On Little Sister
In a gray bunk of a mountain camp a girl lay, like death.
The pink flush of dawn stealing through a small square that stood for a
window brushed her face, like a wing—and only made it more pallid.
Near by a woman stood staring at her; a woman whose transient likeness
to herself, as the light caught her face, too—her too brilliant dark
eyes—made her a thousand times the more terrible.
“Don’t shrink from me—honey,” said a voice whose scorching wildness had
a low hiss in it, like the hiss of flame around green wood in a fire.
“Don’t—oh! don’t turn away from me; I have been trying to draw you to me
for so long—influencing you, influencing you at a distance; some day I
knew I would get hold of you—have you to myself, to myself, for a
while—no matter how your parents might guard you.... And now—now—I
have!”
The eager flame died down; and the poor green wood in the bunk, lay
charred by it, until the very sap in its veins seemed dried up—life
blood, as it were, ceased to flow.
“I have hovered near you—near you for a year, precious—ever since I came
back to these mountains, my own hills where I was born.” The woman’s
figure, so pitiably “hulgy-backed”, round-shouldered, came to the edge
of the bunk.
The kidnapped girl twitched, twitched spasmodically—a quiver only
noticeable in her toes and in the dark, curly eyelashes flickering
upward for a second to the red, spotted handkerchief around her captor’s
neck, but so full of horrified repugnance that the latter involuntarily
retreated a step.
“I—I came to know your ways; I would watch for you early in the morning
on the edge of the wood near your home—which used to be my home until
your mother turned me out; but now—now I’m even with her!” It was a
bitter snap. “I watched you among your flowers, dew-wet flowers—and
wondered whether you had ever heard of me.... No-o, I suppose you
didn’t,” sorely, “but I’m your Aunt, Una, your father’s sister—half
sister, I suppose, the world would say—but I loved him as a brother and
could influence him—the powers I had!” The woman’s dark eyes flashed.
Una shrank flatter—flatter—until in her abject terror she became one
with the wooden bunk.
“But you, when you were a baby, a mite of a dark-eyed child, I loved
best of all—and your mother, she feared my influence over you. She
turned me out. I have had no home for fourteen years. I have been
lonely—hungry. But—always—I have dreamed of you; that, some day, I would
have you again, quite to myself—darling!” It was a hungry sob.
“But I suppose people will say I was mad—mad—to carry you off, like
this, and because of means—means I have taken to try and draw you to
me—”
“You—ar-re—mad,” whispered something in Una—and her flesh crept.
“I knew your parents would not let me see you, but distance—distance is
no longer such a barrier, when a whisper can cross it.” In the wildness
of the woman’s look there was now a mixture of practical shrewdness,
normal enthusiasm, as her glance roved to what Una, in a lifeless way,
perceived was the “shack corner” of the cabin—radio instruments upon a
bench, or shelf, nailed to the log wall.
“Oh! I’m not behind any amateur in that art,” said the Little Lone Lady,
with a flash of cunning, as if she had made use of it a good deal.
“Sometimes, as I rode near and far among the mountains, visiting
people—poor and rich—who wished to see me, I talked to _you_ by radio.
Occasionally—occasionally I sang to you, as I did when you were a little
baby, sometimes—sometimes from a station quite near your home.”
The woman opened the door now to let in the daylight. Her eyes went
feverishly to the sky. Her wild croon floated back to Una:
“Night is done, stars fly home to rest,
Perhaps in soft white clouds they build a nest,
Among your dewy flowers—dear....”
“Uk-k!” It was an unintelligible cluck from Una; the little “stand” in
her right dark eye was weirdly set, in even blanker terror than
before—she lay in the bunk as in a coffin.
Her captor looked at her; and the half-tender, whimsical smile which had
played about her lips, blew away like an erratic breeze.
“But—but this isn’t my camp—” she tried to straighten her round
shoulders—“and—and when you’ve had some refreshment, honey, we’ve got to
ride on—on—your own horse is here—to where you and I can be
together—together—hidden for a while.... The Gypsies would hide us,
their encampment is over on Bald Mountain,” she muttered, speaking aloud
to herself, as she fidgeted round the cabin. “I’ve done favors for
them.... And search parties will look for her on the other little
mountain first, anyhow, if they suspect me, at all,” she added, with
that flash of needle-nosed cunning before which Una’s cold flesh crept.
The woman was ferreting out a water bucket, as she spoke, moving,
indeed, as if the camp, a pine-log cabin, was not hers, although she had
made her own of it and kindled a fire there.
It belonged as she knew, to two young city men, college professors, who
had locked their cabin before going off on a fishing trip, to prevent
amateurs from meddling with the transmitter and receiver of a very
powerful sending station with which they experimented overseas.
