the dark breast of a mountain pool past which she galloped like a rocket.

In her breast was the blackness of the water—the brilliant reflections painted her hopes of saving Una.

This wood road, an old lumber road, in which the zigzagging trail had given out, wound, now, around the mountain’s side.

And parallel with it—just below—ran a brawling mountain stream.

Pem had a sort of feeling that, as long as she lived, she would never lose the note of that stream—always it would flow parallel with her—it and its cry as it umpired the race.

It was going to be a tight race, that she saw. Revelation was lathered all over—wet as if she had ridden him through the water. In the moment that she had reined him in, his eyes had been wild and rolling; he had pranced about among the bushes, neck deliriously arched—nostrils smoking.

The other two horsewomen were still an eighth of a mile ahead.

Revel seemed to be going blindly, her neck stretched out, almost level; now and again she slipped back a step and then—again—she rocked like a boat; a quickly rolling motion that, if slower, would have been a pathetic wabble—and Una upon her back!

But the creature beside her was whipping her on, lashing her own tired horse frantically, too.

And the other pursuer, the youth on whom Pemrose had leaned, was now a hundred and fifty yards behind.

It was as the girl realized this and the blood seemed bursting through the pores of her skin with the thought, the question, as to what she should do when her gallop did bring her up with the riders, that the stream suddenly burst into a jeer ... an awful jeer.

“Don’t you remember that there’s a ‘washout’ ahead,” it said, “where I, the water, swung in, some time ago, and ate back into the road: now, there’s no road there, but a steep bank, a wild bank—clumps of sod ... and Una can’t keep her seat?”

The blood rushed back upon the girl rider’s heart now. Horrible sounds were in her ears, as of a hurricane raging around her on a darkened mountain as, standing in her stirrups, cowering forward, she whipped Revelation on—coaxed him, by his love for her, on—brave Revelation, coming up after them as tight as he could.

She saw that eaten-out bank descend at an angle of fifty degrees, its snaring sod-clumps, wild bushes—girlish feet had once climbed it breathlessly from below.

“Una could never stick on ... and the woman is mad enough to force her down it.... And can I hold them back?”

But out of the hurricane came the still small Voice: “You are not alone,” it said. “On this desperate ride you are not two—and one lagging far behind—but Three. One is, surely, with you who was with Una when she sent that message.”

“But I can’t even r-reach them,” Pemrose was sobbing, a moment later, setting her teeth, for though Revelation was gaining, “coming up tight”, it was not tight enough; that breakdown in the road was very near—that chewed-out pit-bank.

“Father-r in—heaven!” The cry could not reach the girlish lips. The figures ahead were but twenty feet from the washout—the deformity of one plainly emphasized as she bent forward in the saddle, dragging Revel by the lead strap—Revel with the martyred wabble, the neck so forlornly straight.

Una—Una realized what was before her now. She was rocking, too, rocking fiercely, even striking out at her captor, putting up a fight—ineffectual. But....

Was the rock near her suddenly cleft—the great rock above the brawling stream?

It seemed so—so sudden, so like a water jet, was the leap of a dripping figure from behind it.

Capless, coatless, soaking from a climb along the stream’s bed, it swung before Pemrose’s eyes—and the whole world became a blinking washout.

Its arm was round Una in the saddle. Its hurling grip was on her captor’s bridle. It was between the two horsewomen. It bore down the lead strap, like a thread.

“An-drew!” gasped Pemrose—and dropped forward upon Revelation’s neck.

CHAPTER XXV
Spring

“Aunt Margot is getting better—Margaret her real name is—and I don’t know that I ought to call her ‘aunt’ after what she did to me ... but do you know I can’t help feeling sorry for her. She was really unbalanced when she put that through—had been becoming so for some time, so the doctors say.”

On the sidehill, near Camp Chicolee, on a spring day, two girls sat talking.

Below them, on the mountain, their horses grazed.

