PEMROSE LORRY, RADIO AMATEUR

By Isabel Hornibrook

DRAKE OF TROOP ONE

SCOUT DRAKE IN WAR TIME

COXSWAIN DRAKE OF THE SEASCOUTS

DRAKE AND THE ADVENTURERS’ CUP

PEMROSE LORRY: CAMP FIRE GIRL

PEMROSE LORRY: RADIO AMATEUR

“We’ve got to ride on—your own horse is here—to where you and I can be together.”

PEMROSE LORRY

RADIO AMATEUR

BY

ISABEL HORNIBROOK

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

NANA BICKFORD ROLLINS

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

1923

Copyright, 1923,

By LITTLE, Brown, AND COMPANY.

All rights reserved

Published April, 1923

Printed in the United States of America

The author acknowledges her indebtedness to Nawadaha of the Camp Fire (Ethel V. Smart) for the songs and rhymes, and for some helpful collaboration.

ILLUSTRATIONS

• [“We’ve got to ride on—your own horse is here—to where you and I can be together.”]
• [Drifting down, a fire-tail, the aëroplane truly was.]
• [“Well! I say, this is a little bit of all right—isn’t it?”]
• [Pemrose was standing with her aërial out to a gnarled pine-tree.]

PEMROSE LORRY RADIO AMATEUR

CHAPTER I
A Flower Clock

“Good morning, Daytime!” A girl stood upon the gray stone steps of a Lenox mansion and, looking up, answered the first lovely smile that young day flung down to her as, robed in pale pink and bluish bloom, it slowly climbed the eastern sky.

“Good morning, Day-sky!” she laughed again—smiling all over in response to that pink of beauty above her. “Well! this is the first time that the Sunrise and I have been chums,” she murmured to herself, “the first spring, I mean; I—I who used to suffer from the sleepy fevers more than—than the ‘nappiest’ little flower in my garden.”

She laughed softly now, Una Grosvenor, known to her girl chums as Jack—a gay bit of satire, by the way—and by the Council Fire as U-te-yan, Flower, as she descended the gray steps into a dewy garden, where those Rogues O’May, the late spring flowers, were still, many of them, slumbering with eyes tight shut.

“Yes, you gain an hour by the daylight saving—or you think you do, you sluggards!” she flung at them, a slight nearsighted peculiarity in her dark eye flashing with pretty mockery. “Six o’clock, now, by my watch—really only five—and there you are: chicory, tulip, wild rose, pond lily, fast asleep still; poppy, marigold, daisy—and wild dandelion, only just awaking—and one little belated Crocus, just one, dozing, too!”

It was with a smile, roguish and tender, tender as that of the dawn, that Una stood still, cooling her toes in the dew, to look at her garden—with its cheek, silver and pink as a baby’s, reflecting the flush of the sky.

A large, old-fashioned garden it was and full of surprises, inclosing U-te-yan’s blooming beds where, as a Camp Fire Girl, she had sown or planted, experimented and transplanted herself; and it was plain from the look upon her face that she lived in it—dreamed in it, as a princess might live in a fairy tale.

“My flowers!” She dimpled imaginatively. “Oh-h! at this hour, I can almost hear them singing to me. What is it—they—say? I made it up, for them, before:

“Good morning, dear Una! Good morning, dear Day!

The gloom of the night clouds has all flown away,

We kick off our blankets of mist, soft and white,

And dress ourselves up in the lovely gold light,

From rock, bed and border we’re smiling at you,

Good morning! Good morning! Now, you say it too!”

“Good morning! Good morning!” threw back the caroling sprite, her dark eyes dressing themselves up in light, too, as she impersonated her flowers. “Now! what was it I wanted especially to do this morning,” thus she silently questioned the dewy beds, “besides watching the sleepy flowers open in my flower clock, my sundial bed—that’s the clock which really gets me up early,” with a merry nod, “to study their waking time, as the shadow of the dial hand, beginning to move with sunrise, points to one after the other? Oh-h! I know; I wanted to do some transplanting, ‘housemove’ my little Quaker Ladies, before—before old Sods gets around. Now! did any of you ever hear of such a thing as a crusty old gardener whose ‘really truly’ name is—Jacob Sods?”

Whimsically she interrogated pansy and little blue johnny-jump-up, just opening its sleepy eye, daffodil, narcissus and lamp-like geranium which, open-eyed, had kept vigil all night long.

“Humph! There he is now! I never can get ahead of him.” The girl shrugged her shoulders.

“Lorie me! Miss Una,” grunted an old mountaineer who at that moment came shuffling down a garden path, spade in hand and munching a dew-piece, a hunch of bread. “Lorie me! Now, what be you up for so ear-rly! It ben’t but—five—o’clock.” He pulled a timeworn old silver watch out of a side pocket.

“Six—by—me!” Una glanced at her tiny jeweled wrist watch.

“Humph! I go by the Lord’s time, I’ll have you to know!” snorted Jacob Sods, gardener. “I—I ain’t no ‘nose o’ wax’ to be changin’ round.” He shuffled on, grunting.

Una’s tickled laughter rang out as she set to work to transplant her little Quaker Ladies from what was known as the wildflower garden to a sunny rock bed.

“A plant—a plant is a regular tomboy when you’re making a new home for it,” she was murmuring archly to herself, five minutes later, her dark eyebrows lifting over the busy trowel. “You have to make a nice little mound of earth, deep in your hole, for it to sit on and swing its legs, its roots, just like a boy or girl. And—and it likes a snug fit, too! There now, my bluets are in a nice, comfy hole.... And the little Quaker Ladies will never know what happened to them!”

She started. Something was happening to her. Breathlessly she kneeled upright—earthy knuckles pressed against her lips, ear intent.

“Goodness! this—this isn’t the first time when I’ve been up early, before anybody else was around—Pemrose, anybody—that—I thought—I thought I heard a strange sound from the wood. There it is again! Faint hum—silvery hum—all round us in the air! Don’t you—don’t you hear it?”

She turned half wildly to the Quaker Ladies, who seemed to be settling into their new home to music—if music the faintest, vaguest murmur could be called.

