THE SEARCH
No! She did not think the nickum had taken it,--that mysterious Jack at
a Pinch!
This is what the bleeding heart of Pemrose told her over and over again
within the next twenty-four hours,--and after that, too!
True, she had robbed him of his oars and a dance,--or had been
responsible for the trick!
She had not made her scout-knights return those ashen blades until the
morning after the dance, when they were surreptitiously deposited upon
the opposite shore of the lake in the neighborhood of the camp near the
insects' egg-boats.
And she had enjoyed herself hugely as the guest of the White Birch Group
at the wind-up of the June carnival, while he, twice a rescuer, a friend
in a pinch, was drifting helplessly out upon the dark night-waters of
the Bowl, trying to paddle with his hands, within hearing of the festive
dance music, until some good Samaritan from his own shore rowed out and
gave him a homeward tow.
But all this, as the girl passionately told herself, was an everyday
trick,--just a paper pellet thrown at one beside the overwhelming blow
of the loss of her father's record.
And he who could quote Shakespeare upon "Something rotten in the state
of Denmark", amid the horrors of a zero train-wreck, who "liked his
excitement warm", had a sense of humor.
True humor is never without a sense of proportion.
It knows where to stop.
But if the nickum was not the thief,--who then?
Ta-te, the tempest--otherwise the mountain gusts--had to be acquitted
too.
For at the first dawn after the blighted experiment some thin silk rags
of a raven parachute were found clinging, soot-like, to bushes in the
spruce wood, together with a portion of a twisted and bent wire frame.
There was not a trace of the diary, the golden egg, the little
perforated steel box, with the recording pencil and paper in it.
Deprived of its wing, that could not have gone on alone,--without some
hand carrying it.
So the weary and despondent searchers were forced to accept Andrew's
assertion that "mon or deil" had robbed them; and it was plain from the
solemn shake of the "true-penny's" gray head in its up-to-date
chauffeur's cap that he, himself, was disposed to lay the blame on a
"deev."
"It's plain to me, noo, that this auld Earth should bide where she
belangs," he told the two girls, "not go outside o' her ain bit
atmosphere--be sending muckle messages outside it--it's na canny."
He even respectfully delivered himself of this opinion to the
inventor--to Toandoah, with the hungry look of loss in his eye, which
occasionally wrought Pemrose to the point of choking sobs and to
clenching her fists at the mysterious robber.
And he repeated it, with elaborations, did Andrew, on the second June
morning after the loss when Professor Lorry, declaring that it would
take a year to search every foot of Greylock Peak, and that he was not
going to waste time in crying over spilt milk, went down the mountain
with his young assistant and Mr. Grosvenor, who had business in the
valley, to procure materials for another experiment--although not on the
same scale as the first--the girls being left behind with the landlady
of the little mountain inn where they were staying.
The chauffeur wore a "dour" look as he saw them depart, Una's father
driving his own car; for the first time in all his well-trained service,
the true-penny was inclined to sulk over being told to keep an eye on
two "daft lassies", who refused to go down to the town, because they
wanted to search some more--or Pemrose did.
So he sat on a bench outside the little mountain house, thirty-six
hundred feet above sea-level, where there were no visitors at this early
season, with the exception of the experimenting party, and, between
whiffs of his pipe, discoursed upon the folly of simple earth folk in
"ganging beyant themselves, thinking o' clacking wi' the Man in the
Moon, forbye"--and, in tones seemingly bewitched, of the black shape he
had seen jump forth from the woods.
"Pshaw! I do believe you think that it was some bad fairy,
Andrew,--fairy or mountain 'deev', who stole the little record, and part
of the parachute, too--spirited them away," said Una, with fanciful
relish, having not quite grown beyond the fairy-tale age, herself.
"If that's so, girlie," said the mountain landlady--alas! for Andrew
True-penny, alias Campbell, now came the evil chance over which he
sulked--"if that's so, and you could only find the mountain
wishing-stone, stand on it and wish three times--wish har-rd--maybe, the
good fairies would give you back what you're looking for!"
"Where--where is it--the wishing-stone?" The little fixed star in Una's
eye was never so bright--a twinkling star of portent. "The wishing stone
on Greylock! Oh! I never knew there _was_ one."
"Havers, woman! Dinna ye ken that ye hae a tongue to hold?" muttered the
grizzled chauffeur, in a stern aside.
But the motherly New Englander--who, with her old husband, could not for
a moment be suspected of the theft--had her heart full for two sorrowing
girls.