“Wasn’t it lovely of father to arrange for us to spend our Easter holidays, part of them, up here, at the farm—the stock farm?” remarked Una, beginning again, on another tack. “And to have the horses sent up here for us, too!”

“And to think of Revelation being my horse! I never—never can get over that.” The eyes of Pemrose rested upon the long, lithe shape—upon the finely curry-combed coat glistening, amberlike, in the April sunlight. “Menzies—Donald Menzies—didn’t like it one bit,” she dimpled mischievously, “his being given to me. He wanted to sell him.”

“Menzies needn’t complain,” said Una hotly, looking down at the tall figure of the farmer out in the Long Pasture. “Father is going to send Sanbie, his son, to college when he leaves high school, lend him the money to go—a loan he never means to take back. They say that boy, burnt and exhausted as he was, just searched all through the night I was lost, saying: ‘Now you see her—and now you don’t!’”

A little mischief crept into the rippling tones, too—fixing a stationary star in Una’s dark eye.

Pemrose sat very still upon her warm rock, crop in hand, gazing down at the Long Pasture—its colts and horses.

Seven months had passed since Andrew wheeled Revel on the verge of a washout, where the road had been eaten away—months in which the two girls had tasted the novel excitements of boarding school life, minus radio between their two rooms—and it was the first time that Una had seemed inclined to talk freely and naturally of a wild ride up and down Little Sister Mountain—Little Sister smiling under her April curl papers of mist.

“Yes, Mr. Grosvenor said the horse which carried me after you should never go out of the family,” dimpled Pemrose, “and that, as I was an honorary member thereof, he was going to give him to me,” arching black eyebrows. “He’d have made Treff a present of Cartoon, too, only ‘Hop’—I call him that when I want to tease him—said he wouldn’t have that old Sickle Face, at any price.... But what put Her—I’m not going to call her your aunt—into your head now?”

“Father has been to see her lately.” Una’s lip corners twitched a little. “You know she was taken to a hospital, very ill with brain fever, after Andrew stopped the two horses on the verge of that washed-out bank—Andrew has never stopped, calling himself a ‘fool-body’, since, because he didn’t let her go over.”

There was the faintest note of a chuckle in the voice now.

“So you can talk about it easily; can you?” Pemrose glanced, sidelong, at her friend, murmuring silently to herself. “It seems as if that night in the cabin on Little Sister was a ‘canny moment’ as Andrew calls the hour of birth,” with a mute little quiver of laughter. “And so—and so She’s getting better,” she said aloud.

“Yes, she was very weak after the fever and either couldn’t or wouldn’t remember—things. But now she seems softened—sorry for what she did.”

“So she jolly well may be—as Treff would say!” Pemrose kicked at the grass with her riding-boot. “I suppose it was she who set fire to the shed?”

“She—she has never owned up to that.” Una’s lip corners drooped—there was almost a squint in the soft dark eyes which gazed down at the spot where that tool shed had stood. “How the blaze could have started otherwise I—I don’t know,” quiveringly. “But she has confessed to father that when she came back to these mountains, after living in one big city after another, it was, really, because she was lonely and wanted to see me—see how I had grown up. But she was so bitter against father and mother that she wouldn’t even let them know that she was alive—so she kept spying upon me invisibly—trying to influence me. As for her mad idea of kidnapping me—carrying me off—I think it grew out of frantic resentment against mother.”

“But think how she went about it, the slyboots!” cried Pemrose. “Of course she must have found it awfully hard to waylay you; you were so—so ‘peerie-weerie’,” laughingly; “so seldom beyond the garden, alone!”

“Yes, and so she maneuvered with some of the tricks she played upon the simple mountain folk!” said Una. “Her cabin was all wired for electricity; at half-a-dozen different points, by touching an unseen button with an elbow or foot—some part of her anatomy—she could set invisible tuning forks vibrating—or some other—musical device. From that it was an easy step to playing upon my curiosity—in the rôle of ‘Magic Margot’ she carried some of her paraphernalia around with her, I suppose,” with a catch of the breath, half sob, half laughter.

