Read Ebook: Pemrose Lorry Radio Amateur by Hornibrook Isabel Bickford Nana French Illustrator

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Ebook has 1403 lines and 52222 words, and 29 pages

"Or am I--am I going far beyond her, beyond any one, picking up waves, sounds, without any of these things, a?rial--or 'radio soul'?"

The dark eyes were translucent now in the dimness of the wood, with the vision that she, least practical, least plodding of girls--except where her flowers were concerned--should be the elect of heaven for a new discovery.

And as the elect of heaven cannot pause to consider, on she went, through the heavy dew silvering the brown pine needles, sparkling upon tall fiddle-head brake and cinnamon fern, occasionally upon the ebony stem of a baby maidenhair upon a bank.

The woods were unspeakable at this hour--the slowly lighting May woods. There was a little, stealing smile in them, a laugh too young, too subtle to belong to this old world, at all. Or else the world had suddenly grown very young--so young that anything might happen!

Una, herself, felt more like six than sixteen, within a near run of sixteen, as she tiptoed over the trail of a sunbeam on the needles, pausing now and again to lift one foot off the ground, lift it high and listen--after the manner of the terrier who thinks that he cannot listen satisfactorily without a paw in the air.

The high-pitched note, the elfin call vibrated off into faintness. And now, again, she seemed to be standing in mists by a seashore, holding a hollow shell, with a curve in its pipe, to her ear.

There was a throbbing of the air about her, a low reverberation, swelling into a soft intoning, like the murmur of sad sea waves.

She had a momentary spasm of faint-heartedness--of being once more the timid Una, timid to weakness in all but the strength of her imagination. She turned to flee--to beat a retreat to the garden, to her fanciful flower clock.

But that hum was too alluring. A wood that, at daybreak, was a roaring buckie was too persuasive--appealing to every fancy she had.

She began to feel like the ghost of some poor little queer fish that had crept back into the clammy shell it once inhabited.

But she stole on.

"It seems to come from somewhere behind that log-stack," she told herself, peering through thick brambles and umbrella-like scrub of the tenderest fairy green, at a great pile of crossed logs, their ends gleaming, golden--a shack for the haunting shadows.

But when, taking her curiosity in both hands--if her courage was too frail to be handled--she reached that shadowy stack, the mysterious music--if music it could be called--had receded.

She heard it from a recess farther on--and deeper in the wood.

"Oh-h! I m-must be dreaming!" Yet, with hands clasped--carried out of herself--Una pursued that fleeing organ-note.

It brought her in less than another minute to the pine-wood's battleground. Trailing, khaki-colored limbs of dead boughs, dead soldiers, which had fought bravely with last winter's record ice storm, swept the earth, withering.

But among them there were other warriors, green recruits, whose flexible youth had so battled with wind and weight of ice that the branches, twisted, deformed, bowed to earth, were still green. Sap flowed in them. They were one with the living trunk.

In some dim way the lesson of those young hemlocks went home to Una. Her lower lip sagged as she looked at them. Some part of her--some part of her--she began to feel it--was twisted by curiosity, over-wrought fancy, away from her normal self. But it was not broken off.

Suddenly--elastically--it sprang back into place: "I w-won't go any further--after it; I won't!" she cried aloud--and turned her head to look around.

It was then that she got the crowning shock: yet as delicate, as fairy-like--as full of glamour--as the others had been.

Something fell at her feet. A little bunch of dewy wild flowers.

Lace of the carroway, gemmed with dew, lavender wild geranium, its cheek on her shoe, a lingering woodland violet with a tear in her eye, buttercup, dandelion--ebony-stemmed maidenhair, fairy-like in its pleading.

It was beyond Una to resist flowers at her feet.

She stooped to pick them up. Was there a nettle among them? Something stung her. Stung sharply!

She was about to rub the prickling fingers across her lips, but with some thought of the poisonous weeds which, as a Camp Fire Girl she had come to know, she chafed them against her skirt--her sweater cuff--instead.

But there seemed to be no poisoner in all the innocent little bunch that rested its cheek so trustfully against her tan shoe.

Was it the tear in the violet's eye that warned her? Was it the averted face of the drowsy dandelion, still, in the woods, half asleep? Was--oh! was there the faintest whiff about them that was not natural?

Suddenly all the daylight fled out through the tops of the trees, as it were.

And, spurning for the first time a flower, Una turned and fled with it, sobbing, tripping, stumbling, out of the wood--the intoning wood.

She reached the low, stone wall, breathless, wild-eyed.

"Preserve us a'! lassie, what's happened to ye, the morning? Ye look 'beglammered.' Ye look scared; ye look sparrow-blastit."

Never did a human voice fall more comfortingly upon a girl's ears than the rough Scotch accents which greeted hers from the other side of that garden wall.

"Oh! Andrew, I--heard--" began Una, as strong arms lifted her over the wall.

"I h-heard--" she raved again.

But the words were blown from her lips by another hum; a hum that seemed heavenly, so loud, so cocksure, so mechanically humdrum it was--the hum of a skimming a?roplane.

"I heard--" she began for the third time--and lifted her eyes to the sky.

They were blinded by a sheet of flame.

An Awful Note

"Preserve us a'! It's coming down. Coming down--a fire-tail! Driftin' doomward--down'ard--an' afire!"

Andrew's hoarse exclamations tore at the reddened air, even as sharp horns of flame gored it, springing out from a biplane's slipping side.

"Willa-woo! It's side-slippin'--side-slippin' down--afire!"

Old Andrew's hand went to his head. The girl sank to her knees beside her waking flower clock. For her the end of the world had come, heralded by that mysterious pitch pipe in the woods.

The chauffeur looked, too, as if he heard the Big Trump.

Drifting down, a fire-tail, the a?roplane truly was; a long, thin tail feather of brightest flame streaming out from it to the little leaden fish, two-pound fish, that held its radio antenna steady in the air, kept it away from the controls--flipper and rudder controls!

Those controls were useless now. The burning plane was side-slipping from five hundred feet aloft--in spite of the efforts of the one aviator to right it before it landed.

It was but for a moment--an eternal moment--that the man and the kneeling girl watched it, before it roosted, bird of thunder, in a tree top, a noble white ash, over fifty feet tall, growing upon this side of the garden wall.

The startled tree seemed rolling up the whites of its eyes in terror--rustling the pale undersides of its crown of leaves--as the burning plane landed and stuck upon a topmost branch; and, a second earlier, the aviator, finding that he could not make a better landing before the gasolene tank blew up, jumped.

As the dark, helmeted streak shot downward, it just grazed the old sundial, which now counted one flaming hour amid its many sunny ones--and landed right in the middle of the blooming flower clock.

"Dog out!" groaned Andrew and, with the hoarse exclamation on his lips, sprang forward to catch it--break the fall.

But his long arms, his strong breast missed it.

With a soft, reverberating thud it landed in the dial-bed, right on the head of pale Miss Poppy, garden beauty, who got the flattening shock of her life at the moment.

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