A USURPER
Gathering her short, green skirt about her, for she wore, as on that
February day in her father's laboratory, what he called the "nixie
green", the sylvan Camp Fire uniform, the inventor's daughter stretched
herself breast downward, upon the flat ledge of the Pinnacle's crest.
Working her body carefully backward, without another glance at the
precipice beneath, she slid warily over the edge, her face to the rock,
and down the dozen feet of almost smooth, nearly perpendicular slab,
until her feet touched the stone seat of that curved armchair, a deep
embrasure in the mountain granite.
It was not such a wildly difficult feat then for a girl on her mettle to
turn cautiously until her tingling back was pressed hard against the
slab, and thus to lower herself to a sitting position on the rocky
throne.
For that Devil's Chair was a spacious one--fairly so! The seat extended
outward at least three feet and was roomy enough to allow of two people
standing upright on it at the same time.
And what a view old Lucifer must have from it, was Pem's first
thought--provided he didn't, as an Irishman would say, reside away from
home!
Off to the right and left stretched the wonderful landscape of the
Berkshire Hills, Massachusetts' Highlands--the Berkshire mountains in
May where, afar, a summit snow-cap vied with the driven snows of
blossoming fruit trees, lower down; where the pink-shot pearl of a lake
gleamed, opal-like, from an emerald setting, and many a silver thread
winding, expanding, showed where some madcap river or brook had become
with spring a wild thing.
"Oh, hurrah! I can really see off to Mount Greylock--old King
Greylock--even the steel tower upon it--oh! so plainly," murmured the
madcap in the Chair, and nestled triumphantly against its rocky back.
"Greylock, cloud-girdled, from his purple throne,
A shout of gladness sends,
And up soft meadow slopes, a warbling tone,
Of Housatonic blends."
Yes! she felt as if they were two throned dignitaries, she and Greylock;
for she wore the crown of derring do, and King Greylock, still wearing a
thin diadem of snow, was enthroned for ever in her imagination as the
favored peak from which the first experiments with her father's immortal
rocket were to be made.
Upon Greylock's crest within a week or two, maybe--at all events before
summer dog-day heat clogged and fogged the air--her transcendent
dream--or the first part of it--would come to pass: her yearning thumb
would press the button and start the little Thunder Bird off, to fly up
a couple of hundred miles, or so, with its diary in its cone-shaped
head, and send back that novel explorer's log, the little recording
apparatus, attached to a black silk parachute--the first, the very first
record from the outer realm of space.
No wonder that old Greylock sent her back a shout of gladness now, as,
squirming in the Chair, she turned her gaze away from the distant
mountain to green meadow slopes, to the right, where the broadest silver
ribbon, intertwined with the matchless landscape, showed where the
Housatonic River, the blue Housatonic, flowed and sang.
"Oh, dear! I wouldn't have missed this for anything," she exulted
silently. "But the idea of that perfectly horrid boy actually daring me
to do it! He didn't mean to, but he did--strutting off, like that,
crowing about his climbing! As if a girl were--gingerbread! Well--"
indignantly--"that was just one with his passing Una and me when we only
wanted to thank him, felt as if we naturally must thank him,
for--for.... Bah! I won't think of the horrid wreck now! Or of him,
either! I'll be taken up with the view! Isn't it exquisite--sublime? Not
interrupted as it is up there on the--Pinnacle's--crest!...--Ah-h!"
The little pinched exclamation came when--all too suddenly--she changed
the point of view, and looked down.
Beneath her yawned the precipice over which her feet dangled--treading
air, with never a break between them and that grove of dwarf pine trees
more than a hundred feet below, pointed by their glinting rocks.
The little trees bowed to her, now, like servants--green pages.
But, somehow, their homage made her feel uneasy; it put too great a
distance beneath her and them.
The crown of daring which she wore did not fit quite so easily.
She began to feel like a usurper whose head might at any moment be taken
off.
And, with that, she decided to vacate!
Drawing up her feet much more gracefully than her predecessor had done,
she curled her body in the seat and raised it slowly until she was in a
standing position, grasping the stone arms of the chair, turned--turned
rather sickeningly, to be sure, until her breast was against the broad
rock down which she had slid, then reached upward for a handhold by
which to climb--to draw herself up.
There was one. The nickum--churlish climber--had pulled himself up by
it. Like him, she had fought shy of it, sliding down, for fear it should
catch in her clothing.
A little spur it was, projecting from a slight fissure, what he called a
"nick," in the rock, rather more than half-way up,--a good seven feet
from the rocky armchair.
Breathlessly she reached upward, to grasp it.
And, lo! her lips fell apart--like a cleft stone.
At the same time her heart slunk out of her body and dropped into the
precipice behind her.
Her fingers just missed that spur--fell short!
They touched it; they could not curl over it--and grip.
Flattening herself to a green creeper against the rock which seemed
spurning her, wildly she stretched every tendril--every sinew.
In vain! Make as long an arm as she could, this daring Pem, her five
feet three of slim girlish stature would not become the five feet nine
of the daredevil who preceded her!
Emergency balks at extension.
That right arm, racked, fell limply back.
The blue of her eyes, hooking to the spur, if her fingers couldn't, grew
glazed like enamel.
She felt as if she were tumbling backward already, the daring essence of
her, to break her too spunky backbone among those glowing pine-dwarfs
far beneath.
Spread-eagled against the rock's cruel breast, she turned a blanched
face, a convulsed face, upward!