“Oh-h, such an old story to me,” dimpled Pemrose, “being brought up in a laboratory! Father has every musical fork imaginable—experiments with them—up to those brittle quartz ones which, set vibrating, give an angel’s note, so pure and high. Some of them he loved to take out of doors, at times, and match the pitch against Nature’s sounds. We’ve tried it in the woods—and often down by the seashore, where we could almost—almost hit it off with the tide—have a duet in the same key,” laughingly. “But—up here—who could have been doing it?”
“Some eccentric musician with the same hobby,” suggested the Guardian. “There are camps here and there upon the mountain.”
The girl nodded. “Dad hasn’t tried it for a long time now, our pipes o’ Pan,” she said, with a tremble in her triumph—her face blue-lit, as always when she spoke of her father. “He has been all taken up with his inventions. But, sometimes—before—if I teased him, he’d take those rare, wavy quartz tuning forks along, with their sound that nothing in Nature could match, so pure, so crystal-clear it was! Heavenly!” The blue eyes dimmed. “Perhaps, whoever was playing with it, last night—playing Pied Piper....” She glanced at Una. “But who was playing—with—it?” Passionately the question forced itself again.
From the low-pitched tuning forks was suddenly struck a murmur, vague, unaccountable, carried by some magnet into her finger tips, her toes: “I wish—I wish Una’s Father and Mother were back,” it said.
CHAPTER XVIII
Mondamin
“Hurrah! Isn’t it fun to see our bonfire put the stars out?”
It was Dorothy who gave vent to this extinguisher, piling on more dry brush and resinous pine logs until not a spark in the firmament, planet or fixed star, dared to vie with the blaze below—upon the wild mountain top.
“And when it dies down a little and the flames blow aside, you can see old Orion, up there, stretched lazily, on watch,” said the Guardian. “Well! whose ear is the most nearly roasted? I don’t mean an auricular cavity,” laughingly. “I mean ‘Mondamin.’”
Mondamin, great Corn Spirit, they were toasting him, in style, upon the summit of Mount Pocohosette, while the two lesser peaks, Little Brother and Little Sister Mountain, as the girls called them, retired into the shadows of right and left.
Carrying, each, half-a-dozen ears of the sweet, early corn, in its coat of bishop’s purple, procured from the outskirts of the horse-farm, the girls had climbed the mountain in the golden September afternoon, by a trail which sidetracking Balcony and precipice, led almost to the very top.