JACK AT A PINCH
"Keep cool! Don't stir! I'll reach you in a moment!"
As the cry, the reassuring cry, came ringing down to her, Pemrose felt
the blood start again from where it was frozen at the back of her neck
and surge through her flattened body, which, greenly spread-eagled
against that gray rock, the head turned slightly aside, was not unlike
the quaint Indian figure of the Thunder Bird upon a pedestal,--the
emblem of her father's invention.
As the first blind moment of terror passed--the blankness of the
discovery that, strain as she might, she could not reach that spur of
the rock, the nearest hand-hold, and draw herself up to safety--she saw
two rescuing figures loom out on high.
[Illustration: "Keep cool! Don't stir! I'll reach you in a moment!" Page
86.]
The first was that of the chauffeur, Andrew, summoned by a piercing cry
from Una--Una whose delicate face was white and square now as the
marshmallows in the box under her arm, with which she had bribed her
friend to the madcap feat of sliding backward down a twelve-foot rock
and sitting in the Devil's Chair.
And Andrew the Scot saw the danger, heard it skirling in his ears, for
he had been brought up among mountains.
He did not quite see what good he could do, that staid Church Elder, by
joining the girl in the Devil's Seat.
But he came of a Campbell clan which never flinched.
He was preparing to slide down, himself, when an arm--a left elbow
rather--thrust him rudely back.
"T-take hold of this rope-end. Throw yourself flat on the ground there.
Sit on him, you girls, so that he may not be drawn over!" cried a voice,
pointed, vigorous.
Pem knew that it was the fiery voice of the nickum, the broad-shouldered
youth, who had sat in the chair before her, whose crowing had been
responsible for her feat.
Her colorless face was turned upward then and she had seen him push up
the lower folds of his sweater with his left hand--even while its elbow
sent the chauffeur back--and while his right, lightning-like, uncoiled a
rope, a lariat, worn under it around his waist.
It was then that he shouted to her to "keep cool"; and that she, turning
her head aside against the rock, became a living effigy of the Thunder
Bird.
Not waiting to make the rope fast around his own body--or his body fast
to it--he slid down.
The next moment he was standing beside her in the chair.
"Ha! So the 'pep' was in the wrong box that time," he said coolly.
"Yes. Last time it was in the ice-box," snapped she, as coolly, not to
be outdone. "So you _did_ remember--know me--us!"
"How could I help--remembering--that icy train-wreck?" He was slipping
the rope in a noose under her arms. "Perhaps, some day.... Well! I'm
glad to be 'Jack at a Pinch' again, anyway."
"R-ready!" he shouted then.
And Pem was drawn up, to face a Highland squall from Andrew.
"Hoot! lassie, an' air ye sech a fechless tomboy that a mon mun keep his
een sticket on ye a' the time?" the Scot angrily demanded. "How cud ye
be sech a nickum as to try sitting in yon--Deev's Chair?"
"Ask--ask the other nickum; he did it first," flung back the rescued
one.
But under cover of the broad scolding, the other, the Jack at a
Pinch--friend in need for the second time--had again slipped off,
without a word from either of the girls.
"Bah! he is a nickum--a mysterious imp," snapped Pemrose, the fire that
smoldered behind her white face leaping up. "Can't be shyness with him;
he doesn't look the least bit shy! Oh-h! what a fool I was to give him a
chance to help me--save me--in a 'pinch', again."
Tears were springing to her eyes now,--tears of reaction.
She felt that an eighteen-year-old youth, privileged to save her life
twice--it seemed a privilege at the moment--might, at least, have had
the manners to let her thank him for it.
"Oh! he's the nicest and the--hor-rid-est--boy I ever saw," wailed Una,
in tribute to the train-wreck, still a nightmare on her mind.
Both girls were dumfounded, as well they might be.
Pemrose, with her blue eyes under jet-black lashes--girdled, moreover,
with her father's growing fame--Una, with lighter eyelashes and hair,
and that little fixed star of angry excitement blazing in one sweet dark
eye, they were the kind of girls whose good graces a boy would be the
last to spurn, fair even for daughters of Columbia who, democratic in
beauty, as in all else, never hatches out an ugly duckling.
They gazed in stormy bewilderment now after Jack at a Pinch walking off
with his party whom, indeed, he had herded away.
Andrew was looking gloweringly after him, too.
"An' so he's the loon that sat in the Chair first!" grumbled the still
angry chauffeur. "Aw weel--" the "dour" expression upon the speaker's
long upper lip softening a little--"weel! he may be ill-trickit, but
he's a swanky lad, for a' that. Aye, fegs! an' braw, too."
