arms of the chair, turned--turned
rather sickeningly, to be sure, until her breast was against the broad
rock down which she had slid, then reached upward for a handhold by
which to climb--to draw herself up.

There was one. The nickum--churlish climber--had pulled himself up by
it. Like him, she had fought shy of it, sliding down, for fear it should
catch in her clothing.

A little spur it was, projecting from a slight fissure, what he called a
"nick," in the rock, rather more than half-way up,--a good seven feet
from the rocky armchair.

Breathlessly she reached upward, to grasp it.

And, lo! her lips fell apart--like a cleft stone.

At the same time her heart slunk out of her body and dropped into the
precipice behind her.

Her fingers just missed that spur--fell short!

They touched it; they could not curl over it--and grip.

Flattening herself to a green creeper against the rock which seemed
spurning her, wildly she stretched every tendril--every sinew.

In vain! Make as long an arm as she could, this daring Pem, her five
feet three of slim girlish stature would not become the five feet nine
of the daredevil who preceded her!

Emergency balks at extension.

That right arm, racked, fell limply back.

The blue of her eyes, hooking to the spur, if her fingers couldn't, grew
glazed like enamel.

She felt as if she were tumbling backward already, the daring essence of
her, to break her too spunky backbone among those glowing pine-dwarfs
far beneath.

Spread-eagled against the rock's cruel breast, she turned a blanched
face, a convulsed face, upward!

CHAPTER IX

JACK AT A PINCH

"Keep cool! Don't stir! I'll reach you in a moment!"

As the cry, the reassuring cry, came ringing down to her, Pemrose felt
the blood start again from where it was frozen at the back of her neck
and surge through her flattened body, which, greenly spread-eagled
against that gray rock, the head turned slightly aside, was not unlike
the quaint Indian figure of the Thunder Bird upon a pedestal,--the
emblem of her father's invention.

As the first blind moment of terror passed--the blankness of the
discovery that, strain as she might, she could not reach that spur of
the rock, the nearest hand-hold, and draw herself up to safety--she saw
two rescuing figures loom out on high.

[Illustration: "Keep cool! Don't stir! I'll reach you in a moment!" Page
86.]

The first was that of the chauffeur, Andrew, summoned by a