“Well! I say, this is a little bit of all right—isn’t it?”
CHAPTER XV
Wheeled Through Life
“Well! I say, this is a little bit of all right—isn’t it?”
Treffrey Graham, aviator, Polytechnic student, youth of nineteen in whom East and West met on breezy ground, for most of his life had been spent on the other side of the continent, lay upon the rocky Balcony half way up Pocohosette Mountain and indolently kicked pebbles down a sloping ledge, over a precipice’s brink.
“So—so this is what Pemrose eloquently calls ‘the lip of nothing’,” he remarked. “That rolling stone struck something,—bedrock—I guess, five hundred feet below.”
“The Balcony is the brow of nothing; the edge of the ledge is the ‘dod-lip’—pouting lip,” laughed Pemrose, with a little shudder, as her glance shot down an inclined plane of seamy rock merging into the precipice forty yards below the moss-draped Balcony on which she sat.
On one side of this natural platform a fireplace had been built, with a rough windbreak of piled stones, to prevent the flames from wildly running amuck at the will of the evening breeze sweeping up the mountain.
This was a device of that inveterate camper, Treff Graham, whose camp fire, with that of an erratic father, had blazed on far prairie and mountain peak, in most of the picturesque spots of his native land.
“This is a little bit of all right,” he murmured complacently; “you were good to let me come in on it—and on the Flower Pageant to-morrow night—after my ‘dumb stunt’ yesterday—stampeding the outfit.” His lip-corners twitched.
“We ought not to have done it.” Pemrose stabbed at his brown hand with a pine needle—they were skulking among some bushes in the corner of the rocky Balcony farthest from the fire, she sitting—he lying, breast downward. “I like a boy who has a brown speck on the pupil of one eye, just one—he has to have a sense of humor,” she murmured to herself.