THE MAN KILLER
"We must lift him out of the mud! Oh-h! even if it hurts
him--terribly--we'll have to lift him to a dry spot."
It was Pemrose Lorry who spoke. Together with her Camp Fire sisters she
had taken some training in first aid. And one agonizing accident which
she had been told how to deal with was the case of a knee-cap displaced
or broken.
There almost seemed to be a broken head on her own young shoulders
through which wild, streaky lights and shadows came stealing, like
moonlight through cracked shutters whose chinks are not wide enough to
reveal clearly any object in a room.
It was the same breathlessly unreal feeling--the same dim moonlit
groping, that she had felt as she sat on the cliff-brow with Stud, when
he talked of the nickum and his father--and called the latter a "queer
fish!"
For one thing she knew at a glance! She had seen the injured man, who
lay calling for help in a miry spot of the Man Killer trail, before.
Three times before, said lightning perception!
And it came upon her now, as emergency's stiff breeze blew the cobwebs
from her brain, the occasion of the second time, sandwiched in between
that zero day when he had dragged her up a snow-bank, the youth who
saved her addressing him as Dad, and the smiling June one when he lay on
a fernbed before his lake-shore camp, grumpily fishing.
"I--I saw him: I know I saw him--again--crossing the street outside
Una's home on the day when the last installment of the Will was read,"
she realized, her hands coming together convulsively at the thought of
the blighting codicil which hung up the fortunes of the moon-going
Thunder Bird for twelve long years.
"He--he was wearing the same gray cap!" was the next cleaving flash of
memory.
He was not really wearing it now. It bobbed in the rill beside him.
As one eye turned feverishly towards it, the third thunder clap of
perception came in the staggering sense of how like he was to Una.
She might have been his daughter--Una--with that little fixed star of
feeling set like a shining pebble now in her right, fascinated eye,
reflected, exaggerated in the glazed cast of pain in the stone-gray eye
of the man beneath her, whose climber's suit of homespun was daubed with
mountain mud,--whose tweed cap was the brooklet's toy.
He had been trying to scoop up water in it.
And that brought Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl, to herself again, within
quarter of a minute of her first laying eyes on him.
For there is one gallant anchor that will hold in any pinch,--when
thought is shattered and speculation the maddest blur: the Camp Fire
law: Give Service!
She unhooked her little camper's cup from where it hung at her green
belt, and offered him a drink.
She dipped her handkerchief in the trickle of water and wiped the cold
drops of faintness and agony from his forehead.
And then, when he had confided to Andrew, who knelt beside him, that he
had slipped upon the wet, slimy moss beside the rill, as he ascended the
trail, and broken his knee-cap by striking heavily against a confronting
rock, she said that they must lift him to a dry spot.
"That's--r-right. She knows what to--do. Ouch! a--a knee-cap slipped, or
broken--is--the deuce of a rack," groaned the victim, as they proceeded
to raise him, the girls supporting, each, a knickerbockered leg, Pemrose
the injured one, while Andrew took the main weight of the writhing body,
until they laid it upon some dry moss.
Yes! and she knew further what to do, that Camp Fire Girl who wore the
Fire Maker's bracelet upon her wrist, for plucking off her soft, green
sweater she rolled it into a wad and placed it under the hollow of the
injured knee, so flexing it, supporting it, while Una doubled hers into
a pillow for his head,--Una who moved as if in a fantastic dream.
And then arose the question as to the next move; how to go about
obtaining further help.
"We might--might make a stretcher with poles, saplings, with our
sweaters, your coat, Andrew, and--and carry him down to the nearest
farmhouse," Pem suggested.
"No-o thank--you!" The injured man shifted his shoulders ever so
slightly upon one elbow and looked at her; the tiniest laugh shot the
rapids of pain in his eye. "My son said you had a whole lot of
'pep'--same that's in your inventor-father, I suppose, who wants to
bombard the moon!... My son who's play-ing baseball now down on the
Greylock field--mountain's foot!" The sufferer here appealed to Andrew.
"If you could--only--get him up here, I'd be all right! There's an auto
at the nearest farmhouse--maybe they'd let you take it. Any one--any one
can point out 'Starry'"--in a lame rush of pride--"player who made that
home run--"
"Hadna I better bid him bring a doctor along too--a stretcher as weel?"
put in the Scotchman dryly.
The victim nodded, looking at the other's cap.
"You're a chauffeur," he pleaded; "you'll drive fast?"
"Aye, fegs! Fast as God and gasoline will let me!" answered Andrew
devoutly, with an anxious glance at the two girls.
