“Chowchow, indeed! It just suits you, that compound. There’s a vain elf in you somewhere, Pem, that sleeps in the shadow of the Wise Woman.”
“Maybe–maybe, there’s a nickum! That’s Andrew’s word, Andrew’s word for an imp, a tomboy. He’s the Grosvenors’ Scotch chauffeur, you know, who talks with a thistle under his tongue. Well! nickum, or not!” the girl was a rosy weathercock again. “I–I’m just dying to get up to the mountains, to climb the Pinnacle, the green Pinnacle, that rough, pine-clad hill, with Una–and sit in the Devil’s Chair!”
“What! My Wise Woman sitting in the Devil’s Chair! Why! ’twould take a daredevil nickum, indeed, to do that.”
The inventor threw up his hands, laughing again, as he beat a retreat to his hardware den, his laboratory, where there was ever a magnet, potent by night or day, to draw him back.
Yet when still another six weeks had passed and Pemrose, with all the green world of spring in her heart, stood, breathless, upon that Lenox pinnacle–a pine-clad mountainette some thirteen hundred feet above sea-level–lo and behold! there was a nickum sitting coolly in the Devil’s Chair.
A brazen feat it was! For that Lucifer’s throne was a curved stone seat, a natural armchair, rudely carved out of the precipice rock, more than a dozen sheer feet beneath the crest where she stood with Una–Andrew of the thistly tongue having driven the two girls up to the foot of the peak on this the third day after their arrival, with the May flies, amid the mountains.
“A nickum–oh! a nickum, indeed–a daredevil nickum–sitting in the Devil’s Armchair, with his feet dangling down–down over the deep precipice! Look!”
Pemrose pirouetted in excitement at the sight.
“Yes, and, goodness! he seems to be enjoying it, too. Not turning a hair. Oh! if ’twere I–I should be so-o dizzy.”
With the more timid cry in her pulsing throat, and that little appalled stand, a star of mingled consternation and admiration beaming, bewitched, in one dark eye, Una turned from the spectacle–turned, shuddering, from the hundred-and-odd feet of unbroken abyss extending from the nickum’s knickerbockered legs, nonchalantly swinging, to an awed grove of young pine trees, rock-ribbed and bowlder-strewn, far below.