Somehow, however, “Magic Margot,” with the cleverness of a burglar, had
found entrance through a connecting woodshed, the night before, because
she saw that the half-drugged girl whom she was holding on her horse
could go no further.
“No! Even if the farmers should suspect me, at all—connect me with her
disappearance,” she flashed a sidelong glance at Una, “they would not be
likely to look for her _here_ first, on Speckle Mountain—Little Speckle
Mountain,” muttering more vehemently as she stirred up the fire on the
hearth and lifted the bucket.
“Speckle Mountain ... Little Speckle Mountain!” Una was not distinctly
conscious of hearing anything; and yet the words sank into her
subconsciousness, as she lay perfectly passive, almost a dead girl,
while her captor opened the door, with a final:
“The spring is some distance off, dear one. But I shan’t be very long.
Try to sleep a little—before we ride on.”
She was closing the door as she spoke—tying it on the outside.
Suddenly, as if remembering something, she slipped inside again,
fastened a steel creeper upon the heel of her shoe, took a bulky
umbrella from a corner—an umbrella that looked as if it had an unnatural
growth among its ribs, with bright ear-phones dangling from it, flashed
one half-doubtful glance at the stark girl in the bunk—another at the
complete wireless outfit upon that rough deal shelf—and was gone.
In the same dim subconscious way that she had absorbed the remark that
she was on Little Speckle—Little Sister Mountain—as the girls called it,
Una felt the meaning of these maneuvers soak in through her clammy
pores: she had become too familiar with radio practices, during the
summer, to miss it.
She was still beyond conscious thought. But, relieved of the flame of
that scorching presence beside her, lying a poor, staring dummy, upon
her back, against the rough logs above her, she began to see
pictures—and caught her breath convulsively at each.
She saw the grass of the Long Pasture burning. She saw the gray shed
ablaze. She saw herself, running with others, to the stream, to fill
buckets. She saw black, shadowy forms of circling horses, stampeding,
galloping; even here, in the bunk upon Little Sister, she seemed to hear
the soft earth-din of excited hoofs—to wonder whether Revel was among
them.
But, no—no, Revel was here—a captive, too!
The last picture painted by daylight, growing daylight, possessed her;
she made her first hoarse sound, after night-long silence—a cluck! She
saw, did she see, herself tripping where the pasture was very dark, felt
the bucket roll away from her—now her cold hands clutched at the sides
of the bunk—roll away down a mound, while somebody shouted—shouted:
“Shake it up there, Brigade!”
She saw a flurried girl picking up that runaway bucket, felt the handle
sting her, sting fiercely, saw her rub her fingers across her lips,
sucking them a little ... saw the fire become a red phantom, the meadow
a white mist.
She knew that in the same bewildering mist, not unconscious, but numb,
powerless to resist, she had been led by a firm arm to her horse and
lifted upon it, while, as in a dream, the rush and noises of the fire
went on.
And there had been a long ride up a mountain, while a hand held her on
Revel—guiding the horse by a lead strap.
Only now was she remembering—thinking! Beginning to think!
“And—she says we must ride further—further—where they won’t—where they
can’t find me. Gypsies—Encampment! Bald Mountain! And she’s mad—mad!
Maybe, ’twas she who made those strange sounds in the wood.... Oh!
I—I’ll go mad, too; I’m so-o frightened—”
The poor green wood of girlhood rolled over in the bunk, fairly hissing
in the flame of that scorching presence still beside her—she felt it
beside her.
She had a feeling that out of such a fire nothing could come alive. She
couldn’t, anyway—if it was really She who lay here, at daybreak, in a
lonely mountain-top cabin, with two gray bunks on either side—and a red
fire-cheek upon the hearth.
But, no! The nightmare was too monstrous. The bunk held only a shell.
The real Una, the guarded girl, was away, far away, with her Camp Fire
sisters. Why! she could hear them singing, singing their good-night
hymn, before the first foot of the nightmare caught her—before smoke
rushed up the sidehill and the glare burst forth in the Long Pasture:
“Lay me to rest in Shelt’ring Flame,
Oh—Master of the Hidden Fire!”
Ah! she had loved that hymn—dearest of Camp Fire songs.
But suddenly—suddenly—her whole being became again a fiery stick,
shriveling, consuming, for, watching that changing fire-cheek, the red
glow upon the hearth, while daylight broadened, she realized that it was
Una—incredibly it was—who lay here, in a beyond-the-beyond of utter
terror—helplessness.
Una who would be put upon her horse and forced to ride further, away
from father, mother—Pemrose—trapped—trapped....