“It—it comes from the wood, but it isn’t the trees—pines or beeches—it isn’t, oh! it isn’t any sound in Nature, at all.” Una waved her trowel, in utter bewilderment. “What can be doing it—making it? That distant ‘surgy’ hum, rising, falling, murmur, murmuration! Silvery murmuration!” The little peculiar cast in her fascinated eye, too slight to be a blemish, shone, a morning star of marvel, now as she gazed off towards a low, stone wall about a hundred feet away, beyond which was a dark, slowly lighting pine wood.

“If I were to say anything about this to Pemrose, she’d laugh at me—think it was all imagination. She’s—so different. Full of ‘pep’—a radio amateur!”

The girl, the dark-eyed girl whose nature was more woven of poetry than “pep”, who put morning songs into the heads of her flowers, continued to kneel “possessed”, upon a dew-silvered stone beside the rock garden, continued to stare, bewitched, at the dusky green of the early wood.

To her, the vague, sweet murmur which, like a silver cloud, enwrapped her, was not unnatural; it was part of the fairy wonder of the sunrise; of a May sun rising, dim and silvery, like a moon—like a young moon calf—behind shrubbery trees.

“Extra-ordinary!” Her earthy fingers sought each other, restlessly intertwining. “It can’t be a bee? Big, droning bumble bee—Canny Nannie, as the mountain children call it! A whole swarm of Canny Nannies! But there isn’t a bee in sight at this hour; and, if there were, ’twould have to be a glorified—glorified one for me to hear it—at this distance from the wood.”

She stumbled to her feet now, dropping the trowel almost upon the long-suffering heads of the Quaker Ladies, and wandered down a dewy pathway towards a point still nearer to the pine woods, where a gray old sundial upon its four-foot pedestal, shimmered at sunrise, like a huge primrose.

Around this U-te-yan, Flower had created her masterpiece, a ring-like bed in three-cornered sections, peopled only by horological flowers, as her books called them, those that closed sleepily at night, to open at various hours of the morning, energetically or lazily, as the case might be.

To the lovely flower clock, the blooming democracy, wild flowers, even weeds, were admitted, side by side with garden aristocrats, in order to find a flower, sometimes two or three, whose waking or sleeping habits corresponded to the numbers upon the dial’s face—to the sunny hours counted out by the pointing of the shadowy dial finger.

The flower clock had suddenly developed a tongue. The vague hum pursued her here. Pale, spring poppy, uncurling dandelion, caught it, held it—and winked at her over its mystery.

“If—if I were Pemrose now, I’d go right on into the wood, and find out where it comes from—what’s making it,” she murmured to those waking flowers. “The truth is, I’m too—t-too ‘funky’,” with a little deprecatory shrug. “That—that’s why father won’t hear of my going hiking, camping with the other girls this summer; he says I never would stand the sleeping out at night—even for a few nights. And Treff, my madcap cousin Treff, says I’d be such a ‘weer’ I’d turn them all ‘wuzzy’,”—a low laugh—“his barbarous college slang!

“He—he’s coming over to take Pemrose for a little flight, this morning, a little ‘air-hop’, as he calls it, before breakfast. I—I daren’t go up with him in his aëroplane, to hear voices among the clouds—his new radio outfit. That must be weird. But—this is weirder!” The girl’s lips curved silently. “And yet—and yet that’s not the word, either; it’s too sweet. Gracious! Now I hear it, now I d-don’t.” She stole forward a step, bending her ear towards the intoning pines.

“Now—now it’s like a wandering organ note. Oh! am I listening in on anything by radio—a new sort of radio ‘bug’?” with the faintest whiff of laughter. “Am I awake, at all? I’d give worlds—worlds—to go on into the wood, find out what it is—what’s making it. But I’ve seldom been into that pine wood, alone. Never—at this hour.”

Yet, as if that dulcet, wavy murmur, now high-pitched, now low-pitched, faint, yet audible—increasingly audible—in the still May morning, were a luminous belt, an irresistible power-belt, drawing her, Una was moving slowly—vaguely—towards the wood.

She reached the low stone wall—the dark skirts of the passive pines were only fifty feet away.

Each gray stone in that rough wall was now a ruby, reflecting the wonderful amethyst lights in the sky—wings of that mild young sun which had risen so like a moon calf.

Suddenly her hands clutched each other convulsively. Was she masquerading, too? The morning had, all in a moment, become dim; and she was the ghost of a girl standing down, in a mist, by a seashore—holding a hollow sea shell to her ear.

“I can’t—oh! I can’t be happy—unless I find out what’s doing it!”

She sobbed it aloud, now, in light, breathless, seafoam sobs—all irradiated, too—to the dewy flowers among which she stood; gay cottage tulips straggling among sweetbriars along by the wall, each red and yellow mite flashing as if, true to its legend, it had rocked a little elf in its cradle the night before.

There was not a flower in the garden whose legend was not in Una’s flower-basket brain.

This soft sea shell throbbing of the air about her, the faint, shrill piping—now, again, it was high, clear, metallic—yet strangely disembodied—fitted in with a dozen of them.

“It’s not earthly; it’s not,” she cried passionately to the tulips; “it’s t-too fairy-like—too unlike anything I ever heard ... but I can’t be happy, unless—”

A sweetbriar, herself, now, the unfinished protest a thorn in her brain, she was over the low wall—and through the dim shadow gate of the wood.

CHAPTER II
A “Roaring Buckie”

A pure, high note upon the air, a shrill, vibrating beat, as of a bird or a woodsman faintly calling! Wordlessly calling!

But it was not bird, nor woodsman. Una stood still, near a dark little pond, fringed with blue iris—May iris. She heard the birds with it.

“Goodness! can it be-e—am I dreaming that I’m Pemrose—Pemrose, ‘listening in’ on something, picking up sounds from the air with a wonderful ring—radio ring—that her father has made for her?”

The girl looked down at her forefinger; there was no deep ring, no shining cat-whisker, no shimmering crystal there.

“Or am I—am I going far beyond her, beyond any one, picking up waves, sounds, without any of these things, aërial—or ‘radio soul’?”

The dark eyes were translucent now in the dimness of the wood, with the vision that she, least practical, least plodding of girls—except where her flowers were concerned—should be the elect of heaven for a new discovery.

