She hissed the last word at the nickum's back, as he halted at some distance with his companions.
"Una! I'm going to do it," she panted. "I'm going to slide down that rock there, turn round and sit in the Chair--then draw myself up again, as he did. I've got on sneakers. I know I can! I've done some breakneck climbing with father--yes! and with my Camp Fire Group, too."
"I--I'll give you all my marshmallows that we brought with us to toast at an open fire, if you do!... Yes! and one of my two little thistle pins--pebble pins--that Andrew and his wife brought me from Scotland, when they went home last year, _if you do_.... Wasn't he just hor-rid? He didn't want to speak to us--to know us!"
Una's face flamed upon the bribe, and was so pretty lit by that fixed star in the eye, that it must have been a zero-hearted nickum who could turn his back 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.
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!