Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl Part 6

Well! the Heavens fell upon the Pinnacle as Pem drew back--annihilated.

Snubbed for the first time in all her blue-sky life--and by a boy, too!

To be sure, indeed, the nick.u.m, his glance darting past her to Una, had gone by with a slight inclination of his bare head that was a stony bow.

To be sure, when one of the girls of his acquaintance questioned him about the view from the Devil's Seat, there was a sort of creak in his voice as he answered:

"It's--a--corker! You can see away off: far-rms, lakes, all the other mountains--Mount Greylock, too, in the distance! But--but it's a cat's-foot climb down--there!" breaking off breathlessly, as if feeling were making a cat's-paw of him.

"Oh! you can really see Mount Greylock! As far away as that! Well! I'm going to try-y it, too," ventured one of his girlish companions whose age was fourteen. "Summer and winter, I've done a lot of climbing, up here!"

"You try it! Any girl try sitting in the Devil's Chair! Why! there isn't a girl living who could do it," crowed the gray-shouldered youth: and now his tones were lordly, as if he were picking himself up after an inner tumble.

"Hey! Is that so?" Pem--over-hearing--ground the words between her teeth.

"Have you never heard of Camp Fire, What a shame! What a shame!

_If_ you've never heard of Camp Fire, You're to blame! You're to blame!

Then don't take a nap, For we're on the map, Ready to prove it with s-snap!"

She hissed the last word at the nick.u.m's back, as he halted at some distance with his companions.

"Una! I'm going to do it," she panted. "I'm going to slide down that rock there, turn round and sit in the Chair--then draw myself up again, as he did. I've got on sneakers. I know I can! I've done some breakneck climbing with father--yes! and with my Camp Fire Group, too."

"I--I'll give you all my marshmallows that we brought with us to toast at an open fire, if you do!... Yes! and one of my two little thistle pins--pebble pins--that Andrew and his wife brought me from Scotland, when they went home last year, _if you do_.... Wasn't he just hor-rid? He didn't want to speak to us--to know us!"

Una's face flamed upon the bribe, and was so pretty lit by that fixed star in the eye, that it must have been a zero-hearted nick.u.m who could turn his back upon it.

"Hold my hat," said Pem: if she had been a boy, the tone would have meant: "Hold my coat while I thrash him!"

Unhesitatingly she stepped to the precipice-brink and measured the distance to that Devil's Chair very coolly and critically with her eye.

CHAPTER VIII

A USURPER

Gathering her short, green skirt about her, for she wore, as on that February day in her father's laboratory, what he called the "nixie green", the sylvan Camp Fire uniform, the inventor's daughter stretched herself breast downward, upon the flat ledge of the Pinnacle's crest.

Working her body carefully backward, without another glance at the precipice beneath, she slid warily over the edge, her face to the rock, and down the dozen feet of almost smooth, nearly perpendicular slab, until her feet touched the stone seat of that curved armchair, a deep embrasure in the mountain granite.

It was not such a wildly difficult feat then for a girl on her mettle to turn cautiously until her tingling back was pressed hard against the slab, and thus to lower herself to a sitting position on the rocky throne.

For that Devil's Chair was a s.p.a.cious one--fairly so! The seat extended outward at least three feet and was roomy enough to allow of two people standing upright on it at the same time.

And what a view old Lucifer must have from it, was Pem's first thought--provided he didn't, as an Irishman would say, reside away from home!

Off to the right and left stretched the wonderful landscape of the Berks.h.i.+re Hills, Ma.s.sachusetts' Highlands--the Berks.h.i.+re mountains in May where, afar, a summit snow-cap vied with the driven snows of blossoming fruit trees, lower down; where the pink-shot pearl of a lake gleamed, opal-like, from an emerald setting, and many a silver thread winding, expanding, showed where some madcap river or brook had become with spring a wild thing.

"Oh, hurrah! I can really see off to Mount Greylock--old King Greylock--even the steel tower upon it--oh! so plainly," murmured the madcap in the Chair, and nestled triumphantly against its rocky back.

"Greylock, cloud-girdled, from his purple throne, A shout of gladness sends, And up soft meadow slopes, a warbling tone, Of Housatonic blends."

Yes! she felt as if they were two throned dignitaries, she and Greylock; for she wore the crown of derring do, and King Greylock, still wearing a thin diadem of snow, was enthroned for ever in her imagination as the favored peak from which the first experiments with her father's immortal rocket were to be made.

Upon Greylock's crest within a week or two, maybe--at all events before summer dog-day heat clogged and fogged the air--her transcendent dream--or the first part of it--would come to pa.s.s: her yearning thumb would press the b.u.t.ton and start the little Thunder Bird off, to fly up a couple of hundred miles, or so, with its diary in its cone-shaped head, and send back that novel explorer's log, the little recording apparatus, attached to a black silk parachute--the first, the very first record from the outer realm of s.p.a.ce.

No wonder that old Greylock sent her back a shout of gladness now, as, squirming in the Chair, she turned her gaze away from the distant mountain to green meadow slopes, to the right, where the broadest silver ribbon, intertwined with the matchless landscape, showed where the Housatonic River, the blue Housatonic, flowed and sang.

"Oh, dear! I wouldn't have missed this for anything," she exulted silently. "But the idea of that perfectly horrid boy actually daring me to do it! He didn't mean to, but he did--strutting off, like that, crowing about his climbing! As if a girl were--gingerbread! Well--"

indignantly--"that was just one with his pa.s.sing Una and me when we only wanted to thank him, felt as if we naturally must thank him, for--for.... Bah! I won't think of the horrid wreck now! Or of him, either! I'll be taken up with the view! Isn't it exquisite--sublime? Not interrupted as it is up there on the--Pinnacle's--crest!...--Ah-h!"

The little pinched exclamation came when--all too suddenly--she changed the point of view, and looked down.

Beneath her yawned the precipice over which her feet dangled--treading air, with never a break between them and that grove of dwarf pine trees more than a hundred feet below, pointed by their glinting rocks.

The little trees bowed to her, now, like servants--green pages.

But, somehow, their homage made her feel uneasy; it put too great a distance beneath her and them.

The crown of daring which she wore did not fit quite so easily.

She began to feel like a usurper whose head might at any moment be taken off.

And, with that, she decided to vacate!

Drawing up her feet much more gracefully than her predecessor had done, she curled her body in the seat and raised it slowly until she was in a standing position, grasping the stone arms of the chair, turned--turned rather sickeningly, to be sure, until her breast was against the broad rock down which she had slid, then reached upward for a handhold by which to climb--to draw herself up.

There was one. The nick.u.m--churlish climber--had pulled himself up by it. Like him, she had fought shy of it, sliding down, for fear it should catch in her clothing.

A little spur it was, projecting from a slight fissure, what he called a "nick," in the rock, rather more than half-way up,--a good seven feet from the rocky armchair.

Breathlessly she reached upward, to grasp it.

And, lo! her lips fell apart--like a cleft stone.

At the same time her heart slunk out of her body and dropped into the precipice behind her.

Her fingers just missed that spur--fell short!

They touched it; they could not curl over it--and grip.

Flattening herself to a green creeper against the rock which seemed spurning her, wildly she stretched every tendril--every sinew.

In vain! Make as long an arm as she could, this daring Pem, her five feet three of slim girlish stature would not become the five feet nine of the daredevil who preceded her!

Emergency balks at extension.