And as the elect of heaven cannot pause to consider, on she went, through the heavy dew silvering the brown pine needles, sparkling upon tall fiddle-head brake and cinnamon fern, occasionally upon the ebony stem of a baby maidenhair upon a bank.

The woods were unspeakable at this hour—the slowly lighting May woods. There was a little, stealing smile in them, a laugh too young, too subtle to belong to this old world, at all. Or else the world had suddenly grown very young—so young that anything might happen!

Una, herself, felt more like six than sixteen, within a near run of sixteen, as she tiptoed over the trail of a sunbeam on the needles, pausing now and again to lift one foot off the ground, lift it high and listen—after the manner of the terrier who thinks that he cannot listen satisfactorily without a paw in the air.

The high-pitched note, the elfin call vibrated off into faintness. And now, again, she seemed to be standing in mists by a seashore, holding a hollow shell, with a curve in its pipe, to her ear.

There was a throbbing of the air about her, a low reverberation, swelling into a soft intoning, like the murmur of sad sea waves.

“Goodness! Now—now the wood is a ‘roaring buckie’, as Andrew, our Scotch chauffeur, would call a big crooning shell that he’d pick up for me on the seashore. I wish Andrew were here. If only Pemrose was here!”

She had a momentary spasm of faint-heartedness—of being once more the timid Una, timid to weakness in all but the strength of her imagination. She turned to flee—to beat a retreat to the garden, to her fanciful flower clock.

But that hum was too alluring. A wood that, at daybreak, was a roaring buckie was too persuasive—appealing to every fancy she had.

She began to feel like the ghost of some poor little queer fish that had crept back into the clammy shell it once inhabited.

But she stole on.

“It seems to come from somewhere behind that log-stack,” she told herself, peering through thick brambles and umbrella-like scrub of the tenderest fairy green, at a great pile of crossed logs, their ends gleaming, golden—a shack for the haunting shadows.

But when, taking her curiosity in both hands—if her courage was too frail to be handled—she reached that shadowy stack, the mysterious music—if music it could be called—had receded.

She heard it from a recess farther on—and deeper in the wood.

And now again she wanted to turn. But, at that moment, the soul of the distant thicket, it soared, indescribably sweet, shrill, clear, like the vox angelica, the angel stop upon an organ.

“Oh-h! I m-must be dreaming!” Yet, with hands clasped—carried out of herself—Una pursued that fleeing organ-note.

It brought her in less than another minute to the pine-wood’s battleground. Trailing, khaki-colored limbs of dead boughs, dead soldiers, which had fought bravely with last winter’s record ice storm, swept the earth, withering.

But among them there were other warriors, green recruits, whose flexible youth had so battled with wind and weight of ice that the branches, twisted, deformed, bowed to earth, were still green. Sap flowed in them. They were one with the living trunk.

In some dim way the lesson of those young hemlocks went home to Una. Her lower lip sagged as she looked at them. Some part of her—some part of her—she began to feel it—was twisted by curiosity, over-wrought fancy, away from her normal self. But it was not broken off.

Suddenly—elastically—it sprang back into place: “I w-won’t go any further—after it; I won’t!” she cried aloud—and turned her head to look around.

It was then that she got the crowning shock: yet as delicate, as fairy-like—as full of glamour—as the others had been.

Something fell at her feet. A little bunch of dewy wild flowers.

Lace of the carroway, gemmed with dew, lavender wild geranium, its cheek on her shoe, a lingering woodland violet with a tear in her eye, buttercup, dandelion—ebony-stemmed maidenhair, fairy-like in its pleading.

It was beyond Una to resist flowers at her feet.

She stooped to pick them up. Was there a nettle among them? Something stung her. Stung sharply!

She was about to rub the prickling fingers across her lips, but with some thought of the poisonous weeds which, as a Camp Fire Girl she had come to know, she chafed them against her skirt—her sweater cuff—instead.

But there seemed to be no poisoner in all the innocent little bunch that rested its cheek so trustfully against her tan shoe.

Was it the tear in the violet’s eye that warned her? Was it the averted face of the drowsy dandelion, still, in the woods, half asleep? Was—oh! was there the faintest whiff about them that was not natural?

Suddenly all the daylight fled out through the tops of the trees, as it were.

And, spurning for the first time a flower, Una turned and fled with it, sobbing, tripping, stumbling, out of the wood—the intoning wood.

She reached the low, stone wall, breathless, wild-eyed.

“Preserve us a’! lassie, what’s happened to ye, the morning? Ye look ‘beglammered.’ Ye look scared; ye look sparrow-blastit.”

Never did a human voice fall more comfortingly upon a girl’s ears than the rough Scotch accents which greeted hers from the other side of that garden wall.

“Oh! Andrew, I—heard—” began Una, as strong arms lifted her over the wall.

“I h-heard—” she raved again.

But the words were blown from her lips by another hum; a hum that seemed heavenly, so loud, so cocksure, so mechanically humdrum it was—the hum of a skimming aëroplane.

“I heard—” she began for the third time—and lifted her eyes to the sky.

They were blinded by a sheet of flame.

CHAPTER III
An Awful Note

“Preserve us a’! It’s coming down. Coming down—a fire-tail! Driftin’ doomward—down’ard—an’ afire!”

Andrew’s hoarse exclamations tore at the reddened air, even as sharp horns of flame gored it, springing out from a biplane’s slipping side.

“Willa-woo! It’s side-slippin’—side-slippin’ down—afire!”

Old Andrew’s hand went to his head. The girl sank to her knees beside her waking flower clock. For her the end of the world had come, heralded by that mysterious pitch pipe in the woods.

The chauffeur looked, too, as if he heard the Big Trump.

Drifting down, a fire-tail, the aëroplane truly was; a long, thin tail feather of brightest flame streaming out from it to the little leaden fish, two-pound fish, that held its radio antenna steady in the air, kept it away from the controls—flipper and rudder controls!

Drifting down, a fire-tail, the aëroplane truly was.

Those controls were useless now. The burning plane was side-slipping from five hundred feet aloft—in spite of the efforts of the one aviator to right it before it landed.

