A HOTSPUR
"Oh! I'm so glad--just so glad I don't know what to do with myself--that
those experiments with the lesser Thunder Bird, the smaller sky-rocket,
which won't make the four-day trip to Mammy Moon, but will only fly up a
couple of hundred miles, or so, and drop its golden egg, the diary, to
tell you where that blank No Man's Land of space begins will still be
carried out this spring from the top of old Mount Greylock. If they had
been given up, it would have broken my heart--so it would!"
It was evening now, late evening, in the dining room of the professor's
home, looking upon the green University campus.
The girl with the grafted Rose in her name, grafted on to a foreign
stem, was pouring out her father's after dinner coffee--and her own full
heart, at the same time. "Ouch!" She shivered a little. "I don't like to
think of that 'diddering' cold of empty space; not--not since the
train-wreck. I'm like the big boy who saved us then, and was so jolly;
I'm out for excitement if I'm warm enough to enjoy it, eh?"
"Humph! Well, here's somebody who's willing to take a chance on carrying
his warmth, his fun too, with him into space."
The professor laughed as he drew a sheet of thick letter paper, broad
and creamy, from his pocket.
"Oh! is it somebody else ... you don't mean to say it's another hotspur
applying for a passage in the real Thunder Bird when you start the big
rocket off for the moon, eh?"
The girl glanced over her father's shoulder.
"Yes, one more candidate for lunar honors! And this one is the limit for
a Quixote. Young, too, I should say!" Again Toandoah's deep chant of
laughter buoyed his daughter's treble note, as he began to read:
"Professor G. Noel Lorry,
Nevil University.
My dear Sir,
Having learned that you are perfecting an apparatus that will reach
any height--even go as far as the moon--and that it will be capable of
carrying a passenger, I should like to volunteer for the trip.
I have always wanted to say 'Hullo!' to the Man in the Moon, on whose
face I have often looked from an aeroplane already; and I am ready to
try anything once--even if it should be once for all!
Yours for the big chance,
T. S.
P. S. I respectfully apologize for not being able just at present to
give my full name, but will, with your permission, furnish it later."
"Humph! Mr. T. S.! 'With your permission,' where do you write from?"
Pemrose bent low over the primrose sheet. "Oh! from Lightwood. Now,--now
where is that, Daddy?"
"There's a little, one-horse village of the name among the Berkshire
Mountains, not far from fashionable Lenox." Her father smiled.
"Lenox! How lovely! Why! that's where you and I are going to stay--stay
for a week or two--isn't it, father, _en route_ for Greylock and
the experiments. You know the Grosvenors have invited us--and they have
a wonderful old place up there. Una's mother is carrying coals these
days--" Pemrose winked--"coals of penitence in her heart for ever having
sneered at your invention, Daddy."
"Hot ones, are they? Well! I wish she'd hasten and spill them out before
she reaches Lenox." The inventor chuckled. "Let me see, she was born
there, I believe, at their mountain home--yes, and one or other of her
brothers, too."
"Ho! Was it--was it the unicorn; I--I mean the oddity; the Thunder
Bird's rival for all-l that money?" The girlish hand shook now as it
wielded the coffee-pot. "Oh, dear! wouldn't his horn be exalted if he
never came back?" With a droll little catch of the breath. "Una and I
are as friendly as ever now, Dad," ran on the girlish voice, hurriedly
leading off from the neighborhood of the will. "And she's to be taken
out of school early, when we go, because she has been so nervous since
the train-wreck. So chummy we are--oh, as chummy as in the old days when
we measured eyelashes and she laughed at my 'chowchow' name!" The
speaker here shot the bluest of glances through those twinkling lashes
at their reflection in a neighboring teapot, older than Columbia
herself.
"Chowchow, indeed! It just suits you, that compound. There's a vain elf
in you somewhere, Pem, that sleeps in the shadow of the Wise Woman."
"Maybe--maybe, there's a nickum! That's Andrew's word, Andrew's word for
an imp, a tomboy. He's the Grosvenors' Scotch chauffeur, you know, who
talks with a thistle under his tongue. Well! nickum, or not!" the girl
was a rosy weathercock again. "I--I'm just dying to get up to the
mountains, to climb the Pinnacle, the green Pinnacle, that rough,
pine-clad hill, with Una--and sit in the Devil's Chair!"
"_What!_ My Wise Woman sitting in the Devil's Chair! Why! 'twould
take a daredevil nickum, indeed, to do that."
The inventor threw up his hands, laughing again, as he beat a retreat to
his hardware den, his laboratory, where there was ever a magnet, potent
by night or day, to draw him back.
Yet when still another six weeks had passed and Pemrose, with all the
green world of spring in her heart, stood, breathless, upon that Lenox
pinnacle--a pine-clad mountainette some thirteen hundred feet above
sea-level--lo and behold! there was a nickum sitting coolly in the
Devil's Chair.
A brazen feat it was! For that Lucifer's throne was a curved stone seat,
a natural armchair, rudely carved out of the precipice rock, more than a
dozen sheer feet beneath the crest where she stood with Una--Andrew of
the thistly tongue having driven the two girls up to the foot of the
peak on this the third day after their arrival, with the May flies, amid
the mountains.
"A nickum--oh! a nickum, indeed--a daredevil nickum--sitting in the
Devil's Armchair, with his feet dangling down--down over the deep
precipice! Look!"
Pemrose pirouetted in excitement at the sight.
"Yes, and, goodness! he seems to be enjoying it, too. Not turning a
hair. Oh! if 'twere I--I should be so-o dizzy."
With the more timid cry in her pulsing throat, and that little appalled
stand, a star of mingled consternation and admiration beaming,
bewitched, in one dark eye, Una turned from the spectacle--turned,
shuddering, from the hundred-and-odd feet of unbroken abyss extending
from the nickum's knickerbockered legs, nonchalantly swinging, to an
awed grove of young pine trees, rock-ribbed and bowlder-strewn, far
below.
"Oh! I don't want to look at him," she cried cravenly. "How will
he--ever--climb back up here again?"
"Tr-rust him--" began Toandoah's daughter, then suddenly clutched her
throat, her widening eyes as round, as bright, as staringly blue as the
mountain lupine already opening upon the world's surprises, in sunny
spots, among the hills.
Those eyes were now fastened to the back of the nickum's close-cropped
head, to his broad shoulders in a rough, gray sweater, noting a certain
"bully" shrug of those shoulders at the surrounding landscape, as if,
monarch of all he surveyed, he yet felt himself a usurper in his present
seat.
"Something rotten--something rotten in the State of Denmark!" crowed
Pemrose softly. "I wonder if he's getting that off now? Una! Una! It's
He ... He!"
"Who? Who?"
"The man--the boy--who saved us after the train-wreck ... without whom
we mightn't be here--now! Ah-h!" was the softly tremulous answer, as the
blue eyes danced down the rock, with frankest recognition, friendliest
expectation, to that daring, nonchalant nickum figure, now coolly
drawing up its toes for a climb.