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He ignored it, however, though he realized that some plan must be maturing in her head. His suspicion of the day before was certainly well founded. "What about this evening, Charmian?" he asked. "Oh, we are going to pendre la crémaillère. You remember we decided yesterday." "Before or after dinner? And what about Mrs. Shiffney?"
Pilar, who fancied him reconciled to the situation, grew easier in her mind, and by degrees lost much of her distrust. About a month later, toward the middle of March, she had so far regained her equanimity as to allow herself, after a steady resistance, to be persuaded by a friend to attend her house-warming ball "pendre la cremaillere," as they call it in Paris.
"I want you to let us pendre la crémaillère to-morrow evening all alone, just you and I together." "In the studio?" "Of course." "Well, but" he smiled, then laughed rather awkwardly "but what could we do there all alone? What is there to do? And, besides, there's that party at Mrs. Shiffney's to-morrow night. We were both going to that." "We could go there afterward if we felt inclined.
In the midst of a frame of light wood sits the operator, steadying himself with one hand, and with the other fuming a cremaillere, which appears to give a very quick rotatory movement to two glass globes revolving upon a vertical axis. The friction of the globes is supposed to develop electricity to which his power of ascending is ascribed. To wings, however, aerial adventurers mostly adhered.
Battery No. 1, on the main-land, called the Redan, armed with six guns, was three thousand yards in an air-line above the point of the island. A line of infantry intrenchments, en crémaillère, extended from the Redan to the water of a bayou which connects with Reelfoot Lake. A floating battery, anchored near the lower end of the island, added ten guns to its defence.
Now at last the house was ready, four servants were engaged, and the ceremony of hanging the crémaillère was being duly accomplished. The Heaths' house-warming had brought together Charmian's friends. Heath, true to his secret determination to break away from his old life, had wished that it should be so.
In view of the steepness of the slopes to be surmounted, the plans contemplated the construction, on several portions of the road, of a rack-line or cremaillere, a third track provided with cogs, between the other two, and the use of special mountain-climbing locomotives having a cogwheel by means of which the ascent was to be accomplished and the descent regulated.
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