“Oh! I’m so glad–just so glad I don’t know what to do with myself–that those experiments with the lesser Thunder Bird, the smaller sky-rocket, which won’t make the four-day trip to Mammy Moon, but will only fly up a couple of hundred miles, or so, and drop its golden egg, the diary, to tell you where that blank No Man’s Land of space begins will still be carried out this spring from the top of old Mount Greylock. If they had been given up, it would have broken my heart–so it would!”

It was evening now, late evening, in the dining room of the professor’s home, looking upon the green University campus.

The girl with the grafted Rose in her name, grafted on to a foreign stem, was pouring out her father’s after dinner coffee–and her own full heart, at the same time. “Ouch!” She shivered a little. “I don’t like to think of that ‘diddering’ cold of empty space; not–not since the train-wreck. I’m like the big boy who saved us then, and was so jolly; I’m out for excitement if I’m warm enough to enjoy it, eh?”

“Humph! Well, here’s somebody who’s willing to take a chance on carrying his warmth, his fun too, with him into space.”

The professor laughed as he drew a sheet of thick letter paper, broad and creamy, from his pocket.

“Oh! is it somebody else ... you don’t mean to say it’s another hotspur applying for a passage in the real Thunder Bird when you start the big rocket off for the moon, eh?”

The girl glanced over her father’s shoulder.“Yes, one more candidate for lunar honors! And this one is the limit for a Quixote. Young, too, I should say!” Again Toandoah’s deep chant of laughter buoyed his daughter’s treble note, as he began to read:

“Humph! Mr. T. S.! ‘With your permission,’ where do you write from?” Pemrose bent low over the primrose sheet. “Oh! from Lightwood. Now,–now where is that, Daddy?”“There’s a little, one-horse village of the name among the Berkshire Mountains, not far from fashionable Lenox.” Her father smiled.

“Lenox! How lovely! Why! that’s where you and I are going to stay–stay for a week or two–isn’t it, father, en route for Greylock and the experiments. You know the Grosvenors have invited us–and they have a wonderful old place up there. Una’s mother is carrying coals these days–” Pemrose winked–“coals of penitence in her heart for ever having sneered at your invention, Daddy.”

“Hot ones, are they? Well! I wish she’d hasten and spill them out before she reaches Lenox.” The inventor chuckled. “Let me see, she was born there, I believe, at their mountain home–yes, and one or other of her brothers, too.”

“Ho! Was it–was it the unicorn; I–I mean the oddity; the Thunder Bird’s rival for all-l that money?” The girlish hand shook now as it wielded the coffee-pot. “Oh, dear! wouldn’t his horn be exalted if he never came back?” With a droll little catch of the breath. “Una and I are as friendly as ever now, Dad,” ran on the girlish voice, hurriedly leading off from the neighborhood of the will. “And she’s to be taken out of school early, when we go, because she has been so nervous since the train-wreck. So chummy we are–oh, as chummy as in the old days when we measured eyelashes and she laughed at my ‘chowchow’ name!” The speaker here shot the bluest of glances through those twinkling lashes at their reflection in a neighboring teapot, older than Columbia herself.

“Chowchow, indeed! It just suits you, that compound. There’s a vain elf in you somewhere, Pem, that sleeps in the shadow of the Wise Woman.”

“Maybe–maybe, there’s a nickum! That’s Andrew’s word, Andrew’s word for an imp, a tomboy. He’s the Grosvenors’ Scotch chauffeur, you know, who talks with a thistle under his tongue. Well! nickum, or not!” the girl was a rosy weathercock again. “I–I’m just dying to get up to the mountains, to climb the Pinnacle, the green Pinnacle, that rough, pine-clad hill, with Una–and sit in the Devil’s Chair!”

“What! My Wise Woman sitting in the Devil’s Chair! Why! ’twould take a daredevil nickum, indeed, to do that.”

The inventor threw up his hands, laughing again, as he beat a retreat to his hardware den, his laboratory, where there was ever a magnet, potent by night or day, to draw him back.

Yet when still another six weeks had passed and Pemrose, with all the green world of spring in her heart, stood, breathless, upon that Lenox pinnacle–a pine-clad mountainette some thirteen hundred feet above sea-level–lo and behold! there was a nickum sitting coolly in the Devil’s Chair.A brazen feat it was! For that Lucifer’s throne was a curved stone seat, a natural armchair, rudely carved out of the precipice rock, more than a dozen sheer feet beneath the crest where she stood with Una–Andrew of the thistly tongue having driven the two girls up to the foot of the peak on this the third day after their arrival, with the May flies, amid the mountains.

“A nickum–oh! a nickum, indeed–a daredevil nickum–sitting in the Devil’s Armchair, with his feet dangling down–down over the deep precipice! Look!”

Pemrose pirouetted in excitement at the sight.

“Yes, and, goodness! he seems to be enjoying it, too. Not turning a hair. Oh! if ’twere I–I should be so-o dizzy.”

With the more timid cry in her pulsing throat, and that little appalled stand, a star of mingled consternation and admiration beaming, bewitched, in one dark eye, Una turned from the spectacle–turned, shuddering, from the hundred-and-odd feet of unbroken abyss extending from the nickum’s knickerbockered legs, nonchalantly swinging, to an awed grove of young pine trees, rock-ribbed and bowlder-strewn, far below.

“Oh! I don’t want to look at him,” she cried cravenly. “How will he–ever–climb back up here again?”

“Tr-rust him–” began Toandoah’s daughter, then suddenly clutched her throat, her widening eyes as round, as bright, as staringly blue as the mountain lupine already opening upon the world’s surprises, in sunny spots, among the hills.

Those eyes were now fastened to the back of the nickum’s close-cropped head, to his broad shoulders in a rough, gray sweater, noting a certain “bully” shrug of those shoulders at the surrounding landscape, as if, monarch of all he surveyed, he yet felt himself a usurper in his present seat.

“Something rotten–something rotten in the State of Denmark!” crowed Pemrose softly. “I wonder if he’s getting that off now? Una! Una! It’s He ... He!”

“Who? Who?”

“The man–the boy–who saved us after the train-wreck ... without whom we mightn’t be here–now! Ah-h!” was the softly tremulous answer, as the blue eyes danced down the rock, with frankest recognition, friendliest expectation, to that daring, nonchalant nickum figure, now coolly drawing up its toes for a climb.