“Yes, besides her radio equipment.” Pemrose’s black eyebrows drew together. “Did she—did she confess how she managed to overcome you the night of the fire?”

“Father drew it out of her, bit by bit; she rubbed something on the handle of the bucket, when it rolled away from me—you see she was waylaying me then—some strong acid, so that when my fingers touched the handle again it stung me—burned, prickled! Ugh!” Una lifted her fingers as she had raised them, long ago, in the sun parlor and looked at them. “There was a little drug mixed with the acid, so that when I rubbed my fingers to my lips—as she guessed I would do—I got just enough of that to stupefy me—at least, make me powerless to resist her. If that hadn’t ‘worked’ I suppose she’d have tried some other means, but she didn’t want to hurt or frighten me.”

“Well, of all the crazy cunning!” The other girl simply gasped. “I suppose there was some of the same concoction on the little bunch of wild flowers that fell at your feet in the wood.... And I—I wouldn’t believe you that anything happened—anything unusual that morning! Sometimes—” Pemrose slowly shook her head—“sometimes, Daddy says, I’m as wilful as an acid,” laughingly, “an acid eating into salt—and it doesn’t do to be that way, eh?” The blue eyes were mischievous, the lip corners penitent.

“But You! It was you who saved me. You won out against her—with radio,” cried the victim of that unbalanced cunning. “It was you—you who picked up my message—how I ever ticked it off, I don’t know—remembered enough to tick it off! But you found out where I was.” Una’s lip was trembling now—she dashed her hand across her eyes, one bright drop, dislodged, fell upon the mountain grass. “It was when Andrew saw your signal, your creamy sweater, waving from the tree on Little Sister that he knew I was somewhere on that mountain. Immediately he thought of that awful bank, that washout, in the road—then he caught sight of us and climbed—oh! it was an awful climb, too, right through the stream’s bed, for a short cut—was just in time to head us off!”

“I know-ow.” Pemrose’s tone was very low. She caught an April cowslip in the leather loop of her riding crop—there was silence for five minutes. “But you—you yourself, were the real wonder,” she said, then in the same low, thick voice. “Treff—Treff has never got over talking of the way you came through—the clues you left behind you—bits of your habit!”

“I carved them out with a knife I found—and she never saw me!”

Was it a new Una: the mischief, shrewdness—young strength—leaking out of the eye-corners?

“And the bit—the little bit of your flower clock—oh-h! when I saw that....” Pemrose’s hand pressed her lips.

“In case the rags might blow away that was! She—she was watching me all the time; she’d have noticed if I tried to pin them down—the flowers, she thought I was just playing with them!” More mischief, more young strength, the lip corners curling up towards the curly eyelashes—dark eyes twinkling.

“But how on earth did you find your feet, at all?” cried Pemrose desperately. “It’s what I’ve always wanted to ask you. How did you begin to come through—‘crash through’?”

“I think I found the Hidden Fire.” It was almost a whisper with which Una bent to the Spring in the cowslip’s heart.

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Table of Contents

- PEMROSE LORRY, RADIO AMATEUR
- I: A Flower Clock
- II: A “Roaring Buckie”
- III: An Awful Note
- IV: Fathers
- V: The Magic Carpet
- VI: A Gentleman
- VII: Fit for Fit
- VIII: The Wee Hour
- IX: Dandering Kate
- X: Hidden Valley
- XI: Her
- XII: The Shack Corner
- XIII: The Long Pasture
- XIV: Revel and Revelation
- XV: Wheeled Through Life
- XVI: The Lip
- XVII: Wild Flowers
- XVIII: Mondamin
- XIX: A Girl Brigade
- XX: No Answer
- XXI: The Call of the Air
- XXII: On Little Sister
- XXIII: The Ring
- XXIV: The Race
- XXV: Spring
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE