I'm so glad you're in the world!" she murmured gratefully.

"And I just wish you could come into _my_ world often, girlie," was
the cuddling answer, "for it's lonely as old Sarum here on the
mountainside--though where old Sarum is I don't know myself!" breezily.

"Nor I!" laughed Una.

"Old Man Greylock doesn't talk to one, you know--only roars sometimes."
The woman lifted her eye to the dim peak above her, with the pale mists
streaming, tress-like, about its crown, from which Mount Greylock takes
its name; then her anxious glance returned to the sufferer. "Ha! there
he goes--making faces at the pain again," she murmured pityingly. "And,
mercy! I suppose 'twill be a blue moon yet--a dog's age--before his son
can get here."

It was a long age anyhow; although, in reality, little more than an
hour--a wild, wind-ridden, fire-painted hour--before three haggard men
came stumbling up the trail.

Two carried a stretcher between them. One had a bag in his hand.

As they hoisted that collapsible stretcher between its poles over the
last bleak hurdle of rock, one, the youngest, dropped his end of it,
which the doctor, shifting his bag, took up.

Jack at a Pinch rushed forward.

And ever afterwards Pem liked that churlish nickum because he ignored
her then; because he had no more consciousness of her presence, or of
Una's, or of the June woman's, than if they had been rocks--blank
rocks--by the trail, as he flung himself on his knees beside his father.

"Dad! _Dad!_" he cried, his face as gray-blue with hurry as his
baseball flannels. "Oh-h! Dad, what have you been doing to
yourself--now?"

"The biter bitten--Treff! Joker pinched!" came the answer in tones
almost jocular, for the love in that boyish voice was a cordial. "Well!
I guess I haven't got my death-blow now you've come. And--and the murder
is out, boy: these little girls know all-ll: who you are--who I am!"

Then, indeed, Jack at a Pinch raised his head and looked straight across
into the blue eyes of Pemrose Lorry.

"You must have thought me an awful 'chuff'," he said.

"I'm sorry about the oars," was the mute reply of the girl's eyes, but
the least little tincture of a smile trickling down from her
lip-corners, said: "But I'm glad I got even with you, somehow!"

However, there was too much "getting even" just now in this wild
spot--Life grimly settling accounts with the dragon who had so often
"hazed" others--for the boy and girl to spend any more consc