I have always wanted to say 'Hullo!' to the Man in the Moon, on whose face I have often looked from an aeroplane already; and I am ready to try anything once--even if it should be once for all!

Yours for the big chance, T. S.

P. S. I respectfully apologize for not being able just at present to give my full name, but will, with your permission, furnish it later."

"Humph! Mr. T. S.! 'With your permission,' where do you write from?"

Pemrose bent low over the primrose sheet. "Oh! from Lightwood. Now,--now where is that, Daddy?"

"There's a little, one-horse village of the name among the Berkshire Mountains, not far from fashionable Lenox." Her father smiled.

"Lenox! How lovely! Why! that's where you and I are going to stay--stay for a week or two--isn't it, father, _en route_ for Greylock and the experiments. You know the Grosvenors have invited us--and they have a wonderful old place up there. Una's mother is carrying coals these days--" Pemrose winked--"coals of penitence in her heart for ever having sneered at your invention, Daddy."

"Hot ones, are they? Well! I wish she'd hasten and spill them out before she reaches Lenox." The inventor chuckled. "Let me see, she was born there, I believe, at their mountain home--yes, and one or other of her brothers, too."

"Ho! Was it--was it the unicorn; I--I mean the oddity; the Thunder Bird's rival for all-l that money?" The girlish hand shook now as it wielded the coffee-pot. "Oh, dear! wouldn't his horn be exalted if he never came back?" With a droll little catch of the breath. "Una and I are as friendly as ever now, Dad," ran on the girlish voice, hurriedly leading off from the neighborhood of the will. "And she's to be taken out of school early, when we go, because she has been so nervous since the train-wreck. So chummy we are--oh, as chummy as in the old days when we measured eyelashes and she laughed at my 'chowchow' name!" The speaker here shot the bluest of glances through those twinkling lashes at their reflection in a neighboring teapot, older than Columbia herself.

"Chowchow, indeed! It just suits you, that compound. There's a vain elf in you somewhere, Pem, that sleeps in the shadow of the Wise Woman."

"Maybe--maybe, there's a nick.u.m! That's Andrew's word, Andrew's word for an imp, a tomboy. He's the Grosvenors' Scotch chauffeur, you know, who talks with a thistle under his tongue. Well! nick.u.m, or not!" the girl was a rosy weatherc.o.c.k again. "I--I'm just dying to get up to the mountains, to climb the Pinnacle, the green Pinnacle, that rough, pine-clad hill, with Una--and sit in the Devil's Chair!"

"_What!_ My Wise Woman sitting in the Devil's Chair! Why! 'twould take a daredevil nick.u.m, indeed, to do that."

The inventor threw up his hands, laughing again, as he beat a retreat to his hardware den, his laboratory, where there was ever a magnet, potent by night or day, to draw him back.

Yet when still another six weeks had pa.s.sed and Pemrose, with all the green world of spring in her heart, stood, breathless, upon that Lenox pinnacle--a pine-clad mountainette some thirteen hundred feet above sea-level--lo and behold! there was a nick.u.m sitting coolly in the Devil's Chair.

A brazen feat it was! For that Lucifer's throne was a curved stone seat, a natural armchair, rudely carved out of the precipice rock, more than a dozen sheer feet beneath the crest where she stood with Una--Andrew of the thistly tongue having driven the two girls up to the foot of the peak on this the third day after their arrival, with the May flies, amid the mountains.

"A nick.u.m--oh! a nick.u.m, indeed--a daredevil nick.u.m--sitting in the Devil's Armchair, with his feet dangling down--down over the deep precipice! Look!"

Pemrose pirouetted in excitement at the sight.

"Yes, and, goodness! he seems to be enjoying it, too. Not turning a hair. Oh! if 'twere I--I should be so-o dizzy."

With the more timid cry in her pulsing throat, and that little appalled stand, a star of mingled consternation and admiration beaming, bewitched, in one dark eye, Una turned from the spectacle--turned, shuddering, from the hundred-and-odd feet of unbroken abyss extending from the nick.u.m's knickerbockered legs, nonchalantly swinging, to an awed grove of young pine trees, rock-ribbed and bowlder-strewn, far below.

"Oh! I don't want to look at him," she cried cravenly. "How will he--ever--climb back up here again?"

"Tr-rust him--" began Toandoah's daughter, then suddenly clutched her throat, her widening eyes as round, as bright, as staringly blue as the mountain lupine already opening upon the world's surprises, in sunny spots, among the hills.

Those eyes were now fastened to the back of the nick.u.m's close-cropped head, to his broad shoulders in a rough, gray sweater, noting a certain "bully" shrug of those shoulders at the surrounding landscape, as if, monarch of all he surveyed, he yet felt himself a usurper in his present seat.

"Something rotten--something rotten in the State of Denmark!" crowed Pemrose softly. "I wonder if he's getting that off now? Una! Una! It's He ... He!"

