It was an exciting situation.

Pemrose, who like the enthroned daredevil liked excitement, if she was warm enough to enjoy it, had not hoped for quite such a tidbit when she came to the mountains,–at least, short of the little Thunder Bird’s record-breaking flight.

“Oh! I did so want to run across him again. I do so long to thank him! Why–why! we might never have escaped from that awful wreck, got out of the zero water, but for him, Una.” The blue eyes were wet now, frankly wet, bluebells by a mountain brook–the little bursting brooklet of feeling within.

“I–I’d like to thank him, too!” gushed Una, with that little fixed star twinkling most radiantly in one dark eye, the slight stand which characterized it only at intense moments when feeling reached indefinite altitudes. “Oh! how glad I am now,” she ran on breathlessly, “that we made Andrew leave the car down in a garage at the Pinnacle’s foot and bring us up here for a sort of picnic supper,” sending a sidelong glance scouting round for the tall, capped figure of the grizzled chauffeur who, a brief ten years before, had been driving his “laird’s” car upon Ben Muir, a heathery mountain of his native Highlands.

Trustworthy as day, a capable driver and zealous Church Elder, he was one to whose guardianship Una Grosvenor, the apple of her parents’ eye, might safely be intrusted with her visiting friend while her father golfed and her mother lunched and played bridge in complacent peace of mind.

“Oh! she’s all right with Andrew; he’s such a true-penny!” was her father’s dictum. “Safer with him, up here, than she would be with maid or housekeeper! And, after that shock in the winter, the doctor wants her to be out of doors among the hills morning, noon and night–practically all the time, if she can!”

Ah! so far, so good. But just at this unprecedented moment of excitement Andrew, the true-penny, had encountered another Scot, who emigrated before he did, and was breezily “clacking” with him at some distance from where two breathlessly expectant girls gazed down upon the black top of the nickum’s head–and at his wheeling shoulders in the great armchair.

“Oh–oh! there he goes–see–curling up his legs, drawing up his feet carefully, turning in the seat–standing up!” cried Pemrose, all Rose at this crisis, prematurely blooming, as if it were June, not May, as she stood on tiptoe to meet a dramatic moment, reveling in the thought that the daredevil did not know what a surprise awaited him on top here, what a welcome–heart-eager gratitude.

She bit her lip, however, upon the impulsive cry, for she saw two girls, younger than herself, with a ten-year-old boy, who had been watching the climber’s feat from a near-by mound, turn and look at her curiously.

They were evidently acquainted with the daring usurper of the Devil’s Chair.

For, having drawn up his legs until his knees touched his chin, then raised himself to a standing position on the grim stone seat, cautiously turning, his strong fingers gripping the granite chair-arms, when his back was to the precipice beneath and his face almost touching the twelve-foot, well-nigh perpendicular rock which he had to climb, he actually had the hardihood to wave his hand to them.

“Now–now comes the ‘scratch’!” he shouted laughingly. “I’m going to hook on to that ‘nick’ in the rock, there, just over my head, and draw myself up. Had to ‘shy’ it coming down–for fear it would catch in my clothing.”

“Didn’t I–didn’t I t-tell you it was him?” burst forth Pem, with all the vehemence of a little spring torrent, in Una’s ear as she caught the ring of the chaffing voice which had railed at the Fates for “wishing a wreck on” to unoffending youth, and was so boldly challenging them now.

And just as free and frank in her girlish gratitude as that torrent bubbling impulsively out of the earth, when the nickum reached the crest again, she sprang forward, hand outstretched, to meet him. Her eyes, blue as the little fairy blossoms of the star-grass now, were breeze blown in the meadow of her gladness.

It was nothing–nothing not to know the name of one who had saved you from death, she thought.

By the rescue you knew him!

And he knew her!Those eyes, those keen, girlish eyes which had looked through the spectroscope a hundred times, in her father’s laboratory, into the remote mystery of that far-away upper air could not be deceived.

By the sudden, startled heave of his shoulders, whose defiant shrug she remembered so well, by the quick intake of breath, as its climbing hiss sharpened to a whistle–almost a rude whistle in the excitement of the feat he had just performed–by the little stare of breathless surprise, of quandary, in his dark eyes, glowing like Una’s, he recognized her ... and passed her by.

Recognized her as the girl whose “pep” he had complimented for putting another’s life before her own–and didn’t want to have anything more in life to say to her!

Well! the Heavens fell upon the Pinnacle as Pem drew back–annihilated.

Snubbed for the first time in all her blue-sky life–and by a boy, too!To be sure, indeed, the nickum, his glance darting past her to Una, had gone by with a slight inclination of his bare head that was a stony bow.

To be sure, when one of the girls of his acquaintance questioned him about the view from the Devil’s Seat, there was a sort of creak in his voice as he answered:

“It’s–a–corker! You can see away off: far-rms, lakes, all the other mountains–Mount Greylock, too, in the distance! But–but it’s a cat’s-foot climb down–there!” breaking off breathlessly, as if feeling were making a cat’s-paw of him.

“Oh! you can really see Mount Greylock! As far away as that! Well! I’m going to try-y it, too,” ventured one of his girlish companions whose age was fourteen. “Summer and winter, I’ve done a lot of climbing, up here!”

“You try it! Any girl try sitting in the Devil’s Chair! Why! there isn’t a girl living who could do it,” crowed the gray-shouldered youth: and now his tones were lordly, as if he were picking himself up after an inner tumble.

“Hey! Is that so?” Pem–over-hearing–ground the words between her teeth.

She hissed the last word at the nickum’s back, as he halted at some distance with his companions.

“Una! I’m going to do it,” she panted. “I’m going to slide down that rock there, turn round and sit in the Chair–then draw myself up again, as he did. I’ve got on sneakers. I know I can! I’ve done some breakneck climbing with father–yes! and with my Camp Fire Group, too.”“I–I’ll give you all my marshmallows that we brought with us to toast at an open fire, if you do!... Yes! and one of my two little thistle pins–pebble pins–that Andrew and his wife brought me from Scotland, when they went home last year, if you do.... Wasn’t he just hor-rid? He didn’t want to speak to us–to know us!”

Una’s face flamed upon the bribe, and was so pretty lit by that fixed star in the eye, that it must have been a zero-hearted nickum who could turn his back upon it.

“Hold my hat,” said Pem: if she had been a boy, the tone would have meant: “Hold my coat while I thrash him!”

Unhesitatingly she stepped to the precipice-brink and measured the distance to that Devil’s Chair very coolly and critically with her eye.