  In a gray bunk of a mountain camp a girl lay, like death. The pink flush of dawn stealing through a small square that stood for a window brushed her face, like a wing—and only made it more pallid. Near by a woman stood staring at her; a woman whose transient likeness to herself, as the light caught her face, too—her too brilliant dark eyes—made her a thousand times the more terrible. “Don’t shrink from me—honey,” said a voice whose scorching wildness had a low hiss in it, like the hiss of flame around green wood in a fire. “Don’t—oh! don’t turn away from me; I have been trying to draw you to me for so long—influencing you, influencing you at a distance; some day I knew I would get hold of you—have you to myself, to myself, for a while—no matter how your parents might guard you.... And now—now—I have!” The eager flame died down; and the poor green wood in the bunk, lay charred by it, until the very sap in its veins seemed dried up—life blood, as it were, ceased to flow. “I have hovered near you—near you for a year, precious—ever since I came back to these mountains, my own hills where I was born.” The woman’s figure, so pitiably “hulgy-backed”, round-shouldered, came to the edge of the bunk. The kidnapped girl twitched, twitched spasmodically—a quiver only noticeable in her toes and in the dark, curly eyelashes flickering upward for a second to the red, spotted handkerchief around her captor’s neck, but so full of horrified repugnance that the latter involuntarily retreated a step. “I—I came to know your ways; I would watch for you early in the morning on the edge of the wood near your home—which used to be my home until your mother turned me out; but now—now I’m even with her!” It was a bitter snap. “I watched you among your flowers, dew-wet flowers—and wondered whether you had ever heard of me.... No-o, I suppose you didn’t,” sorely, “but I’m your Aunt, Una, your father’s sister—half sister, I suppose, the world would say—but I loved him as a brother and could influence him—the powers I had!” The woman’s dark eyes flashed. Una shrank flatter—flatter—until in her abject terror she became one with the wooden bunk. “But you, when you were a baby, a mite of a dark-eyed child, I loved best of all—and your mother, she feared my influence over you. She turned me out. I have had no home for fourteen years. I have been lonely—hungry. But—always—I have dreamed of you; that, some day, I would have you again, quite to myself—darling!” It was a hungry sob. “But I suppose people will say I was mad—mad—to carry you off, like this, and because of means—means I have taken to try and draw you to me—” “You—ar-re—mad,” whispered something in Una—and her flesh crept. “I knew your parents would not let me see you, but distance—distance is no longer such a barrier, when a whisper can cross it.” In the wildness of the woman’s look there was now a mixture of practical shrewdness, normal enthusiasm, as her glance roved to what Una, in a lifeless way, perceived was the “shack corner” of the cabin—radio instruments upon a bench, or shelf, nailed to the log wall. “Oh! I’m not behind any amateur in that art,” said the Little Lone Lady, with a flash of cunning, as if she had made use of it a good deal. “Sometimes, as I rode near and far among the mountains, visiting people—poor and rich—who wished to see me, I talked to you by radio. Occasionally—occasionally I sang to you, as I did when you were a little baby, sometimes—sometimes from a station quite near your home.” The woman opened the door now to let in the daylight. Her eyes went feverishly to the sky. Her wild croon floated back to Una: “Uk-k!” It was an unintelligible cluck from Una; the little “stand” in her right dark eye was weirdly set, in even blanker terror than before—she lay in the bunk as in a coffin. Her captor looked at her; and the half-tender, whimsical smile which had played about her lips, blew away like an erratic breeze. “But—but this isn’t my camp—” she tried to straighten her round shoulders—“and—and when you’ve had some refreshment, honey, we’ve got to ride on—on—your own horse is here—to where you and I can be together—together—hidden for a while.... The Gypsies would hide us, their encampment is over on Bald Mountain,” she muttered, speaking aloud to herself, as she fidgeted round the cabin. “I’ve done favors for them.... And search parties will look for her on the other little mountain first, anyhow, if they suspect me, at all,” she added, with that flash of needle-nosed cunning before which Una’s cold flesh crept. The woman was ferreting out a water bucket, as she spoke, moving, indeed, as if the camp, a pine-log cabin, was not hers, although she had made her own of it and kindled a fire there. It belonged as she knew, to two young city men, college professors, who had locked their cabin before going off on a fishing trip, to prevent amateurs from meddling with the transmitter and receiver of a very powerful sending station with which they experimented overseas. Somehow, however, “Magic Margot,” with the cleverness of a burglar, had found entrance through a connecting woodshed, the night before, because she saw that the half-drugged girl whom she was holding on her horse could go no further. “No! Even if the farmers should suspect me, at all—connect me with her disappearance,” she flashed a sidelong glance at Una, “they would not be likely to look for her here first, on Speckle Mountain—Little Speckle Mountain,” muttering more vehemently as she stirred up the fire on the hearth and lifted the bucket. “Speckle Mountain ... Little Speckle Mountain!” Una was not distinctly conscious of hearing anything; and yet the words sank into her subconsciousness, as she lay perfectly passive, almost a dead girl, while her captor opened the door, with a final: “The spring is some distance off, dear one. But I shan’t be very long. Try to sleep a little—before we ride on.” She was closing the door as she spoke—tying it on the outside. Suddenly, as if remembering something, she slipped inside again, fastened a steel creeper upon the heel of her shoe, took a bulky umbrella from a corner—an umbrella that looked as if it had an unnatural growth among its ribs, with bright ear-phones dangling from it, flashed one half-doubtful glance at the stark girl in the bunk—another at the complete wireless outfit upon that rough deal shelf—and was gone. In the same dim subconscious way that she had absorbed the remark that she was on Little Speckle—Little Sister Mountain—as the girls called it, Una felt the meaning of these maneuvers soak in through her clammy pores: she had become too familiar with radio practices, during the summer, to miss it. She was still beyond conscious thought. But, relieved of the flame of that scorching presence beside her, lying a poor, staring dummy, upon her back, against the rough logs above her, she began to see pictures—and caught her breath convulsively at each. She saw the grass of the Long Pasture burning. She saw the gray shed ablaze. She saw herself, running with others, to the stream, to fill buckets. She saw black, shadowy forms of circling horses, stampeding, galloping; even here, in the bunk upon Little Sister, she seemed to hear the soft earth-din of excited hoofs—to wonder whether Revel was among them. But, no—no, Revel was here—a captive, too! The last picture painted by daylight, growing daylight, possessed her; she made her first hoarse sound, after night-long silence—a cluck! She saw, did she see, herself tripping where the pasture was very dark, felt the bucket roll away from her—now her cold hands clutched at the sides of the bunk—roll away down a mound, while somebody shouted—shouted: “Shake it up there, Brigade!” She saw a flurried girl picking up that runaway bucket, felt the handle sting her, sting fiercely, saw her rub her fingers across her lips, sucking them a little ... saw the fire become a red phantom, the meadow a white mist. She knew that in the same bewildering mist, not unconscious, but numb, powerless to resist, she had been led by a firm arm to her horse and lifted upon it, while, as in a dream, the rush and noises of the fire went on. And there had been a long ride up a mountain, while a hand held her on Revel—guiding the horse by a lead strap. Only now was she remembering—thinking! Beginning to think! “And—she says we must ride further—further—where they won’t—where they can’t find me. Gypsies—Encampment! Bald Mountain! And she’s mad—mad! Maybe, ’twas she who made those strange sounds in the wood.... Oh! I—I’ll go mad, too; I’m so-o frightened—” The poor green wood of girlhood rolled over in the bunk, fairly hissing in the flame of that scorching presence still beside her—she felt it beside her. She had a feeling that out of such a fire nothing could come alive. She couldn’t, anyway—if it was really She who lay here, at daybreak, in a lonely mountain-top cabin, with two gray bunks on either side—and a red fire-cheek upon the hearth. But, no! The nightmare was too monstrous. The bunk held only a shell. The real Una, the guarded girl, was away, far away, with her Camp Fire sisters. Why! she could hear them singing, singing their good-night hymn, before the first foot of the nightmare caught her—before smoke rushed up the sidehill and the glare burst forth in the Long Pasture: Ah! she had loved that hymn—dearest of Camp Fire songs. But suddenly—suddenly—her whole being became again a fiery stick, shriveling, consuming, for, watching that changing fire-cheek, the red glow upon the hearth, while daylight broadened, she realized that it was Una—incredibly it was—who lay here, in a beyond-the-beyond of utter terror—helplessness. Una who would be put upon her horse and forced to ride further, away from father, mother—Pemrose—trapped—trapped.... “Master!... Master of the Hidden Fire!” She was feeling for the life-tie, at