"Where--where is it--the wishing-stone?" The little fixed star in Una's eye was never so bright--a twinkling star of portent. "The wishing stone on Greylock! Oh! I never knew there _was_ one."
"Havers, woman! Dinna ye ken that ye hae a tongue to hold?" muttered the grizzled chauffeur, in a stern aside.
But the motherly New Englander--who, with her old husband, could not for a moment be suspected of the theft--had her heart full for two sorrowing girls.
"Why! it's a little over a mile from here, I guess, down the Man Killer trail, the third flat slab you come to. I'd go with you myself--though it's rough traveling, the steepest trail on the mountain--only my man is laid up with the rheumatiz, hangin' on to him like a puppy-dog to a root."
"Oh! we can find it for ourselves--hurrah!" shouted Una, almost squinting with anticipation. "I've never stood upon a real mountain wishing-stone before. Who--who knows what may come of it?"
In her young blood, as in Andrew's, was the extravagant excitement of the whole experiment,--this first step in the ladder of demonstration which was by and by to reach the moon--lending to all an unearthly touch.
"The--the Man Killer trail! Why! that's _one_ place where we haven't searched--yet!" A moping Pemrose suddenly awoke.
To her, who had grown up amid the mathematical realities of an inventor's laboratory, who had "plugged" so hard at her elementary physics that she might be able to grasp the first principles of her father's work, some day--some day to work with him,--to her, the little girl-mechanic, a wishing stone was no golden magnet.
But the very fact that there was one spot, not so far from the summit, either--wildest spot on the mountain though it be--still unexplored, was enough to draw her restless feet anywhere, against any deadlock of difficulty.
"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.