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–”
It was the passionate break on that word, even more than the spice in the blue eyes, that went straight to the shadowed spot in Andrew’s heart and found the little sprig of memorial heather, hidden there, the mountain heather, the tiny, pinkish blossoms, with the faint, wild tang, which he plucked whenever he went home to Scotland from a small grave in a hillside “kirkyard” on whose granite marker was printed: “Margery Campbell, aged fifteen!”
It had been as much the restlessness of bereavement as a desire to better their fortunes which had brought his wife and him to the New World, for she had been their only child, with the exception of one son, old enough to be in the American Army.