"Ha! The Man Killer trail!" she whooped again. "Oh-h! we could easily find it; we saw a sign directing to it, as we came up the mountain." "It's na a trail; it's just a hotch-potch o' rocks--some sharp as stickit teeth!" groaned Andrew, who saw his own doom fixed, in vain protesting. He felt rather like a man who had been left behind to hold a wolf by the ears when, in the teeth of every remonstrance he could offer, he found himself, a little later, starting out in the rear of two adventurous girls, in quest of that third slab of a wishing stone--and the breath-racking Man Killer trail. But those girls were, to some degree, seasoned climbers, both,--sure-footed as venturesome! Through the dim limelight of fringing pine woods, across oozing mud-beds, soft from spring rains and freshets, over a babbling brook spanned by an elastic bridge formed of the interlacing roots of giant trees--where Una found much delight in bouncing up and down in anticipation of the magic stone--they stubbornly held their way, and came at last to the chaos of rocks crowding a steep gorge which marked the head of the lonely Killer trail. "Noo--I gang first!" said Andrew--a true-penny still, though the stamp was reversed. "My word!" he added sourly, "this is na trail--juist a scratch on the mountainside--an' the muckle rocks they're a flail for beating the breath out of a puir body." "What--what do I care if they shouldn't leave me a pinch if only I could find something--even a few more rags of the parachute!" gasped Pemrose, in stifled tones of passion, as she climbed, hurry-skurry, over a piled capsheaf of bowlders. Indeed, that battling breath was at a low ebb in all three when, following the tangled skein of a sort of trail which the feet of daring climbers had beaten, here and there, amid the rocks, they reached in due time the third slab which, like the invisible running water in Tory Cave, was supposed to bring "piping times" of luck to whoever should brave the difficulties of the wild pass, to stand on it and wish. "Oh--oh! there it is, at last," cried Una, her hand to her breathless side, "a nice 'squatty' slab--almost as smooth as glass--an' shaped like a mud-turtle. I wonder if there is a fairy underneath it--lurking under the rim. Now--now for the wishing cap!" But before she could don Fortunatus' cap by breaking a wee branch from a dwarf cedar growing amid the crags and wreathing it, like a green cottage bonnet, around her head, she slipped upon the wet moss girdling the stone where a tiny spring bubbled, and almost pitched headlong down the trail, at this point particularly steep. "Easy there, lassie! Ye dinna want to mak' o' that auld flat slab a tombstone, eh?" murmured Andrew, laying a great hand upon her shoulder, with a little smack of laughter upon his long, smooth-shaven upper lip. But immediately he winced as if his own words hurt him, and Pemrose--herself in an aching mood--knew what he was thinking of, that grizzled chauffeur.