A JUNE WOMAN
"I feel as if I was in the pictures!"
"Oh! I feel as if I was in the pictures."
It was the wild thought in each girl's breast, as minutes went on.
The loneliness of the mountain pass, nearly three thousand feet above
sea-level, the rigors of the wind sweeping up it, chill now, June not
yet being ten days old, the frowning crags, the remote heads of other
tall mountains peeping over their shoulders, the two green dots of girls
on either side of a broken man, they took it all in, to the full, most
dramatically too--and felt as if they were in the pictures.
A surpassing moving picture reel, more telling than any they had ever
witnessed, in which--oh, queer double-headed feeling--they were both
actors and spectators!
But pain--pain left no atmosphere of unreality about it for the
suffering man, for the sufferer who monopolized both their soft
sweaters, while they shivered convulsively, until if it came to a beauty
contest between the two now, the old Man Killer, awarding the palm,
would not have made it dependent on a mere matter of eyelashes, but on
which little nose was the least blue bitten.
Pain released something in that sufferer too,--a fire that was not all
wild-fire! For suddenly he dragged Una's green sweater-roll from under
his head and thrust it towards her with an imperious: "Put it on,
child!"
"I shan't!" replied that child of luxury, as arbitrarily, slipping it
back under the pallid cheek, above which the stand of agony in the stony
eye told that the man was suffering almost to a point of delirium now.
"Who ever thought Una would be such a brick?" Pem nibbled the words
between her chattering teeth. "She's shivering--yes! and frightened and
trying to cry--but the brick in her won't allow it!"
There was no doubt that the uncle of her blood was a brick, too, for he
fought the groans reverberating behind his clenched teeth, like a bee in
a bottle, only breaking out now and again in a yearning prayer for the
coming of his son.
"If he were only here--here!" he moaned; it was evident that the
youthful daredevil who liked excitement, but "knew where to stop", was a
tower of strength to the less balanced father.
Pem was longing uncontrollably for his appearance, also--for the rower
whom she had robbed of his oars, while the sufferer seemed to find his
only relief in talking about him.
"My son and I have been in bad scrapes before among--mountains," he
panted, feverishly. "Once high up in the Canadian Rockies, we missed our
guide who had gone back for provisions. Bad plight then, but the boy
didn't 'cave'! He was only fifteen when he shot his bear in Arizona. He
loves the West. But the East's in his blood. Just went wild over these
Berkshire Hills, this spring, over his first sight of mayflowers! They
seemed more of a treasure than the fortune he wanted to part with.
_Hiff-f!_"
Before the eyes of both girls rose the clamor of color "blooming round"
in old Tory Cave--the armful of passe blossoms flung down at the
"rattler" scare.
"Yes--his Mother Earth has been good to him," muttered the whimsical
voice. "Very good! Yet--yet such are earth-sons that he'd turn his back
on her to-morrow--go off on a wild-goose chase after some other
world--even a dead one--if only that moon-storming Thunder--Bird--"
"What! You don't mean to say--oh! did he write to my father about
it--write to my father and sign himself 'T. S.'?" broke in Pemrose,
glancing back along the trail which she had traveled these past few
months and finding it stranger, more baffling than the Man Killer's.
"May--may--have done so," came the answer, with a faint chuckle. "I
asked him when pressed for a name to give his mother's--his middle
one--Selkirk. But he a lunar can-di-date! Not if I know it! With me, the
moon may have the money--but not the boy!"
"The moon may have the money!" Pemrose Lorry glanced at the mud-stained
knapsack lying by the sufferer,--the knapsack tucked away in which was
the golden egg, the precious record; she would not unearth it and glance
at it, because the second look, at least, belonged to her father.
This mature madcap upon the ground, this queer, practical joker,
chastened now, if never before, had played on him a cruel prank, but, at
least, he was not the fool who loved money for its own sake.
"If--only--I could do anything for him!" yearned the girl passionately.
"Oh! I'd want father--father--to feel that I did ev-ery-thing for him."
And, as once before in a watery pinch, the thought of Toandoah's honor,
Toandoah's debt to this trapped March hare, was the vital breath of
inspiration.
"Have--have you any matches?"
Suddenly she bent to the ashen ear.
"In my br-reast pocket, yes." It was a feebly appreciative flicker.
"A fire! I--I a Camp Fire Girl--and not to think of it sooner! Una! Una!