As his tall, spare figure scrambled on down the trail, the sufferer
raised his eyes to Pemrose.
"If--if you could t-twist my knapsack round from under me," he murmured;
"there's a restorative in it--a few drops of ammonia--I'm faint!"
She did so--and turned for the moment as faint as he was.
The whole trail swam, grew black--black as the wisp of thin, ebony silk,
parachute silk, with a fraction of a bent wire frame peeping out from
one corner of that roomy knapsack.
"Well! are you going to desert me now-ow?... Now that the thief is so-o
nice-ly bagged!"
The man looked up at her, some dash of whimsical fire in him mastering
weakness; at the girl kneeling, bolt upright, with the black rag between
her hands, and the twisted scrap of frame,--the frame which had drifted
down two hundred miles.
[Illustration: The man looked up at her, some dash of whimsical fire
mastering weakness. Page 268.]
"Ar-re you--going--to desert me now?"
Again the anchor held; the noble anchor: Give Service: it was as if a
voice outside of her numbed self spoke the words.
The raven rags dropped from between her fingers,--their reflection from
her face.
Steadily enough, she found the little vial lying amid the top layer in
that pigskin knapsack, shook a few drops from it, into the thimble-like
glass accompanying, mixed them with water, held them to his lips.
At the same time she dipped her handkerchief again and passed it over
his forehead.
"Ha! Pity as well as 'pep' in you, eh? Good!" The sufferer actually
winked one eye as the stimulant trickled down. "Well! my dear, the
little recording apparatus is in that knapsack too; I--I make you a
present of it--and of the codicil to my brother's will, as well.... You
won't have to wait twelve years."
Then, indeed, the trail seemed to double up, to wind itself around Pem's
brain, rocks and all,--only every rock was gold-edged, a nugget.
Her eyes stared straight before her,--blue as the June violet that
caught a drop from the spring near.
"Who--who are you?" screamed Una, forgetting that she was speaking to a
broken man.
"How about my being your uncle, Treffrey Graham, my dear, who--who was
such a mad fellow--in--youth; s-such an oddity? Oh-h! you've heard of
him--have--you?"
The whimsical light in the pain-reddened eyes burned to mockery now. It
showed the hippogriff, the "hot tamale", still there. Evidently
eccentricity wasn't all dead.
"Humph! By Jove! I'm having some fun out of my broken knee, after
all--electrifying you girls," gurgled the still racked voice. "Dramatic
setting for a denouement, too, the old Man Killer trail!"
"But why--oh! why-y did you do it?" Pem snatched up the rag of parachute
again, her eyes going wildly from the soot-like scrap of silk to a
wonderful, antique ring upon the little finger of the pale hand which
twitched so strangely below her.
"What! S-steal the little record, you mean!" The bushy eyebrows were
twitching, too. "Well! maybe I want-ed to make sure, for myself, that
the rocket really had gone higher than anything earthly ever flew yet,
before--before I resigned a fortune to it."
That was the moment when the nuggets all turned to rocks again for
Pemrose. He saw the change in her face.
"Oh! I don't mean anything der-og-a-tory to your father, my dear"--pain
snatched at the man's breath--"or to his invention, either. I knew him
before you did. 'Why did I do it?' Curiosity--eccentricity, I
suppose--anything you like to call it! I always was such a 'terror'--a
regular zany, my college friends used to call me."
A flash from those prankful days, erratic as a shooting star, shot the
glaze in the sufferer's eye.
"And, then--and then, I really am interested in everything connected
with the conquest of the air--of space--myself," the hampered speaker
went on. "I've done a little flying, out West,--my son, too! I found out
when the experiments with your father's in-vention--"
"We call it the Thunder Bird," put in Una, as pain again called for a
break.
"Ha! Good name for it! Piles up the moon-going romance, eh? Well-ll,"
wearily, "having found out the par-ti-cu-lar night on which the lit-tle
model rocket was to fly, I came up the mountain to a small camp that my
son and I have ne-ar the summit--east side of Greylock. I was standing
on the edge of the spruce woods, watching the whole performance.
Then--then, when the parachute dragging the little recording apparatus
blew towards me in the darkness, almost into my hand, I--why! I snatched
it up and ran with it. Why? Oh, because I suppose the boy has never died
in me: the boy that's 'part pirate, part pig!'" with a grating chuckle.
Incredible as it seemed, the low laughter, the treacherous tinkle, was
echoed by girlish lips as that renascent urchin momentarily swaggered in
the glaze of the suffering eye!
