ch! This--this is the shortest trail down the
mountain, if it's the roughest--I know that!" She looked desperately at
old Andrew. "If any mean thief--anybody--stole that record, there could
be only one--one motive for it, my father-r says--curiosity; to be the
fir-rst to see that very first record man has ever got from so high
up--high up in the earth's thin atmosphere, where the air ends--and
space begins!"

She seemed to have that whole zero void in her heart now, its light,
stifling gases in her distended throat--Toandoah's little pal--as she
looked distractedly down the gorge.

"Oh! it's pos-si-ble--just barely possible, that after he had satisfied
his cur-ios-ity--or mischief--or whatever it was--he might have thrown
away the little steel box, dropped it somewhere on the trail," she
panted extravagantly. "Or--or we might even come on some more rags of
the parachute and track him--track him to a camp! My father-r--"

It was the passionate break on that word, even more than the spice in
the blue eyes, that went straight to the shadowed spot in Andrew's heart
and found the little sprig of memorial heather, hidden there, the
mountain heather, the tiny, pinkish blossoms, with the faint, wild tang,
which he plucked whenever he went home to Scotland from a small grave in
a hillside "kirkyard" on whose granite marker was printed: "Margery
Campbell, aged fifteen!"

It had been as much the restlessness of bereavement as a desire to
better their fortunes which had brought his wife and him to the New
World, for she had been their only child, with the exception of one son,
old enough to be in the American Army.

The fragrance of that imaginary heather-bloom tucked away in the
impassive chauffeur's breast was occasionally apparent in a furtive
glance thrown skyward, or in a momentary glisten of mist in the gray
shell of the mechanical eye.

It had made the whole family of his employers very sympathetic towards
Andrew, as to a friend. And now a whiff of that heather memory stood
Pemrose in good stead.

"I reckon if leetle Margery were livin', she'd feel in the verra same
way gin anny misfortune happed to me," he told himself.

"Aw, weel, lassie!" Thus he spoke aloud. "Since ye're set on gaeing on a
wee bit further, we'll gang; but dinna get yer hopes stickit on finding
onything!"

"Andrew--Andrew, himself, has found something! Look--look at him!"

It was barely twenty minutes later that the wildly startled cry burst