It was but for a moment—an eternal moment—that the man and the kneeling girl watched it, before it roosted, bird of thunder, in a tree top, a noble white ash, over fifty feet tall, growing upon this side of the garden wall.

The startled tree seemed rolling up the whites of its eyes in terror—rustling the pale undersides of its crown of leaves—as the burning plane landed and stuck upon a topmost branch; and, a second earlier, the aviator, finding that he could not make a better landing before the gasolene tank blew up, jumped.

As the dark, helmeted streak shot downward, it just grazed the old sundial, which now counted one flaming hour amid its many sunny ones—and landed right in the middle of the blooming flower clock.

“Dog out!” groaned Andrew and, with the hoarse exclamation on his lips, sprang forward to catch it—break the fall.

But his long arms, his strong breast missed it.

With a soft, reverberating thud it landed in the dial-bed, right on the head of pale Miss Poppy, garden beauty, who got the flattening shock of her life at the moment.

One leg of the figure, rebounding, hit its owner, the half-stunned aviator, below the waist line, after which he, too, drooped over, lay, huddled, amid the flattened flowers.

“Treff! Oh-h! my cousin Treff. Coming to take Pemrose—up!... Is he—dead?” It seemed to Una to be the ghost of herself that put the question.

“Dead—no! My paley lamb!” Even at this moment the elderly chauffeur shot a glance of fatherly concern and tenderness at the white-lipped girl—she was to him a symbol of the daughter he had lost.

“Dead—not by a hand’s-breadth!” Andrew was kneeling by the unconscious figure, straightening it out. “But his right leg’s broke, I fear—poor lad. Hit him in the stomach, too, that blamed leg, knocked his wind out—knocked him into as-far-land! Water-r, lassie! Water! A stream near-hand there, by the wood!”

“The—w-wood!” Una stared at him feebly, making no motion to pick up the little metal cup, blistered by heat, which he unhooked from the aviator’s belt and flung towards her.

“Yes, the wood! Air ‘ye jacky-witted’? Oh! shame fer a lassie to be ginge’-bread at sech a time. Well, deil-mak’-matter! I’ll go meself.”

But it was at that moment that the “deil”, called upon, seemed to make the matter in question his own.

It was at that moment that the world went quite to perdition with a roar as, aloft in the tree top, the gasolene tank blew up.

Flaming fragments, bits of wing that seemed wrenched from imps, red imps, blazing splinters, scraps of wire and red-hot metal rained all around the girl in the terrified grass—still blanched with dew.

“Warry!” shrieked Andrew. “Down, lassie—down flat, ere the fiery off-fall hit ye!”

But that “fiery off-fall” dropped a curtain between Una and her visions of the wood. In a delirium she picked up the cup—and fled, not back to the wood, but to the nearest garden hydrant.

A fragment of linen wing, aëroplane wing, treated with the preparation that was so inflammable, swept her cheek—a scarlet butterfly. But she managed to fetch the water, her brief dizziness shriveled, like that doped wing, into a frenzy—red frenzy.

As cool drops fell upon his face, moistened his blistered lips, the boy aviator opened his eyes.

“Gosh! but this is an aw-ful note.” He blinked mockingly at motes of his wings swimming before him in the red glare, at his aëroplane fast being reduced to a blackened motor and a few twisted wires in the tree top. “Aw-ful note!” He grinned.

“Aye, it is—my cock-o’-pluck!” gurgled Andrew.

“‘Pulled a bone,’ up there—a blunder,” went on the freakish voice. “New radio outfit, shoved the power plug into wrong groove, short circuit—wires red-hot in a jiffy—spaghetti all blazing—”

“Aye, the inflam’ble, insulating clothie around the bit wires,” put in Andrew.

“Reached over for my chemicals to right of seat—” an amber-brown speck in one of the boy’s stone-gray eyes flashed—“unbalanced plane, she side-slipped, and now ... it’s three thousand for a new ‘bus’ and I can’t take a girl up this morning.”

“Pemrose,” breathed Una.

“Yes, Pemrose. Pretty—Pem!”

“Easy there—easy there, with that right leg—my cock-o’-the-clouds!” Andrew was muttering. “You’ve ‘pulled a bone’ in that, I’m thinking.”

“Ouch! Have I? You look as if I had broken every bone in your body by falling a few hundred feet.”

The aviator glared at Una—then winked his mischievous brown spot.

She could not wink back. Behind the red note of misfortune was, still, for her, the note of mystery: an echo that seemed borne from that hum-haunted wood, the tear in the violet’s eye—a nettle where no nettle was.

She lifted her stung fingers, where the prickle had faded, and looked at them.

Still—still she was “sparrow-blasted” as Andrew’s queer figure put it, blighted to the core by a trifle—kicked by a paltry sparrow, as it were.

And she had not been able to come back with even one little kick of spirit—not even so far as to venture to the safe skirts of the wood again—to the spring not fifty yards away—in the face of another’s need.

Her head drooped shamefacedly, her dark head.

There was a sudden rush of figures running, wildly running across the garden, where a patch of grass and a tree top were now ablaze: her father’s, half clad, old Sods’, others—a girl with blue dilated eyes.

“Pemrose!” She stretched out her arms, in a fair flutter as Andrew saw, then drooped over and fainted, a lily-heart, beside her flower clock.

CHAPTER IV
Fathers

“But I did hear it—father.”

“You dreamed it, girlie—up so early.”

Dwight Grosvenor, father of Una, drew his hand across his forehead; curiously enough, the rim of that high forehead looked damp—clammy as the woods at daybreak.

“Pemrose—Pemrose will believe me that I heard it; that strange sound, high piping—silvery hum. Pemrose will believe me.”

Pemrose Lorry looked in bewilderment from one to another—in the tempered glare of a bright sun-parlor.

“It m-must have been the trees,” she ventured—her glance in the direction of Una, the flower sprite, said that she was accustomed to the whims of a girl as timid as she was finespun.

“But there wasn’t any breeze, I tell you!” Una stamped deliriously. “The pines—the beeches—weren’t even stirring.”

Silent, for a moment, she gazed thoughtfully out at her May garden—at the woods, the hills, beyond it.