"Who? Who?"

"The man--the boy--who saved us after the train-wreck ... without whom we mightn't be here--now! Ah-h!" was the softly tremulous answer, as the blue eyes danced down the rock, with frankest recognition, friendliest expectation, to that daring, nonchalant nick.u.m figure, now coolly drawing up its toes for a climb.

CHAPTER VII

THE PINNACLE

It was an exciting situation.

Pemrose, who like the enthroned daredevil liked excitement, if she was warm enough to enjoy it, had not hoped for quite such a tidbit when she came to the mountains,--at least, short of the little Thunder Bird's record-breaking flight.

"Oh! I did so want to run across him again. I do so long to thank him!

Why--why! we might never have escaped from that awful wreck, got out of the zero water, but for him, Una." The blue eyes were wet now, frankly wet, bluebells by a mountain brook--the little bursting brooklet of feeling within.

"I--I'd like to thank him, too!" gushed Una, with that little fixed star twinkling most radiantly in one dark eye, the slight stand which characterized it only at intense moments when feeling reached indefinite alt.i.tudes. "Oh! how glad I am now," she ran on breathlessly, "that we made Andrew leave the car down in a garage at the Pinnacle's foot and bring us up here for a sort of picnic supper," sending a sidelong glance scouting round for the tall, capped figure of the grizzled chauffeur who, a brief ten years before, had been driving his "laird's" car upon Ben Muir, a heathery mountain of his native Highlands.

Trustworthy as day, a capable driver and zealous Church Elder, he was one to whose guardianship Una Grosvenor, the apple of her parents' eye, might safely be intrusted with her visiting friend while her father golfed and her mother lunched and played bridge in complacent peace of mind.

"Oh! she's all right with Andrew; he's such a true-penny!" was her father's dictum. "Safer with him, up here, than she would be with maid or housekeeper! And, after that shock in the winter, the doctor wants her to be out of doors among the hills morning, noon and night--practically all the time, if she can!"

Ah! so far, so good. But just at this unprecedented moment of excitement Andrew, the true-penny, had encountered another Scot, who emigrated before he did, and was breezily "clacking" with him at some distance from where two breathlessly expectant girls gazed down upon the black top of the nick.u.m's head--and at his wheeling shoulders in the great armchair.

"Oh--oh! there he goes--see--curling up his legs, drawing up his feet carefully, turning in the seat--standing up!" cried Pemrose, all Rose at this crisis, prematurely blooming, as if it were June, not May, as she stood on tiptoe to meet a dramatic moment, reveling in the thought that the daredevil did not know what a surprise awaited him on top here, what a welcome--heart-eager grat.i.tude.

She bit her lip, however, upon the impulsive cry, for she saw two girls, younger than herself, with a ten-year-old boy, who had been watching the climber's feat from a near-by mound, turn and look at her curiously.

They were evidently acquainted with the daring usurper of the Devil's Chair.

For, having drawn up his legs until his knees touched his chin, then raised himself to a standing position on the grim stone seat, cautiously turning, his strong fingers gripping the granite chair-arms, when his back was to the precipice beneath and his face almost touching the twelve-foot, well-nigh perpendicular rock which he had to climb, he actually had the hardihood to wave his hand to them.

"Now--now comes the 'scratch'!" he shouted laughingly. "I'm going to hook on to that 'nick' in the rock, there, just over my head, and draw myself up. Had to 'shy' it coming down--for fear it would catch in my clothing."

"Didn't I--didn't I t-tell you it was him?" burst forth Pem, with all the vehemence of a little spring torrent, in Una's ear as she caught the ring of the chaffing voice which had railed at the Fates for "wishing a wreck on" to unoffending youth, and was so boldly challenging them now.

And just as free and frank in her girlish grat.i.tude as that torrent bubbling impulsively out of the earth, when the nick.u.m reached the crest again, she sprang forward, hand outstretched, to meet him. Her eyes, blue as the little fairy blossoms of the star-gra.s.s now, were breeze blown in the meadow of her gladness.

It was nothing--nothing not to know the name of one who had saved you from death, she thought.

By the rescue you knew him!

And he knew her!

Those eyes, those keen, girlish eyes which had looked through the spectroscope a hundred times, in her father's laboratory, into the remote mystery of that far-away upper air could not be deceived.

By the sudden, startled heave of his shoulders, whose defiant shrug she remembered so well, by the quick intake of breath, as its climbing hiss sharpened to a whistle--almost a rude whistle in the excitement of the feat he had just performed--by the little stare of breathless surprise, of quandary, in his dark eyes, glowing like Una's, he recognized her ...

and pa.s.sed her by.

Recognized her as the girl whose "pep" he had complimented for putting another's life before her own--and didn't want to have anything more in life to say to her!