It was a hollow groan. Pain was, at length, getting the better of that capricious spirit. "Can't--can't I do--anything--to make you more comfortable?" Pemrose asked. Then suddenly remembering that it was he who was making the Thunder Bird's fortune, as impulsively as the little cedar tree leaned to the swollen rill, she bent and kissed the cold sweat of pain from his forehead. "That--that's worth coming East for," murmured the man, his own eyes growing wet. "Little niece! don't you want to--follow--suit? I suppose, a year from now, your Thunder Bird will fly." CHAPTER XXII A JUNE WOMAN "I feel as if I was in the pictures!" "Oh! I feel as if I was in the pictures." It was the wild thought in each girl's breast, as minutes went on. The loneliness of the mountain pass, nearly three thousand feet above sea-level, the rigors of the wind sweeping up it, chill now, June not yet being ten days old, the frowning crags, the remote heads of other tall mountains peeping over their shoulders, the two green dots of girls on either side of a broken man, they took it all in, to the full, most dramatically too--and felt as if they were in the pictures. A surpassing moving picture reel, more telling than any they had ever witnessed, in which--oh, queer double-headed feeling--they were both actors and spectators! But pain--pain left no atmosphere of unreality about it for the suffering man, for the sufferer who monopolized both their soft sweaters, while they shivered convulsively, until if it came to a beauty contest between the two now, the old Man Killer, awarding the palm, would not have made it dependent on a mere matter of eyelashes, but on which little nose was the least blue bitten. Pain released something in that sufferer too,--a fire that was not all wild-fire! For suddenly he dragged Una's green sweater-roll from under his head and thrust it towards her with an imperious: "Put it on, child!" "I shan't!" replied that child of luxury, as arbitrarily, slipping it back under the pallid cheek, above which the stand of agony in the stony eye told that the man was suffering almost to a point of delirium now. "Who ever thought Una would be such a brick?" Pem nibbled the words between her chattering teeth. "She's shivering--yes! and frightened and trying to cry--but the brick in her won't allow it!" There was no doubt that the uncle of her blood was a brick, too, for he fought the groans reverberating behind his clenched teeth, like a bee in a bottle, only breaking out now and again in a yearning prayer for the coming of his son. "If he were only here--here!" he moaned; it was evident that the youthful daredevil who liked excitement, but "knew where to stop", was a tower of strength to the less balanced father. Pem was longing uncontrollably for his appearance, also--for the rower whom she had robbed of his oars, while the sufferer seemed to find his only relief in talking about him.