Una, her balance recovered, jumped upon the stone.
Surely, no wishing-cap ever before was so bonnie, so becoming as the
fine, emerald needles of the little cedar branch gripped together under
the dimpled chin, fringing the sweet, saucy, girlish face, the star in
the bright dark eye so intently fixed.
Pem smiled; in the present crisis of her young life she didn't care if
her friend's eyelashes were longer than hers by a whole ell. And Andrew
sighed because of that one "sair memory" which had oppressed him on the
Pinnacle.
The serio-comic passion in the green-framed face, the fervor in the one
little clenched fist drooping at Una's side, might well have won over
all the good fairy-hosts that ever landed in the wake of the Pilgrims,
and set them to scouring Greylock for the missing record from on high.
"Now then! Pemrose, it's up to you! Turn your backbone into a wishbone."
The wreathed figure stepped from the pedestal,--a laughing June spot
against the wintry grimness of the Man Killer trail.
Obligingly the inventor's daughter stepped up, closing her eyes
half-humorously, doubling the drooping hands at her panting sides.
But, as suddenly, the eyelids were flung up, like shutters from the blue
of day. The uncurling fists were outflung passionately.
"I can't! I _can't_!" cried Pemrose Lorry, choking upon her own
wishbone. "I--I'm not in the humor for it--for foolery! I must go
on--right on--and search! This--this is the shortest trail down the
mountain, if it's the roughest--I know that!" She looked desperately at
old Andrew. "If any mean thief--anybody--stole that record, there could
be only one--one motive for it, my father-r says--curiosity; to be the
fir-rst to see that very first record man has ever got from so high
up--high up in the earth's thin atmosphere, where the air ends--and
space begins!"
She seemed to have that whole zero void in her heart now, its light,
stifling gases in her distended throat--Toandoah's little pal--as she
looked distractedly down the gorge.
"Oh! it's pos-si-ble--just barely possible, that after he had satisfied
his cur-ios-ity--or mischief--or whatever it was--he might have thrown
away the little steel box, dropped it somewhere on the trail," she
panted extravagantly. "Or--or we might even come on some more rags of
the parachute and track him--track him to a camp! My father-r--"
It was the passionate break on that word, even more than the spice in
the blue eyes, that went straight to the shadowed spot in Andrew's heart
and found the little sprig of memorial heather, hidden there, the
mountain heather, the tiny, pinkish blossoms, with the faint, wild tang,
which he plucked whenever he went home to Scotland from a small grave in
a hillside "kirkyard" on whose granite marker was printed: "Margery
Campbell, aged fifteen!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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