"And then--and then something told me--an aberration, I suppose, as my
impulses usually are--that I had some sort of r-right to see the very
first record man had ever got of that upper air, of Space, if--if I was
go-ing to turn over a couple of hundred thousand dollars, for the
pursuit of the--sov-er-eign invention."
"I--I can't believe it," murmured Pem into the stony teeth of the Man
Killer.
"I meant to return the record next morning, but I was a-fraid your
father might shoot me," to Pemrose. "Then, later, I heard he had gone
down the mountain--that was yesterday and a mistake--I went-down, too,
to beard him. A--a little more water, please! I could not climb again
until to-day; I took the Man Killer trail, as being the shortest.
And--here I am!" grimly.
"Incidentally, I gave our family lawyer a shock, little niece," he went
on, as Una, plucking up courage, adjusted her sweater under his head;
she began to like this uncle with the pebble-like cast in his stone-gray
eye, she began to think that girls--Camp Fire Girls, especially, with
their love of the fanciful--might have more patience with him than
others had had.
"Yes! you bet I gave old Cartwright the staggers!" He laughed down the
twinge of agony in his voice. "Called him up on the long distance
telephone, told him I was Treffrey Graham back; that I had been in the
East nearly six months, with my son; that I came pretty near disclosing
myself on the--on the day when the third installment of my brother's
will was read--actually walked up to the door of my sister's house, then
shied off, because ... Oh, gosh! this knee."
The voice broke; it had really become a feverish babble of excitement
now--pain's wild excitement.
"Well! What was I saying--yes! I didn't ring the bell because I hadn't
made up my mind whether I wanted to claim any share of my brother's
fortune, or not; you see he hadn't been very fair to me in youth--taking
away my sweetheart. None of my family had--for--that--matter! I didn't
know whether I wanted to meet them again. Although I liked the look of
my little niece; I had seen her, at a distance, with her mother. And
then, we didn't need the money, my boy and I! Had enough of our own;
Treffrey Graham may be a terror, but he isn't a failure--financially!"
No--not by a long shot! said the flame of the pigeon-blood ruby upon the
pale little finger, now curling significantly in air,--the gem whose
fire in this wild spot seemed as erratic as his own, seeing that none
but a zany would have worn it here.
"So--so I told old Cartwright this morning that I stepped out of that
strung-out will," a smile curled the pallid lips now; "that I authorized
him to make preparations, at once, for the turning over of the remainder
of my brother's wealth, in his name and mine, to the University of our
native city, to be used for the furtherance of Professor Lorry's
won-der-ful invention for r-reaching in-de-finite heights."
"My father!... Oh! my fa-ther!" It was a wild little cry to which the
Man Killer rang now, as the head of Pemrose Lorry went down upon her
knees.
"Yes, I'm glad his way is clear--though, I suppose, only a man 'whose
head grew under his arm' would have managed the thing as I have done."
The sufferer winked through the veil of pain. "Now! my son is different.
He's a dare-devil too--but he knows where to stop. You couldn't have
bribed him to steal that record--though somebody played a trick on him
the other night--robbed him of his oars and a dance--just when he had
'taken the bit between his teeth', too; said he was tired of this
camouflage business, and he was going--going whether I liked it, or
not!"
"_Ah-h!_" That was the moment when Pem's shoulders trembled like
the needles upon the little green cedar sapling that grew by the rill:
all because the Wise Woman in her was shaking the Elf, bidding her go to
sleep for ever--which the Elf, very properly, refused to do, for, after
all, undiluted wisdom would be a colorless cloak for any young back.
"Well! he--he wouldn't speak to us when we just wanted to thank him for
saving us in that terrible train-accident," put in Una defensively.
"Ha! That was my fault, little niece. I made him promise, on coming
East, that he wouldn't go near any of his relatives, risk being
identified by them, until I had decided what to do about the legacy--and
whether I was going to make myself known to them, or not. Now-ow, I hope
you'll be friends. He's your own cousin--Treff junior."
And so Jack at a Pinch at last came into his own in the shape of a name!
"Yes, called after me, he is! Goodness! don't I wish he'd hurry up and
get here, now--with the doctor?"
It was a hollow groan. Pain was, at length, getting the better of that
capricious spirit.
"Can't--can't I do--anything--to make you more comfortable?" Pemrose
asked.
Then suddenly remembering that it was he who was making the Thunder
Bird's fortune, as impulsively as the little cedar tree leaned to the
swollen rill, she bent and kissed the cold sweat of pain from his
forehead.
"That--that's worth coming East for," murmured the man, his own eyes
growing wet. "Little niece! don't you want to--follow--suit? I suppose,
a year from now, your Thunder Bird will fly."