inventor's laboratory, who had "plugged" so hard at her elementary
physics that she might be able to grasp the first principles of her
father's work, some day--some day to work with him,--to her, the little
girl-mechanic, a wishing stone was no golden magnet.

But the very fact that there was one spot, not so far from the summit,
either--wildest spot on the mountain though it be--still unexplored, was
enough to draw her restless feet anywhere, against any deadlock of
difficulty.

"Ha! The Man Killer trail!" she whooped again. "Oh-h! we could easily
find it; we saw a sign directing to it, as we came up the mountain."

"It's na a trail; it's just a hotch-potch o' rocks--some sharp as
stickit teeth!" groaned Andrew, who saw his own doom fixed, in vain
protesting.

He felt rather like a man who had been left behind to hold a wolf by the
ears when, in the teeth of every remonstrance he could offer, he found
himself, a little later, starting out in the rear of two adventurous
girls, in quest of that third slab of a wishing stone--and the
breath-racking Man Killer trail.

But those girls were, to some degree, seasoned climbers,
both,--sure-footed as venturesome!

Through the dim limelight of fringing pine woods, across oozing
mud-beds, soft from spring rains and freshets, over a babbling brook
spanned by an elastic bridge formed of the interlacing roots of giant
trees--where Una found much delight in bouncing up and down in
anticipation of the magic stone--they stubbornly held their way, and
came at last to the chaos of rocks crowding a steep gorge which marked
the head of the lonely Killer trail.

"Noo--I gang first!" said Andrew--a true-penny still, though the stamp
was reversed. "My word!" he added sourly, "this is na trail--juist a
scratch on the mountainside--an' the muckle rocks they're a flail for
beating the breath out of a puir body."

"What--what do I care if they shouldn't leave me a pinch if only I could
find something--even a few more rags of the parachute!" gasped Pemrose,
in stifled tones of passion, as she climbed, hurry-skurry, over a piled
capsheaf of bowlders.

Indeed, that battling breath was at a low ebb in all three when,
following the tangled skein of a sort of trail which the feet of daring
climbers had beaten, here and there, amid the rocks, they reached in due
time the third slab which, like the invisible running water in Tory
Cave, was supposed to bring "piping times" of luck to whoever sh