“And will the Thunder Bird really lay its egg upon the moon? Such a hard egg, too! Will it–really–drop a pound weight of steel upon the head of the Man in the Moon?... Oh! de-ar Mammy Moon–what a shock she’ll get.”

The girl, the fifteen-year-old Camp Fire Girl–all but sixteen now–to whom Mammy Moon had been the fairy foster-mother of her childhood, ever since she lay, wakeful, in her little cot, looking up at that silvery face of a burnt-out satellite, picturing it the gate of Heaven and her mother’s spirit as bathed in the soft, lunar radiance behind it, caught her breath with a wild little gasp whose triumph was a sob upon the still laboratory air.

“Lay its egg in a nest of the moon! A dead nest! It will do more than that, little Pem!” Toandoah, the inventor, turned from fitting a number of tiny sky-rockets into the supply chamber of a larger one,–turned with that living coal of fire in his eye which only the inventor can know, and looked upon his daughter. “Yes, it will do more than that! The Thunder Bird will lay its golden egg for us–if it drops its expiring one upon the moon. It will send us back the first record from space, the very first information as to what it may be that lies up–away up–a couple of hundred miles, or so, above us, in the outer edges of the earth’s atmosphere of which less is known at present than of the deepest soundings of the ocean. Our Thunder Bird will be the–first–explorer.”

The man’s eyes were dim now. For a moment he saw as in a prism the work of his fingers, those little explosive rockets–the charges of smokeless powder–which being discharged automatically in flight, would send the Thunder Bird upon its magic way, roaring its challenge to the world to listen, switching its rose-red tail of light.

Then–then as the mist cleared those deep, glowing eyes of his became to his daughter a magic lantern by which she saw a series of pictures thrown upon the sheeting whitewash of the laboratory wall, culminating in one which was almost too dazzling for mortal girl of fifteen–though born of a great inventor–to bear.

“And to think,” she cried, rising upon tiptoe, swaying there in the February sunlight, “just to think that it’s a Camp Fire Girl–a Camp Fire Girl of America–with the eyes of the world upon her, who will push the button, throw the switch upon a mountain-top, launch the Thunder Bird upon its glor-i-ous way, send off–send off the first earth-valentine to Mammy Moon!... Oh! Toandoah–oh! Daddy-man–it’s too much.”

Pemrose Lorry clasped her hands. Her blue-star eyes, blue at the moment as the tiny blossoms of the meadow star-grass for which some fairy has captured a sky-beam, were suddenly wet.

A slim, girlish figure in forest green–last sylvan word in Camp Fire uniforms which she was trying on–she hung there, poised upon an inner pinnacle, while sunbeams racing down the whitewash did obeisance before her, while spectroscope, lathe and delicate balances, brilliant reflectors, offered her a brazen crown.

“Well–well, it’s coming to you, Pem–you sprite.” Her father shot a sidelong glance at the nixie green as he fitted another little rocket into its groove in the larger one’s interior, where the touch of a mechanical appliance, like the trigger of a gun, in the Thunder Bird’s tail, would ignite it in flight. “You alone, girl as you are, know the full secret of the Thunder Bird, as you romantically call it, the principle on which I am working, child–in so far as you can understand it–in creating this model rocket for experiments and the master sky-rocket, the full-fledged Thunder Bird, later, to soar even to the moon itself–Mars, too, maybe–you alone know and you have kept it dark. You’ve plugged like a boy at your elementary physics in high school, so’s to be able to understand and sympathize–you’ve lived up to the name I gave you–”

“My chowchow name!” interjected the girl, winking slily.

“Well! it is a mixture.” Her father echoed her chuckle. “But I guess you’ve been son and daughter both, you good little pal–you sprite of the lab.”

“Oh! Toandoah–oh! Daddy-man–I’m so glad.”

Here there was a little laboratory explosion, a rocket of feeling fired off, as the owner of that hybrid name, Pemrose, came down from her pinnacle and, perching upon a low tool-chest at the inventor’s side, took the humbler place she loved,–fellow of her father’s heart.

“I–I used to wish I was all boy until I became a Camp Fire Girl; that bettered the betty element a little,” she confided, the spice of her mixed cognomen floating in her eye.

It was a joke with her, that chowchow name–original mixture–and how she came by it.

Her father, Professor Guy Noel Lorry, Fellow of Nevil University,–Toandoah, the inventor, she called him,–wearing his symbol, a saw-toothed triangle, embroidered with her own upon her ceremonial dress–had at one time almost prayed for a son, a boy who might help him to realize the dream, even then taking hold upon his heart, of conquering not the air alone but space–zero space, in which it was thought nothing could travel–so that old Earth might reach out to her sister planets.

He planned to call the boy Pemberton after his own father.

Likewise the mother of the maiden in green now seated upon the tool-box had longed for a daughter and aspired to name her Rose, in tender memory of a dear college chum, a flower no longer blooming upon earth.

And when the little black-haired mite in due time came, when she opened upon her father eyes blue as the empyrean he hoped to conquer, he had cried out of a core of transport lurking in the very heart of disappointment: “Oh! by Jove, I can’t quite give up my dream: let’s name her Pemrose. If she had been a boy, I’d have called her Pem.”

The young mother blissfully agreed–and did not live long to call her anything.

