CHAPTER IX
JACK AT A PINCH
"Keep cool! Don't stir! I'll reach you in a moment!"
As the cry, the reassuring cry, came ringing down to her, Pemrose feltthe blood start again from where it was frozen at the back of her neckand surge through her flattened body, which, greenly spread-eagledagainst that gray rock, the head turned slightly aside, was not unlikethe quaint Indian figure of the Thunder Bird upon a pedestal,--theemblem of her father's invention.
As the first blind moment of terror passed--the blankness of thediscovery that, strain as she might, she could not reach that spur ofthe rock, the nearest hand-hold, and draw herself up to safety--she sawtwo rescuing figures loom out on high.
"Keep cool! Don't stir! I'll reach you in a moment!" Page86.]
The first was that of the chauffeur, Andrew, summoned by a piercing cryfrom Una--Una whose delicate face was white and square now as themarshmallows in the box under her arm, with which she had bribed herfriend to the madcap feat of sliding backward down a twelve-foot rockand sitting in the Devil's Chair.
And Andrew the Scot saw the danger, heard it skirling in his ears, forhe had been brought up among mountains.
He did not quite see what good he could do, that staid Church Elder, byjoining the girl in the Devil's Seat.
But he came of a Campbell clan which never flinched.
He was preparing to slide down, himself, when an arm--a left elbowrather--thrust him rudely back.
"T-take hold of this rope-end. Throw yourself flat on the ground there.Sit on him, you girls, so that he may not be drawn over!" cried a voice,pointed, vigorous.
Pem knew that it was the fiery voice of the nickum, the broad-shoulderedyouth, who had sat in the chair before her, whose crowing had beenresponsible for her feat.
Her colorless face was turned upward then and she had seen him push upthe lower folds of his sweater with his left hand--even while its elbowsent the chauffeur back--and while his right, lightning-like, uncoiled arope, a lariat, worn under it around his waist.
It was then that he shouted to her to "keep cool"; and that she, turningher head aside against the rock, became a living effigy of the ThunderBird.
Not waiting to make the rope fast around his own body--or his body fastto it--he slid down.
The next moment he was standing beside her in the chair.
"Ha! So the 'pep' was in the wrong box that time," he said coolly.
"Yes. Last time it was in the ice-box," snapped she, as coolly, not tobe outdone. "So you _did_ remember--know me--us!"
"How could I help--remembering--that icy train-wreck?" He was slippingthe rope in a noose under her arms. "Perhaps, some day.... Well! I'mglad to be 'Jack at a Pinch' again, anyway."
"R-ready!" he shouted then.
And Pem was drawn up, to face a Highland squall from Andrew.
"Hoot! lassie, an' air ye sech a fechless tomboy that a mon mun keep hiseen sticket on ye a' the time?" the Scot angrily demanded. "How cud yebe sech a nickum as to try sitting in yon--Deev's Chair?"
"Ask--ask the other nickum; he did it first," flung back the rescuedone.
But under cover of the broad scolding, the other, the Jack at aPinch--friend in need for the second time--had again slipped off,without a word from either of the girls.
"Bah! he is a nickum--a mysterious imp," snapped Pemrose, the fire thatsmoldered behind her white face leaping up. "Can't be shyness with him;he doesn't look the least bit shy! Oh-h! what a fool I was to give him achance to help me--save me--in a 'pinch', again."
Tears were springing to her eyes now,--tears of reaction.
She felt that an eighteen-year-old youth, privileged to save her lifetwice--it seemed a privilege at the moment--might, at least, have hadthe manners to let her thank him for it.
"Oh! he's the nicest and the--hor-rid-est--boy I ever saw," wailed Una,in tribute to the train-wreck, still a nightmare on her mind.
Both girls were dumfounded, as well they might be.
Pemrose, with her blue eyes under jet-black lashes--girdled, moreover,with her father's growing fame--Una, with lighter eyelashes and hair,and that little fixed star of angry excitement blazing in one sweet darkeye, they were the kind of girls whose good graces a boy would be thelast to spurn, fair even for daughters of Columbia who, democratic inbeauty, as in all else, never hatches out an ugly duckling.
They gazed in stormy bewilderment now after Jack at a Pinch walking offwith his party whom, indeed, he had herded away.
Andrew was looking gloweringly after him, too.
"An' so he's the loon that sat in the Chair first!" grumbled the stillangry chauffeur. "Aw weel--" the "dour" expression upon the speaker'slong upper lip softening a little--"weel! he may be ill-trickit, buthe's a swanky lad, for a' that. Aye, fegs! an' braw, too."