“’Twasn’t like anything I ever heard before,” she murmured pensively. “Not like any sound in Nature, at all! ’Twas like the fine small music Andrew speaks of that calls the—fairies—”

“Andrew!” Her father suddenly set his foot down in relief—the vague annoyance in his face melting, “I’ve a great mind to dismiss that ‘blellum.’ A fogy whose tongue drips folk lore as a rain streak drips mist! Whose stories—”

“Ending with; ‘An if a’ tales be true,’ that’s no lie,” put in Pemrose slyly, with a preoccupied glance at an adjoining room where, in splints and bandages, a young aviator, with a mocking brown speck in one gray eye, lay dreaming of his fiery “note.”

But, now, it was Una, petted child, who set her foot down, stamping it again—stamping passionately:

“Dismiss Andrew—father!” she cried. “Andrew who picked me up bodily and hurled me into the back of the car when I was out with him alone, six months ago, and another auto, recklessly driven, came right for us round a corner! Andrew who never thought of himself, at all—only of saving me! Who—who was so badly battered—got some of the glass of the wind shield into him—that he had to have....” She almost snapped her fingers at her father.

“There! There, child! Of course I didn’t mean it.” The latter patted her shoulder soothingly. “But I wish he’d shed his Scotch mists, anywhere but in your ears.”

“Well—well, Andrew had nothing to do with this,” insisted Una, after a cooling minute. “I did hear it, that funny—piping—hum. The Quaker Ladies heard it, too—” her eyebrows arching merrily—“and they thought ’twas like the ringing and singing in harebells—”

“There now, Jack! There now!” Her father threw up his hands as he called his only daughter by the name, occasionally, thrust upon her by her girl chums, as a satire upon the “betty” element in her being so strong—on her being as far as possible removed from what might, possibly, be known as a “lassie-boy.” “There you are! You’re just steeped to the ears in these flower legends, very finespun and poetic—but too airy an atmosphere for a girl like you, with an imagination that ‘works overtime.’ Oh! I’m glad of your new interest in your flowers; it overcame your—”

“‘Sleepy fivvers,’” put in Una archly. “You used to say I was as lazy as the white Star of Bethlehem, Daddy dear, and she’s a perfect dormouse, garden dormouse—the little ‘ten o’ clock.’”

“But I—I’d like to see my little girl interested in something else, too, to keep her earth-fast.” Mr. Grosvenor laid his arm tenderly around the shoulders of his only child. “How—how about learning to run one of my big cars? How about becoming interested in radio, like your friend Pemrose? Oh-h! not in listening in on a concert. The laziest lubber-sprite could do that!” with a laugh. “But in riding the whirlwind and directing the storm,” gayly, “the jumble of noises coming through the air taking you by storm. I declare if you could once gossip familiarly of vacuum tube and variometer, current and condenser; if you could pick up one sentence—one word even—from the dot and dash with which the air is forever ticking, I might—”

“What! code. Telegraphy that—that horrid teaser!”

Una curled up like the finical Star of Bethlehem before the blinding beat of a thunder shower.

“I might,” Mr. Grosvenor went on, unheeding, swinging his eyeglasses judicially, “I might, even, decide that you were stern enough stuff, hot stuff enough, to go into camp with the other girls, this summer, and not infect them all with ‘peerie-weerie’ fears—fancies.”

“To camp!” It was a little diverted scream. “Oh! father, you know I’m dying to go—go with Pemrose.”

“Well! I’m beginning to think it might really be better for you than staying here under the care of a governess, while I—while I make a flying trip, business trip, to Europe—and your mother goes to bring me back,” with a shrug. “When do you start? What are your hiking plans?” The big man of affairs, banker, financier, turned to Pemrose.

“Oh! we leave here—I leave here on the tenth of July, seven weeks from now, to pick up my Camp Fire sisters just over the Massachusetts line, where we follow the Greylock Trail until we strike the Long Trail winding right through the Green Mountains, from end to end.”

The girl paused, the lure of the Long Trail unwinding itself remotely in her blue eyes.

“But we don’t follow that, for long, either; we branch off along other mountain trails and—and little snaky, brown roads that stand on their hind legs and grope for the sky,” laughingly, “until—until—four days’ hiking and sleeping out at night—” Pemrose waved a letter, just received—“we come to Mount Pocohosette at the heart of the Green Mountains—”

“Pocohosette!” Una sprang erect and clapped her hands. “Why—why that’s where your horse-farm is, Daddy, and I’ve never—never been up there.”

“I only bought it and stocked it last year, down in the valley, the rich bottom lands at the foot, and put a ‘canny’ farmer in charge of my Morgan thoroughbreds.” Mr. Grosvenor laughed. “Well, go on with your program,” he looked at Pemrose.

“The mountain is very wild, so I understand—adventure by the yard!” beamed the blue-eyed girl. “A—a rocky Balcony, half way up, where you can stand on the lip of nothing and look down!”

“Oh-h! lovely,” shivered Una; for her such a breakneck blank had a fascination—fancy could always people it.

“The Guardian—Guardian of our Camp Fire Group hopes to rent some old farmhouse for a week or two.” Pemrose glanced at her letter.

“How about a month or two—eh?” The fluttering eyeglasses in Mr. Grosvenor’s hand reflected, now, the deepest twinkle in the eye above them—is there any role more gratifying to a “high-powered” humanitarian than to play fairy godfather to a group of girls? “If—if I might suggest,” he said slowly, “there’s a jolly nice sort of camp—pine-log cabin—there already, on the breezy sidehill, just a mile and a half above the horse-farm, which I used for hunting quarters, before I was seized with the passion for raising Morgan horses. If your Group will accept the loan of it ... there, I’ll write to the Guardian to-day.”

“Oh-h! Mr. Grosvenor....” The light fairly swooned in Pemrose’s blue eyes.

“And if this daughter of mine will only strike a bargain on the dot and dash ‘teaser’ just to show that she isn’t entirely such stuff as dreams are made of,” with a laugh, “I might have radio installed for you—so that you can, now and again, tune in on a concert, while camping on the edge of nothing.”

