“Some-somebody coming! Oh-h, some-body–coming!” cried Una, at that moment, so that the man started up, with a heyday exclamation–and tumbled back, a wreck of groans.
For it was not his son. Neither was it the long-coated figure of the chauffeur, at sight of which each girl would have passionately hugged herself–if not him.
But it was a messenger whom Andrew had sent.
And at sight of her, of the fresh mountain rose in her cheeks, with its heart of American gold, the climbing flash in her hazel eye, Una just tumbled into sobs, herself, that little fixed star in her eye blazing pathetic welcome, for this was her first taste of emergency’s pinch, emergency’s call for sacrifice.
“Are you–oh! are you come to stay with us–us?” she cried, running forward with childish confidence.
“That I be–girlie!” responded the mountain woman, throwing a warm arm around her. “The man that borrowed our little aut’mobile truck and set off in it at a score down the mountain, the man with a queer blowpipe at the roots of his tongue, he told me that he had left two lassies up here on the lonely trail, with a badly hurt man. ‘Woman!’ says he, kind o’ fierce-like, ‘if they were yer own bit lassies, ye’d scorch the rocks, climbing to ’em.’ ‘Man!’ says I,” the Greylock woman paused, half-laughingly, to catch her breath, “‘I never laid eyes on them, or on the broken-kneed man, either, but I’ll warm the way, just the same.’ But, mercy! it took me most an hour to get here–though only a mile of climbing–the old Man Killer is–so-o–fierce.”
Her eye, at that, went to the fire, now brilliantly painting the trail, to the pillowed figure upon the moss, with the sweater-roll in the hollow of the injured knee.
“But, land sakes! I needn’t ha’ been in such a mad hurry getting here, after all–giving my skin to make ear-laps for the old Man Killer!” she cried, holding up two raw palms, flayed by indiscriminate climbing. “For, my senses! they’re no stray lambs o’ tenderfoot–those ‘twa bit lassies’!” mimicking Andrew’s blowpipe. “They know how to take care of themselves in a pinch–and of somebody else, too!... And–and, see here, what I’ve brought you, honey, rolled in the blanket for him!”
“Cake–choc’late cake! C-coffee!” Una gasped feebly, confronted by the ghost of her everyday life.
She grasped the reality, though, of that normal life, somewhere waiting for her, with the first bite into the brown-eyed cake, while her sweater was restored to her thinly clad shoulders as the mountain woman spread her blanket over the injured man and tucked it under him for a pillow.