THE PINNACLE
It was an exciting situation.
Pemrose, who like the enthroned daredevil liked excitement, if she was
warm enough to enjoy it, had not hoped for quite such a tidbit when she
came to the mountains,--at least, short of the little Thunder Bird's
record-breaking flight.
"Oh! I did so want to run across him again. I do so long to thank him!
Why--why! we might never have escaped from that awful wreck, got out of
the zero water, but for him, Una." The blue eyes were wet now, frankly
wet, bluebells by a mountain brook--the little bursting brooklet of
feeling within.
"I--I'd like to thank him, too!" gushed Una, with that little fixed star
twinkling most radiantly in one dark eye, the slight stand which
characterized it only at intense moments when feeling reached indefinite
altitudes. "Oh! how glad I am now," she ran on breathlessly, "that we
made Andrew leave the car down in a garage at the Pinnacle's foot and
bring us up here for a sort of picnic supper," sending a sidelong glance
scouting round for the tall, capped figure of the grizzled chauffeur
who, a brief ten years before, had been driving his "laird's" car upon
Ben Muir, a heathery mountain of his native Highlands.
Trustworthy as day, a capable driver and zealous Church Elder, he was
one to whose guardianship Una Grosvenor, the apple of her parents' eye,
might safely be intrusted with her visiting friend while her father
golfed and her mother lunched and played bridge in complacent peace of
mind.
"Oh! she's all right with Andrew; he's such a true-penny!" was her
father's dictum. "Safer with him, up here, than she would be with maid
or housekeeper! And, after that shock in the winter, the doctor wants
her to be out of doors among the hills morning, noon and
night--practically all the time, if she can!"
Ah! so far, so good. But just at this unprecedented moment of excitement
Andrew, the true-penny, had encountered another Scot, who emigrated
before he did, and was breezily "clacking" with him at some distance
from where two breathlessly expectant girls gazed down upon the black
top of the nickum's head--and at his wheeling shoulders in the great
armchair.
"Oh--oh! there he goes--see--curling up his legs, drawing up his feet
carefully, turning in the seat--standing up!" cried Pemrose, all Rose at
this crisis, prematurely blooming, as if it were June, not May, as she
stood on tiptoe to meet a dramatic moment, reveling in the thought that
the daredevil did not know what a surprise awaited him on top here, what
a welcome--heart-eager gratitude.
She bit her lip, however, upon the impulsive cry, for she saw two girls,
younger than herself, with a ten-year-old boy, who had been watching the
climber's feat from a near-by mound, turn and look at her curiously.
They were evidently acquainted with the daring usurper of the Devil's
Chair.
For, having drawn up his legs until his knees touched his chin, then
raised himself to a standing position on the grim stone seat, cautiously
turning, his strong fingers gripping the granite chair-arms, when his
back was to the precipice beneath and his face almost touching the
twelve-foot, well-nigh perpendicular rock which he had to climb, he
actually had the hardihood to wave his hand to them.
"Now--now comes the 'scratch'!" he shouted laughingly. "I'm going to
hook on to that 'nick' in the rock, there, just over my head, and draw
myself up. Had to 'shy' it coming down--for fear it would catch in my
clothing."
"Didn't I--didn't I t-tell you it was him?" burst forth Pem, with all
the vehemence of a little spring torrent, in Una's ear as she caught the
ring of the chaffing voice which had railed at the Fates for "wishing a
wreck on" to unoffending youth, and was so boldly challenging them now.
And just as free and frank in her girlish gratitude as that torrent
bubbling impulsively out of the earth, when the nickum reached the crest
again, she sprang forward, hand outstretched, to meet him. Her eyes,
blue as the little fairy blossoms of the star-grass now, were breeze
blown in the meadow of her gladness.
It was nothing--nothing not to know the name of one who had saved you
from death, she thought.
By the rescue you knew him!
And he knew her!
Those eyes, those keen, girlish eyes which had looked through the
spectroscope a hundred times, in her father's laboratory, into the
remote mystery of that far-away upper air could not be deceived.
By the sudden, startled heave of his shoulders, whose defiant shrug she
remembered so well, by the quick intake of breath, as its climbing hiss
sharpened to a whistle--almost a rude whistle in the excitement of the
feat he had just performed--by the little stare of breathless surprise,
of quandary, in his dark eyes, glowing like Una's, he recognized her ...
and passed her by.
Recognized her as the girl whose "pep" he had complimented for putting
another's life before her own--and didn't want to have anything more in
life to say to her!
Well! the Heavens fell upon the Pinnacle as Pem drew back--annihilated.
Snubbed for the first time in all her blue-sky life--and by a boy, too!
To be sure, indeed, the nickum, his glance darting past her to Una, had
gone by with a slight inclination of his bare head that was a stony bow.
To be sure, when one of the girls of his acquaintance questioned him
about the view from the Devil's Seat, there was a sort of creak in his
voice as he answered:
"It's--a--corker! You can see away off: far-rms, lakes, all the other
mountains--Mount Greylock, too, in the distance! But--but it's a
cat's-foot climb down--there!" breaking off breathlessly, as if feeling
were making a cat's-paw of him.
"Oh! you can really see Mount Greylock! As far away as that! Well! I'm
going to try-y it, too," ventured one of his girlish companions whose
age was fourteen. "Summer and winter, I've done a lot of climbing, up
here!"
"You try it! Any girl try sitting in the Devil's Chair! Why! there isn't
a girl living who could do it," crowed the gray-shouldered youth: and
now his tones were lordly, as if he were picking himself up after an
inner tumble.
"Hey! Is that so?" Pem--over-hearing--ground the words between her
teeth.
"Have you never heard of Camp Fire,
What a shame! What a shame!
_If_ you've never heard of Camp Fire,
You're to blame! You're to blame!
Then don't take a nap,
For we're on the map,
Ready to prove it with s-snap!"
She hissed the last word at the nickum's back, as he halted at some
distance with his companions.
"Una! I'm going to do it," she panted. "I'm going to slide down that
rock there, turn round and sit in the Chair--then draw myself up again,
as he did. I've got on sneakers. I know I can! I've done some breakneck
climbing with father--yes! and with my Camp Fire Group, too."
"I--I'll give you all my marshmallows that we brought with us to toast
at an open fire, if you do!... Yes! and one of my two little thistle
pins--pebble pins--that Andrew and his wife brought me from Scotland,
when they went home last year, _if you do_.... Wasn't he just
hor-rid? He didn't want to speak to us--to know us!"
Una's face flamed upon the bribe, and was so pretty lit by that fixed
star in the eye, that it must have been a zero-hearted nickum who could
turn his back upon it.
"Hold my hat," said Pem: if she had been a boy, the tone would have
meant: "Hold my coat while I thrash him!"
Unhesitatingly she stepped to the precipice-brink and measured the
distance to that Devil's Chair very coolly and critically with her eye.