"Oh! he's 'swanky' enough--swaggering--but I don't think he's 'braw',
handsome--not with that little stand in his eye--just like Una's, only
more so." Pem added the last words under her breath. "But, oh! for
goodness sake! let's get away from here," she cried wildly; "over to the
other side of the Pinnacle, anywhere--anywhere--so that we won't see him
again, before his strutting over what he's done, makes me--makes me--"
"Yes--it's pretty on the other side of the hill, easy climbing, much
smoother--green and spring-like," assented Una soothingly, pouring balm.
"It's all covered with young pine trees and just a few, very few, tall
silvery birches. Not rough and rocky as it is this side!" glancing
shiveringly down the precipice.
"Not another Deev's Chair in sight, I'll be hoping--fegs!" muttered
Andrew, picking up a basket which he had carried from the automobile up
the low mountainside, and in the late emergency had set down.
It contained cocoa, sandwiches, fruit and other toothsome dainties for a
picnic supper.
"We have permission to make a fire, a Pin-na-cle blaze, to--to boil
water and toast our marshmallows. Oh! of all things, all-ll things on
this planet--I don't know what we may find on any other--that's
'banner', it's a marshmallows toast out-of-doors--isn't it?" chanted
Una, intoning her delight to the trees, the low spruce and pine scrub,
as she skipped among them, an evergreen sprite, herself, for she, too,
now wore the "bonnie green", the Camp Fire short skirt, middy blouse and
captivating Tam-o'-shanter--most nymph-like note in dress for daughters
of the woodland.
"And--and I just know the dear-est, loveliest pin-ey nook," she went on
in a choir-boy sing-song; "half-way down the Pinnacle's softer side it
is, where we may build our fire. Halleluiah! I suppose I'll have to get
busy and gather fagots, as in Camp Fire rank I'm a Wood Gatherer. Oh,
dear! Will you listen to old Andrew. Now what is _he_ singing?"
The Scot, indeed, relaxing from prim silence and chauffeur ceremony here
upon the Pinnacle's height, with only two young girls to marshal instead
of the mechanism of lever and brake--although the former, as he had
found to his cost might prove the worse handful of the two--was
alternately whistling, with lips drily pursed, and crooning in the
burr-like accents which adhered like a thistle to his tongue, his
version of a very old song:
"Young lassie! Daft lassie,
I tell ye the noo,
I'm keepin' some fagots,
An' a stick, too, for you!
"Singing whack fol de ri do!
De ri do!
"A lassie, a dog,
And an auld rowan tree,
The mair that you thwacks 'em,
The better they be!"
"'Thwacks 'em!' Pshaw! he's flinging that in my direction--having a
fling at me--for sitting in the Devil's Chair," laughed Pem, but the
laughter was bitter, two-edged. "Oh! Una," she burst forth shakily, "as
long--as long's ever I live, I'll wish I hadn't done it,
letting--letting that Jack at a Pinch, as he called himself, that big,
boorish boy, play friend in need to me-e again. Ugh-h!"
Her stung lips quivered and were twisted, partly upon the after-taste of
terror.
"Humph! forget it--oh-h! forget it," caroled the younger girl. "See that
you don't make a trouble out of it, for trouble is a hor-rid
kettle-o'-fish for the troublers--see!... But--listen! Listen! Surely
that's singing--singing from somewhere--_other_ singing!"
She paused on tiptoe, a green dryad, one little hand, fair as a
flower-petal, curled about her startled ear.
But Pem was for the moment comfort-proof.
"Bah! 'Tisn't quite so easy to forget," she murmured, bitterly.
Her less fragile fists were mounted one upon another under her chin as
if to hold her head up. For the first time in her life she felt as if
she were being asked to drink a cup of humiliation--she, Toandoah's
little pal--and she made wry faces over even a sip.
"Humph! Doesn't it seem queer--queer--outlandish?" she snapped,
bolstering the piqued head higher with each passionate adjective. "Here
for three months, ever since February--since I recovered consciousness
after that freezing wreck--I've been longing, oh! longing to meet again
the boy whose chaff, whose very chaff, warmed one amid the horrors....
You didn't hear it; you were too far gone. And, _now_!" The little
fists lashed out. "Bah! Who could ev-er dream that he'd turn out such a
'chuff', as the boys say--an un-civ-il chuff?... Una! it's never--it
isn't, it can't be Camp Fire Girls?"
"It is! It is! I told you I heard singing."
The answer was shrill with delight as the wiry note of the little
black-poll warbler, nesting near.
"Why! Why! Goodness! That's what I hurled at _him_; at his crowing,
cock-a-hoop back!"
The older girl's face softened, melted into whimsicality now,--into a
freakish surprise that encircled, like a golden ring, her wide-open
mouth.
Up--up from the Pinnacle's softer side, its tender, heavenly side, the
chant came ringing, the merry chant and challenge:
"Then--then don't take a nap,
For we're on the map!"
"Camp Fire Girls! Camp Fire Girls! Here on the Pinnacle 'map'!"
Pem caught her breath wildly. Never--oh! never was a turn of the tide
more welcome.