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.
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--"