"Why! it's a little over a mile from here, I guess, down the Man Killer
trail, the third flat slab you come to. I'd go with you myself--though
it's rough traveling, the steepest trail on the mountain--only my man is
laid up with the rheumatiz, hangin' on to him like a puppy-dog to a
root."
"Oh! we can find it for ourselves--hurrah!" shouted Una, almost
squinting with anticipation. "I've never stood upon a real mountain
wishing-stone before. Who--who knows what may come of it?"
In her young blood, as in Andrew's, was the extravagant excitement of
the whole experiment,--this first step in the ladder of demonstration
which was by and by to reach the moon--lending to all an unearthly
touch.
"The--the Man Killer trail! Why! that's _one_ place where we
haven't searched--yet!" A moping Pemrose suddenly awoke.
To her, who had grown up amid the mathematical realities of an
inventor's laboratory, who had "plugged" so hard at her elementary
physics that she might be able to grasp the first principles of her
father's work, some day--some day to work with him,--to her, the little
girl-mechanic, a wishing stone was no golden magnet.
But the very fact that there was one spot, not so far from the summit,
either--wildest spot on the mountain though it be--still unexplored, was
enough to draw her restless feet anywhere, against any deadlock of
difficulty.
"Ha! The Man Killer trail!" she whooped again. "Oh-h! we could easily
find it; we saw a sign directing to it, as we came up the mountain."
"It's na a trail; it's just a hotch-potch o' rocks--some sharp as
stickit teeth!" groaned Andrew, who saw his own doom fixed, in vain
protesting.
He felt rather like a man who had been left behind to hold a wolf by the
ears when, in the teeth of every remonstrance he could offer, he found
himself, a little later, starting out in the rear of two adventurous
girls, in quest of that third slab of a wishing stone--and the
breath-racking Man Killer trail.
But those girls were, to some degree, seasoned climbers,
both,--sure-footed as venturesome!
Through the dim limelight of fringing pine woods, across oozing
mud-beds, soft from spring rains and freshets, over a babbling brook
spanned by an elastic bridge formed of the interlacing roots of giant
trees--where Una found much delight in bouncing up and down in
anticipation of the magic stone--they stubbornly held their way, and
came at last to the chaos of rocks crowding a steep gorge which marked
the head of the lonely Killer trail.
"Noo--I gang first!" said Andrew--a true-penny still, though the stamp
was reversed. "My word!" he added sourly, "this is na trail--juist a
scratch on the mountainside--an' the muckle rocks they're a flail for
beating the breath out of a puir body."
"What--what do I care if they shouldn't leave me a pinch if only I could
find something--even a few more rags of the parachute!" gasped Pemrose,
in stifled tones of passion, as she climbed, hurry-skurry, over a piled
capsheaf of bowlders.
Indeed, that battling breath was at a low ebb in all three when,
following the tangled skein of a sort of trail which the feet of daring
climbers had beaten, here and there, amid the rocks, they reached in due
time the third slab which, like the invisible running water in Tory
Cave, was supposed to bring "piping times" of luck to whoever should
brave the difficulties of the wild pass, to stand on it and wish.
"Oh--oh! there it is, at last," cried Una, her hand to her breathless
side, "a nice 'squatty' slab--almost as smooth as glass--an' shaped like
a mud-turtle. I wonder if there is a fairy underneath it--lurking under
the rim. Now--now for the wishing cap!"
But before she could don Fortunatus' cap by breaking a wee branch from a
dwarf cedar growing amid the crags and wreathing it, like a green
cottage bonnet, around her head, she slipped upon the wet moss girdling
the stone where a tiny spring bubbled, and almost pitched headlong down
the trail, at this point particularly steep.
"Easy there, lassie! Ye dinna want to mak' o' that auld flat slab a
tombstone, eh?" murmured Andrew, laying a great hand upon her shoulder,
with a little smack of laughter upon his long, smooth-shaven upper lip.
But immediately he winced as if his own words hurt him, and
Pemrose--herself in an aching mood--knew what he was thinking of, that
grizzled chauffeur.
Una, her balance recovered, jumped upon the stone.
Surely, no wishing-cap ever before was so bonnie, so becoming as the
fine, emerald needles of the little cedar branch gripped together under
the dimpled chin, fringing the sweet, saucy, girlish face, the star in
the bright dark eye so intently fixed.
Pem smiled; in the present crisis of her young life she didn't care if
her friend's eyelashes were longer than hers by a whole ell. And Andrew
sighed because of that one "sair memory" which had oppressed him on the
Pinnacle.
The serio-comic passion in the green-framed face, the fervor in the one
little clenched fist drooping at Una's side, might well have won over
all the good fairy-hosts that ever landed in the wake of the Pilgrims,
and set them to scouring Greylock for the missing record from on high.
