Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl Part 22

It had made the whole family of his employers very sympathetic towards Andrew, as to a friend. And now a whiff of that heather memory stood Pemrose in good stead.

"I reckon if leetle Margery were livin', she'd feel in the verra same way gin anny misfortune happed to me," he told himself.

"Aw, weel, la.s.sie!" Thus he spoke aloud. "Since ye're set on gaeing on a wee bit further, we'll gang; but dinna get yer hopes stickit on finding onything!"

"Andrew--Andrew, himself, has found something! Look--look at him!"

It was barely twenty minutes later that the wildly startled cry burst from Una as the trio struggled on--on down the fitful path, between the rocky jaws of the Man Killer, where beetling crags loomed, fang-like, on either side of them and, here and there some swollen rill made of a green moss-bank a slimy mud-bed.

"He--he's hearing things, if he isn't seeing them. Oh, look!... Look at him!"

Una's hand was at her jumping heart--pressing hard as if to hold it in her body--as she beheld the tall figure of the chauffeur, motionless as arrested mechanism, upon the trail, ahead.

"I heerd a--skirl." Andrew's face was stony as that of the Old Man of Greylock--a featured rock--as he turned it upon the breathless girls.

"A skirl! A cry!" he repeated hoa.r.s.ely. "'Twas na the yap of an animal, either! Somebody--somebody's yawping for help out here in this awfu'

spot! Dinna ye hear it, children?"

They did. Their flesh began to creep.

Up, upward, struggling between great rocks, it climbed, that cry, where the stony teeth of the Man Killer bit the trail right in two.

"Help--h-help!" it pleaded. "Oh--help!" Then feebly, but fierily: "_Oh-h!_ confound it--_help_, I say!"

That was the moment when Pemrose Lorry shook as if the old Man Killer were devouring her.

Was there--could there be something familiar, half-familiar, about the faint, volcanic shout: some accent she seemed to have heard before? And yet--and yet, not quite that, either!

"My word! Some puir body's hur-rted bad--ba-ad--like a toad under a harrow," grunted Andrew, and scrambled hastily on over a gray barrier of rocks,--the girls following.

Once again it limped painfully up to them, the cry, like a visible, broken thing. "Help--h-help, I say!" Then, feebly, in rock-bitten echo: "_Help!_"

CHAPTER XXI

THE MAN KILLER

"We must lift him out of the mud! Oh-h! even if it hurts him--terribly--we'll have to lift him to a dry spot."

It was Pemrose Lorry who spoke. Together with her Camp Fire sisters she had taken some training in first aid. And one agonizing accident which she had been told how to deal with was the case of a knee-cap displaced or broken.

There almost seemed to be a broken head on her own young shoulders through which wild, streaky lights and shadows came stealing, like moonlight through cracked shutters whose c.h.i.n.ks are not wide enough to reveal clearly any object in a room.

It was the same breathlessly unreal feeling--the same dim moonlit groping, that she had felt as she sat on the cliff-brow with Stud, when he talked of the nick.u.m and his father--and called the latter a "queer fis.h.!.+"

For one thing she knew at a glance! She had seen the injured man, who lay calling for help in a miry spot of the Man Killer trail, before.

Three times before, said lightning perception!

And it came upon her now, as emergency's stiff breeze blew the cobwebs from her brain, the occasion of the second time, sandwiched in between that zero day when he had dragged her up a snow-bank, the youth who saved her addressing him as Dad, and the smiling June one when he lay on a fernbed before his lake-sh.o.r.e camp, grumpily fis.h.i.+ng.

"I--I saw him: I know I saw him--again--crossing the street outside Una's home on the day when the last installment of the Will was read,"

she realized, her hands coming together convulsively at the thought of the blighting codicil which hung up the fortunes of the moon-going Thunder Bird for twelve long years.

"He--he was wearing the same gray cap!" was the next cleaving flash of memory.

He was not really wearing it now. It bobbed in the rill beside him.

As one eye turned feverishly towards it, the third thunder clap of perception came in the staggering sense of how like he was to Una.

She might have been his daughter--Una--with that little fixed star of feeling set like a s.h.i.+ning pebble now in her right, fascinated eye, reflected, exaggerated in the glazed cast of pain in the stone-gray eye of the man beneath her, whose climber's suit of homespun was daubed with mountain mud,--whose tweed cap was the brooklet's toy.

He had been trying to scoop up water in it.

And that brought Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl, to herself again, within quarter of a minute of her first laying eyes on him.

For there is one gallant anchor that will hold in any pinch,--when thought is shattered and speculation the maddest blur: the Camp Fire law: Give Service!

She unhooked her little camper's cup from where it hung at her green belt, and offered him a drink.

She dipped her handkerchief in the trickle of water and wiped the cold drops of faintness and agony from his forehead.

And then, when he had confided to Andrew, who knelt beside him, that he had slipped upon the wet, slimy moss beside the rill, as he ascended the trail, and broken his knee-cap by striking heavily against a confronting rock, she said that they must lift him to a dry spot.

"That's--r-right. She knows what to--do. Ouch! a--a knee-cap slipped, or broken--is--the deuce of a rack," groaned the victim, as they proceeded to raise him, the girls supporting, each, a knickerbockered leg, Pemrose the injured one, while Andrew took the main weight of the writhing body, until they laid it upon some dry moss.

Yes! and she knew further what to do, that Camp Fire Girl who wore the Fire Maker's bracelet upon her wrist, for plucking off her soft, green sweater she rolled it into a wad and placed it under the hollow of the injured knee, so flexing it, supporting it, while Una doubled hers into a pillow for his head,--Una who moved as if in a fantastic dream.

And then arose the question as to the next move; how to go about obtaining further help.

"We might--might make a stretcher with poles, saplings, with our sweaters, your coat, Andrew, and--and carry him down to the nearest farmhouse," Pem suggested.

"No-o thank--you!" The injured man s.h.i.+fted his shoulders ever so slightly upon one elbow and looked at her; the tiniest laugh shot the rapids of pain in his eye. "My son said you had a whole lot of 'pep'--same that's in your inventor-father, I suppose, who wants to bombard the moon!... My son who's play-ing baseball now down on the Greylock field--mountain's foot!" The sufferer here appealed to Andrew.

"If you could--only--get him up here, I'd be all right! There's an auto at the nearest farmhouse--maybe they'd let you take it. Any one--any one can point out 'Starry'"--in a lame rush of pride--"player who made that home run--"

"Hadna I better bid him bring a doctor along too--a stretcher as weel?"

put in the Scotchman dryly.

The victim nodded, looking at the other's cap.

"You're a chauffeur," he pleaded; "you'll drive fast?"

"Aye, fegs! Fast as G.o.d and gasoline will let me!" answered Andrew devoutly, with an anxious glance at the two girls.

As his tall, spare figure scrambled on down the trail, the sufferer raised his eyes to Pemrose.

"If--if you could t-twist my knapsack round from under me," he murmured; "there's a restorative in it--a few drops of ammonia--I'm faint!"