from Una as the trio struggled on--on down the fitful path, between the
rocky jaws of the Man Killer, where beetling crags loomed, fang-like, on
either side of them and, here and there some swollen rill made of a
green moss-bank a slimy mud-bed.

"He--he's hearing things, if he isn't seeing them. Oh, look!... Look at
him!"

Una's hand was at her jumping heart--pressing hard as if to hold it in
her body--as she beheld the tall figure of the chauffeur, motionless as
arrested mechanism, upon the trail, ahead.

"I heerd a--skirl." Andrew's face was stony as that of the Old Man of
Greylock--a featured rock--as he turned it upon the breathless girls.

"A skirl! A cry!" he repeated hoarsely. "'Twas na the yap of an animal,
either! Somebody--somebody's yawping for help out here in this awfu'
spot! Dinna ye hear it, children?"

They did. Their flesh began to creep.

Up, upward, struggling between great rocks, it climbed, that cry, where
the stony teeth of the Man Killer bit the trail right in two.

"Help--h-help!" it pleaded. "Oh--help!" Then feebly, but fierily:
"_Oh-h!_ confound it--_help_, I say!"

That was the moment when Pemrose Lorry shook as if the old Man Killer
were devouring her.

Was there--could there be something familiar, half-familiar, about the
faint, volcanic shout: some accent she seemed to have heard before? And
yet--and yet, not quite that, either!

"My word! Some puir body's hur-rted bad--ba-ad--like a toad under a
harrow," grunted Andrew, and scrambled hastily on over a gray barrier of
rocks,--the girls following.

Once again it limped painfully up to them, the cry, like a visible,
broken thing. "Help--h-help, I say!" Then, feebly, in rock-bitten echo:
"_Help!_"

CHAPTER XXI

THE MAN KILLER

"We must lift him out of the mud! Oh-h! even if it hurts
him--terribly--we'll have to lift him to a dry spot."

It was Pemrose Lorry who spoke. Together with her Camp Fire sisters she
had taken some training in first aid. And one agonizing accident which
she had been told how to deal with was the case of a knee-cap displaced
or broken.

There almost seemed to be a broken head on her own young shoulders
through which wild, streaky lights and shadows came stealing, like
moonlight through cracked shutters whose chinks are not wide enough to
reveal clearly any object in a room.

It was the same breathlessly unreal feeling--the same dim moonlit
groping, that she had felt as she sat on the cliff