"Now then! Pemrose, it's up to you! Turn your backbone into a wishbone."
The wreathed figure stepped from the pedestal,--a laughing June spot
against the wintry grimness of the Man Killer trail.
Obligingly the inventor's daughter stepped up, closing her eyes
half-humorously, doubling the drooping hands at her panting sides.
But, as suddenly, the eyelids were flung up, like shutters from the blue
of day. The uncurling fists were outflung passionately.
"I can't! I _can't_!" cried Pemrose Lorry, choking upon her own
wishbone. "I--I'm not in the humor for it--for foolery! I must go
on--right on--and search! This--this is the shortest trail down the
mountain, if it's the roughest--I know that!" She looked desperately at
old Andrew. "If any mean thief--anybody--stole that record, there could
be only one--one motive for it, my father-r says--curiosity; to be the
fir-rst to see that very first record man has ever got from so high
up--high up in the earth's thin atmosphere, where the air ends--and
space begins!"
She seemed to have that whole zero void in her heart now, its light,
stifling gases in her distended throat--Toandoah's little pal--as she
looked distractedly down the gorge.
"Oh! it's pos-si-ble--just barely possible, that after he had satisfied
his cur-ios-ity--or mischief--or whatever it was--he might have thrown
away the little steel box, dropped it somewhere on the trail," she
panted extravagantly. "Or--or we might even come on some more rags of
the parachute and track him--track him to a camp! My father-r--"
It was the passionate break on that word, even more than the spice in
the blue eyes, that went straight to the shadowed spot in Andrew's heart
and found the little sprig of memorial heather, hidden there, the
mountain heather, the tiny, pinkish blossoms, with the faint, wild tang,
which he plucked whenever he went home to Scotland from a small grave in
a hillside "kirkyard" on whose granite marker was printed: "Margery
Campbell, aged fifteen!"
It had been as much the restlessness of bereavement as a desire to
better their fortunes which had brought his wife and him to the New
World, for she had been their only child, with the exception of one son,
old enough to be in the American Army.
The fragrance of that imaginary heather-bloom tucked away in the
impassive chauffeur's breast was occasionally apparent in a furtive
glance thrown skyward, or in a momentary glisten of mist in the gray
shell of the mechanical eye.
It had made the whole family of his employers very sympathetic towards
Andrew, as to a friend. And now a whiff of that heather memory stood
Pemrose in good stead.
"I reckon if leetle Margery were livin', she'd feel in the verra same
way gin anny misfortune happed to me," he told himself.
"Aw, weel, lassie!" Thus he spoke aloud. "Since ye're set on gaeing on a
wee bit further, we'll gang; but dinna get yer hopes stickit on finding
onything!"
"Andrew--Andrew, himself, has found something! Look--look at him!"
It was barely twenty minutes later that the wildly startled cry burst
from Una as the trio struggled on--on down the fitful path, between the
rocky jaws of the Man Killer, where beetling crags loomed, fang-like, on
either side of them and, here and there some swollen rill made of a
green moss-bank a slimy mud-bed.
"He--he's hearing things, if he isn't seeing them. Oh, look!... Look at
him!"
Una's hand was at her jumping heart--pressing hard as if to hold it in
her body--as she beheld the tall figure of the chauffeur, motionless as
arrested mechanism, upon the trail, ahead.
"I heerd a--skirl." Andrew's face was stony as that of the Old Man of
Greylock--a featured rock--as he turned it upon the breathless girls.
"A skirl! A cry!" he repeated hoarsely. "'Twas na the yap of an animal,
either! Somebody--somebody's yawping for help out here in this awfu'
spot! Dinna ye hear it, children?"
They did. Their flesh began to creep.
Up, upward, struggling between great rocks, it climbed, that cry, where
the stony teeth of the Man Killer bit the trail right in two.
"Help--h-help!" it pleaded. "Oh--help!" Then feebly, but fierily:
"_Oh-h!_ confound it--_help_, I say!"
That was the moment when Pemrose Lorry shook as if the old Man Killer
were devouring her.
Was there--could there be something familiar, half-familiar, about the
faint, volcanic shout: some accent she seemed to have heard before? And
yet--and yet, not quite that, either!
"My word! Some puir body's hur-rted bad--ba-ad--like a toad under a
harrow," grunted Andrew, and scrambled hastily on over a gray barrier of
rocks,--the girls following.
Once again it limped painfully up to them, the cry, like a visible,
broken thing. "Help--h-help, I say!" Then, feebly, in rock-bitten echo:
"_Help!_"