“Master!... Master of the Hidden Fire!” She was feeling for the
life-tie, at last—wide awake, at last—gibbering, clutching with her cold
hands at the gray sides of the bunk, the outer bunk of two—with,
somewhere, a memory of a red fox trapped by the roadside.
“Master! Master! Master!” Was there a Sheltering Flame? A Hidden Fire?
Anything that could save a girl now—burn up the trap?
“Master! Master! Master!” She called it out loud, kneeling up in the
bunk, in the yellowing dawn, catching with both hands at her breast, her
blouse. “Master, help me! Save—me!”
Where did the light come from; it seemed to flash all round her, beyond
daylight.
“Help yourself,” it said. “Save—yourself! There must be something you
can do. Think—hard!”
And the light fell full upon needle and dial on the face of the radio
transmitter, against a log wall, eight feet distant.
She cowered in the bunk, cowered, as if she had been struck, looking up
in a ghastly way at the familiar antennæ running round the logs above
her head.
“I never—could!” Yet, somehow, she was out of the gray bunk where she
had lain, coffined—the girl who would have to be wheeled through life in
a cushioned chair.
“Master of the Hidden Fire! Now! Now!” She tottered, gripping its
side—but she reached that shining “shack corner”, the shelf with its
wireless litter.
Amid a medley of plugs and jacks, used for connecting varied circuits,
amid shining brass and bakelite, was a little telegraph key. Study,
practice, at Camp Chicolee, had made it a pal—almost a pal.
“If—I only ... could! But I never could—remember! But Master of the
Hidden Fire!” She tumbled on to a high stool against that shelf, the
table nailed to the log wall, dropping her head amid the litter. “We—we
had a private sign we always used, we girls. _She_ has a little receiver
in that umbrella, I know; if I speak, she’ll pick it up ... dot an’
dash, maybe, she can’t! Oh-h! what first: light the bulbs, start the
generator.”
Mechanically, with a glance at that dark generator under the table,
garner of power, she was throwing the switch, turning the rheostat knob
in the panel of the transmitting set, not slowly, carefully, as she had
been taught to do, to prolong the life of the bulbs to which she was
turning on the strong current.
Much did a girl in her kidnapped plight care about bulbs—bulbs that talk
overseas!
She slammed the rheostat on full, so that the fairy filaments in those
electric bulbs—the sending vacuum tubes of the powerful transmitter—just
leaped from dim to brightest—almost in a moment to white heat, the grids
and plates about them glowing cherry red.
It was a cheerful cherry. It blinded her—her dull eyes.
But it gave the girl with a face like a white cameo, who had been kept
all her life, as a gem, in cotton wool, a sense of power she had never
known before.
“Master of the Hidden Fire!”
She began to feel she was on top.
Quite steadily she did the next half-familiar thing, closed the aërial
switch, connecting the whole set, cast a glance at the dial with the
needle on it in the face of the panel-like transmitter, to see if now
the miracle was working—the powerful set in action.
“It is. The needle moves.... The message! If I can only send it out,
tell where I am, Pemrose—somebody—will g-get it! If only my head weren’t
so ‘whirley-hirly’!” piteously. “Our sign, the sign with which we always
begin a message: Di-dit-di-dit-di-dit! Dah-dah-dah-dah! That’s—it. Six
dots, four dashes.” The two first fingers of her right hand, pressing
the key, were ticking it off now, while her swollen lips murmured,
talking aloud, like her captor. “Now—if I can only give my name—or the
first letter of it! They’d know. ‘Dot-dot-dash’: di-dit-dah; yes, I
guess that stands for ‘U’. Where—am I? Oh! on Speckle Mountain—I never
can spell that all out ... and she’ll be coming back. What—what was the
abbreviation we had for it: ‘L. S’?”
Straining memory to a white heat now, she ticked that off—both letters
clearly.
“But—I must give it again. Pemrose—that’s what she said. Three times. A
distress signal! And that woman—”
Again—again—she ticked it off, the bulbs glaring at her until she felt
their incandescence in her brain—light-headed, delirious—as if she were
sending herself out into the ether, while she tried to add to her
message and give the call-letters of the home-camp, beginning at the
wrong end, as she would be sure to do.
“She—she’s coming!”
Just enough presence of mind remained for her to pull the switches—turn
the rheostat knob again.
“It will take a few seconds to cool off. But she can’t call it back—the
message.”
Slowly those radiant bulbs, the shining vacuum tubes dimmed—became blind
eyes, the cherry-red plates fading out.
But the current turned off from them was switched on—for ever—in the
eyes of the girl-prisoner, little white filaments glowing in their
lamp-like blackness as she shot back to the bunk.
A knife, an old camp-knife, lay on a stool in the way. She whipped that
back with her.