“Ouch! angry teeth, already!” quivered another, as the night wind took her by the hair—and lightning grinned below her.
“It is coming, sure enough—and we never would have time to get home before it!” Girlish forms cowered towards the fire now, trembling—trembling before the night’s angry teeth.
“If I don’t mistake, ’twill make every storm we’ve witnessed before seem mild as a Sunday School picnic—even the one the night the flash light fainted,” said Pemrose, creeping round the fire on hands and knees, to sit near Una.
Presently, when the storm broke upon them—or below them, rather—they were locked in each other’s arms, cheek to cheek.
“They’re always ‘twosing’, those two,” Dorothy threw a little grimace into the fire’s heart, as she shrank into her heavy sweater. “Pemrose would stand up for Una against everything in the world—a good thing, too, for Una could never stand up for herself!”
But, as a matter of fact, every girl would have stood up for Una—would have shielded her with a warm breast from mountain rain and storm—and Dorothy knew it.
“I suppose that’s what it means to be ‘born in the purple’,” she murmured impishly to herself now; “it’s all gratitude to her ‘high-powered’ father,” with a low gasp, “for this wonderful, wonderful summer: radio concerts, horseback riding—everything! Una isn’t spoiled, though, I’ll admit; she loves us all, but she just swings like a pendulum between Pemrose and the Guardian.”
She had been privileged to go out alone with the Guardian—Dorothy remembered that now—on sundry occasions when the other older girls had undertaken climbing feats that were a little beyond her endurance—or her energy—as when they had stormed Little Poco, Little Brother Mountain, a precipitous peak, with a face rough as Esau’s hands—to interview the spell-woman.
They had not found her at home. And, contrary to custom, her camp on Little Brother’s shoulder was not wide open for the “next fellow.” It was securely locked.
The girls, led by their Assistant Guardian, had come back almost hysterical with fatigue, anathematizing the inhospitable “heather cat”, whose roaming propensities were familiar to them, for occasionally they saw her again—the Little Lone Lady—with Nature’s heavy cross, the lump between her shoulders, climbing some lonely bridle path, always on horseback—the camper’s pack across her saddle, the bloated umbrella in her stirrup strap.