The Lip
It was the Guardian who reached her first, almost stepping over the edge
of the abyss herself—in her recklessness about anything but saving the
girl.
So quickly, had that girl rolled down the moss-seamed rock, a dummy—a
bundle of inanimate clothing—that such wild clutchings as her poor hands
made at moss and grass and helpless leaf seemed but mechanical
twitchings!
Automatic twitchings to those who watched her, without a cry—lest a cry,
should cut the last chance!
But in the human dummy, when consciousness is swooning, there is a
something which looks after that last chance.
Over the first fold of the terrible lip, in the very teeth of the
precipice, earth-embedded, there grew a little tree—a stunted little
midget of a birch tree.
That which took care of Una’s last chance, clutched it—and hung on.
It bent—bent like everything—but it did not break.
And in the same minute the Guardian reached her, realizing her own
rashness, her own danger, just in time to start back, kneel down upon
the edge of nothing and, leaning over, grasp the girl’s wrists.
“Lord, don’t fail me. Don’t let me turn dizzy,” moaned the woman,
clinging in her agony to a tree, too—the Tree of Life.
It was a branch of that Tree which answered—a very vital branch.
Almost instantaneously a presence was beside her, a fearless presence. A
lad who could do flying stunts a few thousand feet in the air was
stretched out at her right hand, his shoulders over the brink.
His voice, though edgy, was perfectly cool.
“Keep quiet,” he said tensely. “Hang on. Great guns! hang on tight until
I can get a good grip of you. Now—now I have your wrist, just hang—as
easily as possible,” to the girl into whose up-staring dark eyes a
glazed reason was coming back. “There—I have you. Now we come! Let’s
lift her up!”
A human chain of girls lying flat, had meanwhile formed, was holding on
to the Guardian’s feet; if she—or Una—had sounded the depth of the
waterfall, hundreds of feet below, it is probable that all would have
done so.
Thanks to the little birch tree and that limb of daring, young Treff,
all were, presently, safe back upon the Balcony, Una wrapped in
Pemrose’s arms.
“There now, darling! There now—don’t look down,” cooed the latter.
“You’re s-safe now. Quite safe now. And wasn’t the Guardian a
‘brick’?... Treff, too—oh! Treff, too, of course,” with an arch wink at
the latter, “but he’s seasoned—he’d stand on his head in a soaring
balloon—I—believe.”
“Not ex-actly,” protested the hero a little breathlessly. “Stunt-flying
a thousand feet up would—would be a three-legged race on a Sunday School
picnic, compared to that ledge there—a girl hanging over—mean
proposition,” behind his teeth.
“Ugh!” Pemrose shuddered. “Why—why did you go wandering off by yourself
like that?” She clasped her girl chum tighter.
“Wander-ing—off!” But, with that, Una sat up; and now it seemed as if
the recent shock was but the unsealing of a greater terror behind it, in
her eyes.
“Did you hear-r it?” she gasped, pushing herself away and staring at
Pem. “Now—now you heard it for yourself,” in feverish triumph. “That
strange hum; that pip-ing sound. ’Twas—’twas the same that I heard in
the wood, at home. And you wouldn’t believe me! I wanted to find out
where it—came—from. But it isn’t earthly,” in a low whimper. “I think
it’s trying—trying to get—hold—”
“Not earthly!” hooted Pemrose. “I could make it.”
“I c-can’t believe you,” hiccoughed the girl, who had been hypnotized
into following it.
“Make it a dare—will you?” challenged the other—although, perhaps, with
a tiny “niggling” doubt in her blue eyes. “What will you bet me that
Treff and I together can’t ‘pull off that stunt’?”
* * * * *
That night a great scientist’s daughter talked long with her father by
radio, handling her message as cleverly as she did before, for the
edification and envy of her companions.
It was a pact between them that on certain mornings and evenings—after
dark, in the latter case—they should try to tune in on a conversation
with each other.
To-night, again, the experiment was an exciting success, for expense had
not been spared on the “outfit” installed in this mountain camp by Mr.
Grosvenor for the diversion and development of summering girls—his own
rather ineffectual daughter among them—and at the laboratory end, a
hundred miles away, was a powerful sending station.
As the girl pulled her switches, after good-nights had been exchanged
through the air, with much badinage of “Y. L.” “O. M.” and jokes about
hearing with the phones on the table when they were over her straining
ears, Pemrose Lorry turned to her young knight and abettor, Treff
Graham, with the white light, just shut off from the bulbs, switched on
in her eyes.
“Father—father says we can get the wherewithal at Roslyn College,” she
cried mysteriously. “He’ll telephone to one of his friends who’s
conducting a summer school there. And it’s only seventy miles away.
But—” anxiously—“could you go and come in the same day? The Flower
Pageant will be to-morrow evening.”
“Yes, and that would be a ‘peach’ of a time to loose the pipes. Crowning
feature! Seventy miles! Why that’s only a little hop,” protested the
youth blithely. “I’ll be back with the pibroch, sleeping pibroch, in the
tail of the plane.”