Get busy! Gather wood, quickly--quickly--all-ll the dry wood you can!"
And the friendly little cedar gave of its one brown arm, the spruce
chit, the birch stripling, the pine urchin--all the hop-o'-my-thumb
timber that flourished in this wild pass--contributed of the dead limbs
torn from them by last winter's blasts, to burn up the chill in the old
Man Killer's heart.
Una's little nose, piquantly tiptilted, warmed from a fashionable
orchid-color to a cheery rose pink, with the excitement, the pressing
adventure of trailing firewood among the rocks and dragging it captive
to the new-born blaze which Pem was fanning with her breath and with the
breezy bellows of her short green skirt.
As for the sufferer, hope stirred anew in him as he turned his head
towards the flaming pennons of good cheer, while the fire, prospering
gayly, feathered its nest with scarlet down.
He saw, too, that the fire-witch was preparing something in that red
nest for him.
Raking out the first glowing embers, she filled her little aluminum cup
at the rill and set it among them; when it steamed she shook into it a
few drops from the little vial--the aromatic spirits of ammonia--and
held it to his lips.
"It's the best I can do," she murmured, but her eyes stretched that best
into an indefinite blue of longing to capture the pain even for a short
time and bear it for him--for him who was making the Thunder Bird's
fortune.
As before, the stimulant set the racked heart to sending strength
through the freezing veins--and with it a touch of the whimsicality
which Death alone could quench.
"Little girl!" Treffrey Graham's eye winked upon a mote of fun that
softened to a mist. "Your fa-ther's invention is the gr-reatest thing
yet; it's a Success--I know that from the one glimpse I had at the
record--" Pemrose winced--"but--but you may tell him from me that I
doubt if, after all, his Thunder Bird is the best thing he's turned
out."
"Some-somebody coming! Oh-h, some-body--coming!" cried Una, at that
moment, so that the man started up, with a heyday exclamation--and
tumbled back, a wreck of groans.
For it was not his son. Neither was it the long-coated figure of the
chauffeur, at sight of which each girl would have passionately hugged
herself--if not him.
But it was a messenger whom Andrew had sent.
And at sight of her, of the fresh mountain rose in her cheeks, with its
heart of American gold, the climbing flash in her hazel eye, Una just
tumbled into sobs, herself, that little fixed star in her eye blazing
pathetic welcome, for this was her first taste of emergency's pinch,
emergency's call for sacrifice.
"Are you--oh! are you come to stay with us--us?" she cried, running
forward with childish confidence.
"That I be--girlie!" responded the mountain woman, throwing a warm arm
around her. "The man that borrowed our little aut'mobile truck and set
off in it at a score down the mountain, the man with a queer blowpipe at
the roots of his tongue, he told me that he had left two lassies up here
on the lonely trail, with a badly hurt man. 'Woman!' says he, kind o'
fierce-like, 'if they were yer own bit lassies, ye'd scorch the rocks,
climbing to 'em.' 'Man!' says I," the Greylock woman paused,
half-laughingly, to catch her breath, "'I never laid eyes on them, or on
the broken-kneed man, either, but I'll warm the way, just the same.'
But, mercy! it took me most an hour to get here--though only a mile of
climbing--the old Man Killer is--so-o--fierce."
Her eye, at that, went to the fire, now brilliantly painting the trail,
to the pillowed figure upon the moss, with the sweater-roll in the
hollow of the injured knee.
"But, land sakes! I needn't ha' been in such a mad hurry getting here,
after all--giving my skin to make ear-laps for the old Man Killer!" she
cried, holding up two raw palms, flayed by indiscriminate climbing.
"For, my senses! they're no stray lambs o' tenderfoot--those 'twa bit
lassies'!" mimicking Andrew's blowpipe. "They know how to take care of
themselves in a pinch--and of somebody else, too!... And--and, see here,
what I've brought you, honey, rolled in the blanket for _him_!"
"Cake--choc'late cake! C-coffee!" Una gasped feebly, confronted by the
ghost of her everyday life.
She grasped the reality, though, of that normal life, somewhere waiting
for her, with the first bite into the brown-eyed cake, while her sweater
was restored to her thinly clad shoulders as the mountain woman spread
her blanket over the injured man and tucked it under him for a pillow.
"You--you're a 'trump,' little niece--letting me have it for-r so long,"
he said wistfully.