“Boys—boys say that they have a respect for any ‘O. G.: Old Girl’, radio slang, who can master code—the ‘crutch’, as they call it—because she has to set her back to the wall to do it,” put in Pemrose roguishly. “And then—” her hand went up, in excitement, to her dimpling chin—“we wouldn’t have to depend altogether on my magic ring, radio ring, for any—any little gleanings from the air.”

“Magic ring—humph!” The fairy godfather’s eyebrows were lifted—just a little superciliously. “What can you pick up with a gewgaw like that—toy set like that? Firing pellets at the moon, eh?” he winked quizzically.

“You forget—you forget that my father is an inventor, sir, and that he has invented—discovered—a new crystal—‘radio soul’—which is an amplifier as well as a detector!” Pemrose’s back was up and to the wall now, her blue eyes flashing. “He—oh, he stumbled upon it while experimenting for my ring. We all know that crystals up to this time have been crude affairs,” vouchsafed the girlish radio fan, her chin in the air.

“A one-stage amplifier, I suppose—as well as a detector, sorting out sounds from the air!” Mr. Grosvenor gasped.

“Oh, by George! child, I did forget that your father is the archwizard who has bombarded the moon with something more ponderable than pellets. If any one can achieve the impossible—”

“He could have made me a ring with just an ordinary galena crystal, or silicon,” murmured Pemrose shyly, as the great man paused, “with which I could have picked up waves—sounds—not very far off. But—with this—my two hundred feet of aërial out to a tree, my spiked heel in the mud,” laughingly, “early in the morning, especially, I can—can glean snatches of everything within five or six miles; further—further, if it’s dot an’ dash—a powerful station sending!”

“Oh, by Jove! I can fancy you standing round, out-of-doors, after daybreak, with your shining halo—headpiece—on.” The tall man threw back his shoulders, with a chuckle. “Well! maybe, you’ll be the woman with power on her head who can ride Revelation.” He winked. “Revelation, son of Revel, Morgan bay, fifteen hands high, good-natured, well-trained—bridle-wise—but needing a rider with ‘pep’ to handle him!”

“I rode with father all last summer.” The “pep” leaked out of Pemrose’s whisper into her red cheeks now—the sunburst of luck was too suffusing.

“Oh! there will be eight or nine horses, I expect, out in the Long Pasture, on the sidehill. You girls can take turns in riding. Revel, gentle little mother-horse—a baby could ride her—I meant to have her brought down here this summer, for Una.”

“And—and I can ride her, up there, father!” Una flung her arms around him—a clinging vine. Suddenly, however, she raised her head, as if afraid that she might be riding Revel in a false habit. “But I did hear-r it, father,” she persisted, “that silvery murmur—hum. And, oh! that wasn’t all—only you’re so unbelieving. While I was listening, wondering—wondering whether I could be strung on wires,” half laughingly, half fearfully, “picking up sounds by radio, something fell at my feet. A little bunch of wild flowers! I touched them. Something stung me.”

Again she held up her slim fingers and looked at them curiously.

“Well, it left ‘nor mark nor burn’, child,” chaffed her father, catching the hand and examining it, too. “Bah! Some boy playing a trick on you—playing on a Jew’s harp! Don’t go into the wood again so—early—”

“It wasn’t! It wasn’t!” Passionately the vine tore itself from its pedestal and maintained its own independent conviction.

But as Una caught the cloud, the vague cloud, descending again upon her father’s face, her soft flower-heart capitulated.

“Well! all right, Daddy, if you want me to think that, I will—I’ll try to,” she pledged. “You’re the dearest prince of a father ever was—and I wouldn’t exchange you even for Pemrose’s Wizard,” with a little moue, a little grimace in the direction of the other girl, who had turned aside and was looking out through the plateglass panels towards the mountains.

“There—I haven’t done your hair this morning, yet.”

Una pressed her father into a low wicker chair, perched upon his knee and began twisting the dark, graying locks around her finger.

Pemrose, over her shoulder, watched them smilingly. She had no cause for envy, she who wore a Wizard’s ring.

“Revel and Revelation!” she murmured beatifically. “But why-y did he look so upset if he, really, didn’t believe that Una heard anything unusual in the wood ... now, that’s what I’d like to know!”

CHAPTER V
The Magic Carpet

“Well—‘Jack!’ Hullo, Unie! Haven’t you said good-bye to your flower clock yet? Good-bye for six weeks to your flower clock! Oh-h! I’m so excited over the start I just don’t know what to do with myself.”

Pemrose Lorry danced down the dew-blanched steps of the Grosvenor mansion, at Lenox, just a little earlier, as clock and dial hand went, than the “mornie” hour at which Una had descended them, seven weeks before, with electrifying results.

The sun was in the act of rising, no May moon-calf now, but a summer Sultan, proclaiming that July was here: Moon of Thunder, but moon of summer idylls, too, of wonderful shadows in the triple greens of brooks, of cardinal flowers fairly “smashing” across the eye with their joy of color in mountain passes—the ideal month for campers.

The garden, the great, terraced garden, seemed to have paled a little in July heat from its flush of June joy.

White flowers predominated—or light ones.

But, here and there, blue larkspur raised its dewy spires, one with the dancing tint of the girl’s eyes.

Gladioli and hollyhocks, tall pages of the rising sun, in their salmon-pink and crimson, bent to awaken their neighbor, the yellow tiger lily, one of the flowers admitted to the lovely democracy of the sundial bed, the flower clock, because it closed sleepily at night, to open at a rather late hour of the morning—as would the dreaming carnation.

Una—Una was saying good-by to that dewy flower clock now, for which she had won a Camp Fire honor for creation—original creation—or if the idea, old as the hills as all ideas are, had been in the “flower-bab” brain of some old botanist, a couple of hundred years before, it had been born anew, impromptu, in hers: she had risen early and watched late, to work it out.

Old Sods, who spurned daylight saving, going by any but the Lord’s time, established custom, had repaired the pretty floral clock after the rude shock of an aviator’s crashing down upon the heads of the sleeping flowers.

Like Andrew, the contradictory old gardener, whose name fitted like a glove, had an affection for the white flower of a girl whose hobby it was!

He had risen early, on the morning after the “fiery note”, had deported sleeping flower families from other beds and wild flowers from their rustic haunts, to build up the new democracy.

