k upon it.

"Hold my hat," said Pem: if she had been a boy, the tone would have
meant: "Hold my coat while I thrash him!"

Unhesitatingly she stepped to the precipice-brink and measured the
distance to that Devil's Chair very coolly and critically with her eye.

CHAPTER VIII

A USURPER

Gathering her short, green skirt about her, for she wore, as on that
February day in her father's laboratory, what he called the "nixie
green", the sylvan Camp Fire uniform, the inventor's daughter stretched
herself breast downward, upon the flat ledge of the Pinnacle's crest.

Working her body carefully backward, without another glance at the
precipice beneath, she slid warily over the edge, her face to the rock,
and down the dozen feet of almost smooth, nearly perpendicular slab,
until her feet touched the stone seat of that curved armchair, a deep
embrasure in the mountain granite.

It was not such a wildly difficult feat then for a girl on her mettle to
turn cautiously until her tingling back was pressed hard against the
slab, and thus to lower herself to a sitting position on the rocky
throne.

For that Devil's Chair was a spacious one--fairly so! The seat extended
outward at least three feet and was roomy enough to allow of two people
standing upright on it at the same time.

And what a view old Lucifer must have from it, was Pem's first
thought--provided he didn't, as an Irishman would say, reside away from
home!

Off to the right and left stretched the wonderful landscape of the
Berkshire Hills, Massachusetts' Highlands--the Berkshire mountains in
May where, afar, a summit snow-cap vied with the driven snows of
blossoming fruit trees, lower down; where the pink-shot pearl of a lake
gleamed, opal-like, from an emerald setting, and many a silver thread
winding, expanding, showed where some madcap river or brook had become
with spring a wild thing.

"Oh, hurrah! I can really see off to Mount Greylock--old King
Greylock--even the steel tower upon it--oh! so plainly," murmured the
madcap in the Chair, and nestled triumphantly against its rocky back.

"Greylock, cloud-girdled, from his purple throne,
A shout of gladness sends,
And up soft meadow slopes, a warbling tone,
Of Housatonic blends."

Yes! she felt as if they were two throned dignitaries, she and Greylock;
for she wore the crown of derring do, and King Greylock, still wearing a
thin diadem of snow, was enthroned for ever in