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!"
CHAPTER XXIII
THE CELESTIAL CLIMAX
A year from then it did!
It awoke the World with its challenging roar, silencing for ever, let us hope, the racket of guns upon this dear planet, leading man in future to seek his conquests in more transcendent ways, even outside Earth's atmosphere, as it took its pioneer flight again from the misty top of old Mount Greylock.
The World and his wife were there to see: scientists from the four quarters of the globe--Earth's great ones.
And other spellbound spectators, too: Una, the White Birch Group, their Boy Scout comrades--Stud fast developing into the type of hotspur who wanted to take passage for the moon--all massed in such a stupendous Get Together as made the mountain seem "moonshine land", indeed, to their thrill-shod feet.
And never--oh! never since the history of Mother Earth and her satellite began did such a spectacular traveler start on such a flaming trip as when the hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America threw the switch and the steel explorer, twenty feet long, leaped from its platform high into the air, pointed directly for the moon, with a great inventor's mathematical precision,--trailing its two-hundred-foot, rosy trail of fire.
There was not breath--not breath, even, to cry: "Watch it tear!"
Only breath enough, in young girls' bodies, at least, to gaze off at Mammy Moon, loved patron of many an outdoor revel, and ponder upon the nature of the shock she would get when the Thunder Bird's last explosion lit up her fair face with a blue powder-flash--lit it up for earth to see!
"Do--do you think 'twill ev-er get there--two hundred and thirty thousand miles, about, when--when an eighth of an inch out at the start; and it would m-miss--miss?" breathed a youth who knelt by the heroine of the evening, the inventor's daughter.
"Toandoah doesn't miss. My father doesn't miss." The young head of Pemrose Lorry queened it in the darkness, with a pride which made of old Greylock, at that moment, the world's throne. "But how--how are we to live through the next hundred hours--the next four days--the time the Thunder Bird will take to travel?"
Yet they did succeed in living through it and in leading time a merry dance too, for young Treffrey Graham, junior, all old scores forgotten, was proving a prince of chums, as spirited in play as he was prompt in a pinch.
And together--hand clasped in hand, indeed--by virtue of her being the inventor's daughter, he the son of the man who had resigned a fortune to the transcendent invention, side by side with two or three of those Very Great Ones, they stood, four nights later, looking through a monster telescope upon a mountaintop, and saw--saw the celestial climax, the first of the heavenly bodies reached.
Saw the blue powder-flash light up the full, round face of the Silver Queen they loved, while the Thunder Bird, expiring, dropped its bones upon her dead surface.
"It's--got--there," breathed the youth. "What next? Some day--some day, maybe, we'll be shooting off there--together?"
"Yes! if only the Man in the Moon could shoot us back!" breathed Pemrose.
Already it had come to be "we" bound up with "What next?" for it would, indeed, be a zero "next" in which the hands of youth and maiden would not meet in comradeship--and love.
But the sun and center of the girl's heart was still--and would be for long--her father.
The greatest moment of that unprecedented night came when Toandoah bent to her, and said:
"Little Pem! there was just one moment when I may have been discouraged, you remember! None knew the Wise Woman who saved the city."
[Illustration]