d 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