CHAPTER IX
Jack at a Pinch
“Keep cool! Don’t stir! I’ll reach you in a moment!”
As the cry, the reassuring cry, came ringing down to her, Pemrose felt the blood start again from where it was frozen at the back of her neck and surge through her flattened body, which, greenly spread-eagled against that gray rock, the head turned slightly aside, was not unlike the quaint Indian figure of the Thunder Bird upon a pedestal,–the emblem of her father’s invention.
As the first blind moment of terror passed–the blankness of the discovery that, strain as she might, she could not reach that spur of the rock, the nearest hand-hold, and draw herself up to safety–she saw two rescuing figures loom out on high.
“Keep cool! Don’t stir! I’ll reach you in a moment!” Page 86.
The first was that of the chauffeur, Andrew, summoned by a piercing cry from Una–Una whose delicate face was white and square now as the marshmallows in the box under her arm, with which she had bribed her friend to the madcap feat of sliding backward down a twelve-foot rock and sitting in the Devil’s Chair.
And Andrew the Scot saw the danger, heard it skirling in his ears, for he had been brought up among mountains.
He did not quite see what good he could do, that staid Church Elder, by joining the girl in the Devil’s Seat.