But the ruined ash-tree he could not repair. Reduced almost, to a bare trunk, it could no longer roll up the whites of its eyes, when ruffled—show only the pale undersides of its crown of leaves—or it might well have done so, this morning, over a miracle which presently took place with its assistance.

“Hullo—Unie! Unie-Wunie! Well! isn’t the last long farewell to your flower clock said?” cried Pemrose again, dancing down the silvery garden path—her whole warm being simply on the fire-edge of vacation joy. “Oh-h! this is a wonderful day to start for camp. A little ‘chilly-cold’, as Sods would say! But that makes it all the better for hiking. And to-night—to-night we may be sleeping out by the Long Trail! Oh! aren’t you just wild over it, too?”

There was an answering shout, rather faint, from the neighborhood of the dim old sundial, within a stone’s throw of the wood.

“I expect she’s watering the ‘clocksie’ with a final tear,” said Pemrose to herself. “Well! if she is feeling rather blue over saying good-bye to her flowers—goodbye for this year to most of them—on top of the good-bye to her father and mother when they started for Europe yesterday, I—I’m going to spring a diversion on her.... Hi there, Jack,” she called exultingly, “don’t you want the big end of a sensation, a sunrise sensation; don’t you want to listen in on my ring; so early in the morning as this we ought to be able to pick up something, before the sounds ‘dim off’ with bright daylight—there are some strong sending stations near?”

Una rose, a dewy sprite, from the neighborhood of her flower clock.

“Why are the sound waves stronger at night—or in the early morning?” she asked.

“Search me!” The radio amateur shrugged her shoulders gayly. “Father did venture some reason for it, something about ‘molecules’, but it didn’t stick!” She tapped her forehead with a ringed forefinger. “Anyhow, he said it was only an ‘out-shot’, merrily; that every day somebody was making a new out-shot in the direction of radio, as he did when he discovered this new crystal, more wonderful than galena or silicon, or any of the detectors which people have been using, as a ‘radio soul’, up to the present.”

That listening soul was in the girl’s eyes now, her larkspur eyes. She swung the radio head-phone, artistically carved, or engraved, with Camp Fire symbols, connected by an enameled wire with a minute joint in the deep ring upon her forefinger—a ring whose light-hued bakelite setting shimmered like amber in the primrose dawn.

“Besides, at this hour, we’ll have the atmosphere to ourselves—or nearly so—so that we may come in on something that’s broadcasted from some powerful station in town,” she added hopefully, “or we may even steal in on some fashionable amateur near by, in some one of the big camps or houses along the lake! Some radio fiend, with a costly set, who is so crazy over the new game that he has sat up all night over it and is keeping on into daylight ... with my spiked heel in the soft ground of the stream’s bank over there, by the—wood—”

“The wood!” echoed Una fearfully.

“Yes, you haven’t been ‘coming in’ on any funny murmur, uncanny murmur, there, this morning; have you? I believe you’re a brand-new sort of radio ‘bug’ yourself,” chaffingly.

“No—I haven’t.” The dark-eyed girl shivered, white-cheeked, in the dew. “If I did—if I ever should again—I’d have to try to find out what made it—though—”

“No, you wouldn’t. You’d run to earth—to Sods. I know you! Well! come along then.” Pemrose impetuously seized her friend’s hand. “With my heel in the magic carpet—the wet moss, over there—and my two hundred feet of antenna, fine, insulated wire strung out to the poor old ash-tree, we ought to be able to get results—some results, at this hour.”

“Well! you’ll promise to let me listen in, too, you won’t hold on to those magic ear-phones all the time yourself? I know you!” Una glanced at the dangling “halo”, attached to the ring, yielding as she generally did when Pemrose pulled the strings.

“But we’ll have to hurry, we won’t have much time,” she said, “as we leave here before seven, in the big car with Andrew, to pick up the other campers at Greylock village. We haven’t had breakfast yet; and, oh! are we quite sure that we have everything in our packs?” with the tremor of a novice.

“Everything—ducky! Including the last straw!” Pemrose was toying with her ring. “The rolls of colored paper for our flower costumes, the Wild Flower Pageant—your birthday, in August!” she murmured dreamily, really thinking of those radio “fiends” who might, at the moment, be handling their last few messages before broad daylight—on whom she might steal in. “We ought to have sent them up with the camp stores and extra clothing to the horse-farm—those rolls. When it comes to the last long mile—”

“Pshaw! they don’t weigh any more than two pinheads,” laughed Una, swaying like “white weed”, herself, her dark eyes, like her flowers, “dressing themselves up in gold light.” “And the farmers’ wives, their little children, they have so little in their lives!”

“Um-m. There may be very few ‘natives’ to admire us,” Pemrose was still showing off the ring to the sunrise, “unless—unless you include quack-natives,” merrily, “Treff and his father, who have a camp about ten miles from the horse-farm.”

“Poor Treff!” She dimpled. “Didn’t we have a time teasing him into getting well after his awful note? I believe if the world came to an end to-morrow that boy would call it a ‘note’.... But I like a boy who has a brown speck in one gray eye, just one—his fun-mill!”

“Wonder if he’s got a new ‘bus’ yet?” speculated Una.

“And whether he’s ‘pulling any more bones’ with his radio outfit?” laughed the amateur. “Well! I’ll tell you what, I’m going to loop my aërial round the old ash-tree, this morning, just to make up for what it suffered through him!”

And now was the moment when that noble white ash, upon the garden side of the wall, might have rolled up the whites of its eyes, ruffled the pale lining of its leaves—if it had any left to ruffle—as a girl, clambering up, looped her aërial, her shining wire, as loftily as she could around the blackened trunk.

“Eh! What’s the merricle now?” grunted old Sods to the waking flowers, as he peeped, from a distance, over that garden wall.

And they nodded that they did not know, that they might be still dreaming, half open, as they saw that girl bounding lightly back over the wall to the brook’s edge, to slip a steel creeper upon her heel, the same that a girl might strap upon her daring heel, in icy weather—and don a listening halo.

“You—you’re not going any further into the wood?” Una probed the pines with glances, half fearful, half fascinated.