And Una shyly forbore to answer.
Occasionally it is easier to land gracefully after a long jump than a
short one in the case of an awkward gulf to be crossed! She saw that her
friend Pemrose, no relation at all to this extraordinary uncle, could
care for him and welcome him without embarrassment, while, with every
doubtful glance in his direction, she felt, still, as if she did not
quite know whether she was on her head or her heels.
She crept, for reassurance, very close to the mountain woman, the
typical June woman, with the normal rose in her cheeks, and the golden
buttercup for a heart, as she picnicked, subdued, by the trail fire.
"I don't think--oh! I don't believe I ever met anybody q-quite like you
before. But I'm so glad you're in the world!" she murmured gratefully.
"And I just wish you could come into _my_ world often, girlie," was
the cuddling answer, "for it's lonely as old Sarum here on the
mountainside--though where old Sarum is I don't know myself!" breezily.
"Nor I!" laughed Una.
"Old Man Greylock doesn't talk to one, you know--only roars sometimes."
The woman lifted her eye to the dim peak above her, with the pale mists
streaming, tress-like, about its crown, from which Mount Greylock takes
its name; then her anxious glance returned to the sufferer. "Ha! there
he goes--making faces at the pain again," she murmured pityingly. "And,
mercy! I suppose 'twill be a blue moon yet--a dog's age--before his son
can get here."
It was a long age anyhow; although, in reality, little more than an
hour--a wild, wind-ridden, fire-painted hour--before three haggard men
came stumbling up the trail.
Two carried a stretcher between them. One had a bag in his hand.
As they hoisted that collapsible stretcher between its poles over the
last bleak hurdle of rock, one, the youngest, dropped his end of it,
which the doctor, shifting his bag, took up.
Jack at a Pinch rushed forward.
And ever afterwards Pem liked that churlish nickum because he ignored
her then; because he had no more consciousness of her presence, or of
Una's, or of the June woman's, than if they had been rocks--blank
rocks--by the trail, as he flung himself on his knees beside his father.
"Dad! _Dad!_" he cried, his face as gray-blue with hurry as his
baseball flannels. "Oh-h! Dad, what have you been doing to
yourself--now?"
"The biter bitten--Treff! Joker pinched!" came the answer in tones
almost jocular, for the love in that boyish voice was a cordial. "Well!
I guess I haven't got my death-blow now you've come. And--and the murder
is out, boy: these little girls know all-ll: who you are--who I am!"
Then, indeed, Jack at a Pinch raised his head and looked straight across
into the blue eyes of Pemrose Lorry.
"You must have thought me an awful 'chuff'," he said.
"I'm sorry about the oars," was the mute reply of the girl's eyes, but
the least little tincture of a smile trickling down from her
lip-corners, said: "But I'm glad I got even with you, somehow!"
However, there was too much "getting even" just now in this wild
spot--Life grimly settling accounts with the dragon who had so often
"hazed" others--for the boy and girl to spend any more conscious
thoughts upon each other.
There was the terrible trip--the worst mile ever traveled--down the Man
Killer trail, for him, strapped to the stretcher, after the doctor had
examined the injury and found the delicate kneecap both slipped and
broken.
"I guess if--if I pull through this, I'll be a--reformed--character; no
more--no more eccentricity for me," he murmured dizzily to Pemrose who,
when the trail permitted, walked beside him, stroking his hand,--and he
rolled his eyes faintly, through the veil of the opiate which the doctor
had given, at the knapsack beside him, wherein lay the golden egg.
And with his own hands, the Man Killer at last conquered, as they laid
him in an ambulance, he took the five-inch, open-work steel box, the
precious record, from that knapsack's depth and handed it to her.
She could not look at it, the little Thunder Bird's log of that
two-hundred mile trip aloft, she could only jealously clasp it to her
breast,--Toandoah's little pal.
"T-tell your fa-ther from--me," said the broken voice, "that Treff
Graham is the same old Treff; that he m-may be a pirate, but he isn't a
pig--not re-al-ly! That," faintly, "he apol-o-gizes--and steps aside;
that, with all his heart--it's there, if it is a madcap--" wanderingly,
winkingly, he touched his left breast--"he hopes that, a year from now,
the highways of the hea-vens may be opened--the im-mor-tal Thun-der Bird
will fly!"