“Noo–I gang first!” said Andrew–a true-penny still, though the stamp was reversed. “My word!” he added sourly, “this is na trail–juist a scratch on the mountainside–an’ the muckle rocks they’re a flail for beating the breath out of a puir body.”
“What–what do I care if they shouldn’t leave me a pinch if only I could find something–even a few more rags of the parachute!” gasped Pemrose, in stifled tones of passion, as she climbed, hurry-skurry, over a piled capsheaf of bowlders.
Indeed, that battling breath was at a low ebb in all three when, following the tangled skein of a sort of trail which the feet of daring climbers had beaten, here and there, amid the rocks, they reached in due time the third slab which, like the invisible running water in Tory Cave, was supposed to bring “piping times” of luck to whoever should brave the difficulties of the wild pass, to stand on it and wish.
“Oh–oh! there it is, at last,” cried Una, her hand to her breathless side, “a nice ‘squatty’ slab–almost as smooth as glass–an’ shaped like a mud-turtle. I wonder if there is a fairy underneath it–lurking under the rim. Now–now for the wishing cap!”
But before she could don Fortunatus’ cap by breaking a wee branch from a dwarf cedar growing amid the crags and wreathing it, like a green cottage bonnet, around her head, she slipped upon the wet moss girdling the stone where a tiny spring bubbled, and almost pitched headlong down the trail, at this point particularly steep.
“Easy there, lassie! Ye dinna want to mak’ o’ that auld flat slab a tombstone, eh?” murmured Andrew, laying a great hand upon her shoulder, with a little smack of laughter upon his long, smooth-shaven upper lip.
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.