last—wide awake, at last—gibbering, clutching with her cold hands at the gray sides of the bunk, the outer bunk of two—with, somewhere, a memory of a red fox trapped by the roadside. “Master! Master! Master!” Was there a Sheltering Flame? A Hidden Fire? Anything that could save a girl now—burn up the trap? “Master! Master! Master!” She called it out loud, kneeling up in the bunk, in the yellowing dawn, catching with both hands at her breast, her blouse. “Master, help me! Save—me!” Where did the light come from; it seemed to flash all round her, beyond daylight. “Help yourself,” it said. “Save—yourself! There must be something you can do. Think—hard!” And the light fell full upon needle and dial on the face of the radio transmitter, against a log wall, eight feet distant. She cowered in the bunk, cowered, as if she had been struck, looking up in a ghastly way at the familiar antennÆ running round the logs above her head. “I never—could!” Yet, somehow, she was out of the gray bunk where she had lain, coffined—the girl who would have to be wheeled through life in a cushioned chair. “Master of the Hidden Fire! Now! Now!” She tottered, gripping its side—but she reached that shining “shack corner”, the shelf with its wireless litter. Amid a medley of plugs and jacks, used for connecting varied circuits, amid shining brass and bakelite, was a little telegraph key. Study, practice, at Camp Chicolee, had made it a pal—almost a pal. “If—I only ... could! But I never could—remember! But Master of the Hidden Fire!” She tumbled on to a high stool against that shelf, the table nailed to the log wall, dropping her head amid the litter. “We—we had a private sign we always used, we girls. She has a little receiver in that umbrella, I know; if I speak, she’ll pick it up ... dot an’ dash, maybe, she can’t! Oh-h! what first: light the bulbs, start the generator.” Mechanically, with a glance at that dark generator under the table, garner of power, she was throwing the switch, turning the rheostat knob in the panel of the transmitting set, not slowly, carefully, as she had been taught to do, to prolong the life of the bulbs to which she was turning on the strong current. Much did a girl in her kidnapped plight care about bulbs—bulbs that talk overseas! She slammed the rheostat on full, so that the fairy filaments in those electric bulbs—the sending vacuum tubes of the powerful transmitter—just leaped from dim to brightest—almost in a moment to white heat, the grids and plates about them glowing cherry red. It was a cheerful cherry. It blinded her—her dull eyes. But it gave the girl with a face like a white cameo, who had been kept all her life, as a gem, in cotton wool, a sense of power she had never known before. “Master of the Hidden Fire!” She began to feel she was on top. Quite steadily she did the next half-familiar thing, closed the aËrial switch, connecting the whole set, cast a glance at the dial with the needle on it in the face of the panel-like transmitter, to see if now the miracle was working—the powerful set in action. “It is. The needle moves.... The message! If I can only send it out, tell where I am, Pemrose—somebody—will g-get it! If only my head weren’t so ‘whirley-hirly’!” piteously. “Our sign, the sign with which we always begin a message: Di-dit-di-dit-di-dit! Dah-dah-dah-dah! That’s—it. Six dots, four dashes.” The two first fingers of her right hand, pressing the key, were ticking it off now, while her swollen lips murmured, talking aloud, like her captor. “Now—if I can only give my name—or the first letter of it! They’d know. ‘Dot-dot-dash’: di-dit-dah; yes, I guess that stands for ‘U’. Where—am I? Oh! on Speckle Mountain—I never can spell that all out ... and she’ll be coming back. What—what was the abbreviation we had for it: ‘L. S’?” Straining memory to a white heat now, she ticked that off—both letters clearly. “But—I must give it again. Pemrose—that’s what she said. Three times. A distress signal! And that woman—” Again—again—she ticked it off, the bulbs glaring at her until she felt their incandescence in her brain—light-headed, delirious—as if she were sending herself out into the ether, while she tried to add to her message and give the call-letters of the home-camp, beginning at the wrong end, as she would be sure to do. “She—she’s coming!” Just enough presence of mind remained for her to pull the switches—turn the rheostat knob again. “It will take a few seconds to cool off. But she can’t call it back—the message.” Slowly those radiant bulbs, the shining vacuum tubes dimmed—became blind eyes, the cherry-red plates fading out. But the current turned off from them was switched on—for ever—in the eyes of the girl-prisoner, little white filaments glowing in their lamp-like blackness as she shot back to the bunk. A knife, an old camp-knife, lay on a stool in the way. She whipped that back with her. |
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