“No-o, ‘Peerie-Weerie?’ How are you going to stand sleeping out by the Long Trail to-night, if you don’t ‘side-dish’ your fancies?” Pemrose tilted the halo rakishly askew upon her little dark head. “Just look at the ring!” she gasped. “Isn’t it a winner?”

A winner it truly was; fraught every inch with glamour, the divine glamour of ingenuity.

“Four hundred turns of the finest hairwire wound round it, in this bobbin-like groove! Isn’t that—that elfin, if you like it?” The blue eyes danced. “And this ‘atomy’ lever which moves the cat-whisker to touch the crystal—father’s new crystal that takes the shine out of the others! And the miniature ‘bind-posts’, joints—three—one hooked on to my ground connection,” the amateur displayed her heel, “another to my aërial—the third to my hearing halo; father—oh! was there ever anybody like him—” it was a transfigured sob—“worked over these magnetic ear-phones, too, to make them extra sensitive.”

“I wish—if only they could pick up a little speech—music—for us,” murmured Una, half her faint-heart in the wood, “if—if ever so dimly—faintly!”

“Speech—music—before six o’clock in the morning! You don’t ask much!” scoffed Pemrose. “I don’t suppose we’ll even get a twitter of telephony—the twitter of an early bird.” She laughed excitedly. “Listen—listen to that early bird, up there, in the tallest pine,” pushing the ear-phones up, “do you know what he’s saying—that brown thrasher? A brown thrasher it is! He’s chanting advice to the farmers:

“‘Shuck it, shuck it, sow it, sow it,

Plow it, plow it, hoe it, hoe it.’

“And he doesn’t know that he’s away behind the times with his old song!” Pemrose’s black brows were lifted archly. “That the air is just full of advice ‘stuff’ about him to which he’s deaf: ships, far out at sea, signaling reports about the weather, local Weather Bureaus sending in radio reports to headquarters—perhaps, we may come in on some of that! Oh! was there ever—ever, before, a time when it was so much better to be a girl than a bird?”

Fairly translated, now, in her excitement, that favored girl was selecting a nice, wet, oozing spot in the moss of the magic carpet into which to dig her heel—that fairy carpet more wonderful than ever was genii’s for transporting the one who stepped on it, thus, afar—so far as one sense was concerned, at least.

“Good ground connection!” she murmured. “That ought to bring results. Of course anything we do pick up will be awfully faint, just dot and dash, easier to glean—and in which two-thirds of the messages are sent out. Hus-sh!”

Deeper she ground her heel into the sparkling moss—Pemrose Lorry, radio amateur. She straightened her halo. She moved the bronze cat-whisker to touch the crystal and stood a statue as, the magic ring “rubbed”, those highly sensitive ear-phones became active—began to glean from the morning air.

“Do you ... are you—oh! are you—getting—anything?” Una watched her, hands clasped.

“Hush!” frowned the radio fan. “Your—your hor-rid racket!”

“I didn’t make any. Needn’t be so peeved!... You have—have to make allowance for radio ‘fiends’; they’re savage if you disturb them!” murmured Una mischievously to the pines—her interest was beginning to be concentrated on the experiment now.

Five minutes passed. A finger was pointed at her, shooting her straight through the heart with thrill.

“Are you ... oh! are you ...” she ventured again.

“I—am.”

“Wha-at?” in a bewitched whisper.

“Just a little dot an’ dash—faint ticking—weather station in town, couple of miles off—three maybe—but I could—understand.”

She gave her hand to the sunrise, the inventor’s daughter, the new crystal flashing like a diamond. Never did queen of the middle ages, never did Begum of the Indies dream of such a ring upon her forefinger.

“L-let—me. I have been studying code a little, since father—”

Una’s lips barely fluttered upon the whisper, like a flower.

And now—now the halo was upon her dark head. She was listening in through the other girl’s ring, through the other girl’s heel, through the other girl’s heart, as it were, to the faint, faint murmur in the air.

But a smattering of code could make nothing of that swooning tick.

Again Pemrose transferred the headpiece.

And now time as well as space was annihilated—even the approaching departure forgotten.

Una began to feel as if a Meg-of-the-many-feet, a centipede, was stealing down her back, but its hundred little feet were silver-pointed—tipped with light.

“I—got—it!” Again a finger was pointed at her—not the ring finger, that was held out level. “Not—not dot an’ dash, this time: whisper—speech, I got it; one amateur asking another—‘play a few holes of golf—before breakfast!’” Never had a girl’s eyebrows gone so high in the world of wonder, of mischief, before, as those black ones lifted over the blue, listening eyes—for every organ of the body was now “listening in.”

“Word here, word there—repeated an’ repeated—I got it. B-but what’s this? Never—never singing, before six o’clock in the morning. So-o faint! Oh! it seems—seems to come from the far edge of nothing.”

And to the “far edge of nothing” Pemrose Lorry listened, every pulse an ear, until her hearing, so trained in this new aërial communication, began to pick up syllables—words—faint as far moon-shine, indeed, yet half-clear upon the air:

“Night ... done, stars ... to rest,

Perhaps in soft, white clouds ... a nest,

Among your—dewy flowers....”

“Oh! l-let me!” shivered Una, half-sobbing—transfigured sobs.

Mechanically Pemrose transferred the headpiece.

“Among ... dewy flowers ... see you stand,

You do not know ... in my hand!”

“I hate it! Oh-h, I hate it—it.” Passionately the other girl tore the phones from her ears. “It’s like the hum—” the little stand in her right dark eye was fixed in fear—“makes me feel queer—creepy—I don’t know why!” She began to cry. “I don’t want to listen in! I’ll—never—”

“Nonsense!” said Pemrose sharply. “Only some amateur—crazy amateur—singing into a horn at a near-by station, quite near-by, that’s ‘going strong’!”

But, for a moment, her bright face had looked “sparrow-blasted”, too.

Far away, in the silence, a fox barked.

CHAPTER VI
A Gentleman

It was the “yamf” of a fox again. The sun was high now. The brown byroad stretched away like a ribbon between the fringing woods that rose on either side of it, screening the mountain’s grandeur, shadowing the path of the gliding automobile.