"Oh! he's 'swanky' enough--swaggering--but I don't think he's 'braw',handsome--not with that little stand in his eye--just like Una's, onlymore so." Pem added the last words under her breath. "But, oh! forgoodness sake! let's get away from here," she cried wildly; "over to theother side of the Pinnacle, anywhere--anywhere--so that we won't see himagain, before his strutting over what he's done, makes me--makes me--"
"Yes--it's pretty on the other side of the hill, easy climbing, muchsmoother--green and spring-like," assented Una soothingly, pouring balm."It's all covered with young pine trees and just a few, very few, tallsilvery birches. Not rough and rocky as it is this side!" glancingshiveringly down the precipice.
"Not another Deev's Chair in sight, I'll be hoping--fegs!" mutteredAndrew, picking up a basket which he had carried from the automobile upthe low mountainside, and in the late emergency had set down.
It contained cocoa, sandwiches, fruit and other toothsome dainties for apicnic supper.
"We have permission to make a fire, a Pin-na-cle blaze, to--to boilwater and toast our marshmallows. Oh! of all things, all-ll things onthis planet--I don't know what we may find on any other--that's'banner', it's a marshmallows toast out-of-doors--isn't it?" chantedUna, intoning her delight to the trees, the low spruce and pine scrub,as she skipped among them, an evergreen sprite, herself, for she, too,now wore the "bonnie green", the Camp Fire short skirt, middy blouse andcaptivating Tam-o'-shanter--most nymph-like note in dress for daughtersof the woodland.
"And--and I just know the dear-est, loveliest pin-ey nook," she went onin a choir-boy sing-song; "half-way down the Pinnacle's softer side itis, where we may build our fire. Halleluiah! I suppose I'll have to getbusy and gather fagots, as in Camp Fire rank I'm a Wood Gatherer. Oh,dear! Will you listen to old Andrew. Now what is _he_ singing?"
The Scot, indeed, relaxing from prim silence and chauffeur ceremony hereupon the Pinnacle's height, with only two young girls to marshal insteadof the mechanism of lever and brake--although the former, as he hadfound to his cost might prove the worse handful of the two--wasalternately whistling, with lips drily pursed, and crooning in theburr-like accents which adhered like a thistle to his tongue, hisversion of a very old song:
"Young lassie! Daft lassie, I tell ye the noo, I'm keepin' some fagots, An' a stick, too, for you!
"Singing whack fol de ri do! De ri do!
"A lassie, a dog, And an auld rowan tree, The mair that you thwacks 'em, The better they be!"
"'Thwacks 'em!' Pshaw! he's flinging that in my direction--having afling at me--for sitting in the Devil's Chair," laughed Pem, but thelaughter was bitter, two-edged. "Oh! Una," she burst forth shakily, "aslong--as long's ever I live, I'll wish I hadn't done it,letting--letting that Jack at a Pinch, as he called himself, that big,boorish boy, play friend in need to me-e again. Ugh-h!"
Her stung lips quivered and were twisted, partly upon the after-taste ofterror.
"Humph! forget it--oh-h! forget it," caroled the younger girl. "See thatyou don't make a trouble out of it, for trouble is a hor-ridkettle-o'-fish for the troublers--see!... But--listen! Listen! Surelythat's singing--singing from somewhere--_other_ sin
ging!"
She paused on tiptoe, a green dryad, one little hand, fair as aflower-petal, curled about her startled ear.
But Pem was for the moment comfort-proof.
"Bah! 'Tisn't quite so easy to forget," she murmured, bitterly.
Her less fragile fists were mounted one upon another under her chin asif to hold her head up. For the first time in her life she felt as ifshe were being asked to drink a cup of humiliation--she, Toandoah'slittle pal--and she made wry faces over even a sip.
"Humph! Doesn't it seem queer--queer--outlandish?" she snapped,bolstering the piqued head higher with each passionate adjective. "Herefor three months, ever since February--since I recovered consciousnessafter that freezing wreck--I've been longing, oh! longing to meet againthe boy whose chaff, whose very chaff, warmed one amid the horrors....You didn't hear it; you were too far gone. And, _now_!" The littlefists lashed out. "Bah! Who could ev-er dream that he'd turn out such a'chuff', as the boys say--an un-civ-il chuff?... Una! it's never--itisn't, it can't be Camp Fire Girls?"
"It is! It is! I told you I heard singing."
The answer was shrill with delight as the wiry note of the littleblack-poll warbler, nesting near.
"Why! Why! Goodness! That's what I hurled at _him_; at his crowing,cock-a-hoop back!"
The older girl's face softened, melted into whimsicality now,--into afreakish surprise that encircled, like a golden ring, her wide-openmouth.
Up--up from the Pinnacle's softer side, its tender, heavenly side, thechant came ringing, the merry chant and challenge:
"Then--then don't take a nap, For we're on the map!"
"Camp Fire Girls! Camp Fire Girls! Here on the Pinnacle 'map'!"
Pem caught her breath wildly. Never--oh! never was a turn of the tidemore welcome.