Grown to girlhood, the sprite of the laboratory, who had looked through a spectroscope at seven, clapping her small hands over the fairy colors–pure red, orange, green, blue, violet, separated by little dark, thread-like lines, each representing some element in that far-away upper air which her father hoped to master–preferred for herself the boyish Pem to the oft-worn Rose.

But in order to square accounts with what she called the “betty” element in her, she evened things up on becoming a Camp Fire Girl by choosing a name all feminine wherewith to be known by the Council Fire.

Wantaam, signifying Wisdom–a Wise Woman–was the title she bore as one who wore the Fire Maker’s bracelet upon her wrist and had pledged herself to tend as her fathers had tended and her fathers’ fathers since time began, that inner, mystic flame which has lit man’s way to progress from the moment when he forged a bludgeon to conquer his own world, until, to-day, when he was inventing a Bird to invade others.

And it was that Wise Woman who spoke now; she, of all others, who knew the secret of the magic Thunder Bird; and who, trustworthy to the core, had “kept it dark.”

“Oh! if I’ve ‘plugged’ hard in the past over those fierce first principles of mechanics, electricity, optics, heat and the rest–and those ‘grueling’ laws of gravitation–that’s just nothing, a scantling compared to the way I’m going to study and make a hit when I get on into college,” she cried; “so–so that, some day, I can, really, work with you, Toandoah–you record-breaking inventor–oh! dearest father ever was.”

Laughingly, passionately she flung an arm around the neck of the man in the long, drab laboratory coat, half strangling him as he bent over the two-foot model rocket, testing it with his soul in his finger-tips, from its cone-shaped steel head to its steering compartment, thence to the supply chamber with all the little propelling rockets in it, down to its complicated nozzle, or tail.

“Why–why! there’s no knowing what you and I may be doing yet, when we strain our wits to cracking, is there, Daddy-man?” she exulted further. “You say, yourself, that once space is conquered, that horribly cold old zero space outside the earth’s atmosphere, anything devised that will move through it, as our Thunder Bird can do, then–then there’s no limit! We might be shooting a passenger off to the moon now, provided the Man in the Moon would shoot him back,” gayly, “if only the master sky-rocket, twelve times as large as this little model you’re working on for experiments, were ready. The re-al moon-going Thunder Bird! Oh, dear!” Her little fingers restlessly intertwined. “How–how I can har-rdly wait to throw the switch upon a mountaintop and–watch it tear, as the college boys say!”

“Sometimes–sometimes I’m inclined to think it will never ‘tear’; that another than I will be the first to reach the heavenly bodies.” Toandoah sighed. “For where are the funds coming from, Pem, the little bonanza–fairy gold-mine–necessary to gorge our Thunder Bird for its record flight–fit it out for its novel migration to the moon, eh?” The inventor clasped his hands behind his head, whistling ruefully. “Funds, child! Already, it has pecked through the biggest slice of mine!”

“Ah! but–ah! but–” the girl suddenly flashed upon him a sky-blue wink–“ah! but the third nut hasn’t been cracked yet, remember, for the Bird to peck at that. Isn’t it in four weeks from now–oh! in five–” the slight figure swaying like the blue-eyed grass upon its tall green stem, blown by a wild breeze–“in five weeks from now that the third drawer will be opened, containing the third and last installment of Mr. Hartley Graham’s queer, queer drawn-out will. When it is–oh! when it is–maybe, then, at last, there will be something coming to the University, our University, to benefit your inventions, Daddy.”

“My child! when that third nut is cracked, ’twill only benefit a ‘nut’.” The man chuckled drily now. “In other words, the remainder of Friend Hartley’s fortune, all that his sister, Mrs. Grosvenor, hasn’t already got, will still be held in trust by me, as executor of the will, for–for that griffin of a younger brother of his who cleared out over twenty years ago and hasn’t sent a line to his family since.”

“Was Mr. Treffrey Graham–really–such a–zany?” Pem asked the question for the nineteenth time, her black eyebrows arching.

“My word! ‘Was he?’ A–a regular hippogriff he was, child! A hot tamale, like that Mexican fruit which burns you if you bite into it! At college one could hardly come near him without getting scorched by his tricks. Remember my telling you about my putting in an appearance in class one day–Physics 3–boasting of the latest thing in student’s bags, setting it down beside me–and not seeing it again for three weeks? The terrible Treff, of course! The climax came, as you know, when he locked a gray-haired professor into the padded cell for opposing baseball too early in the season, while the campus was still soft.”

“Mer-rcy! And kept him there for ages–in that stuffy little room, all wadded and lined with brown burlap, used for analyzing sound–the prof not able to make himself heard!”

The listener, girl-like, drew fresh excitement from a faded tale.

“Yes–that meant expulsion, of course, and his family, one and all, turning a cold shoulder on Treff, before he went away for good–nobody knew where. His engagement was broken off. His brother Hartley saw to that–married the girl himself.”

“I wonder–I wonder if the Terrible Treff ever married?” Pem musingly nursed her chin,–and with it a wildfire interest in the “hot tamale.”

“I heard he did. Somebody said so–somebody who met him out West, years ago–that he was a widower, with a little son. But–apparently–he has no more use for his family.”

“No more–no more than his sister, Mrs. Grosvenor, has for us since you were made executor of that outlandish will, left, piecemeal in three drawers, to be opened on the first three anniversaries of Mr. Graham’s death–and not her husband!” Now it was an entirely new breeze of excitement, a stiffening, pinching draught, which swept the forest-green figure upon the tool-chest until its voice grew thin and sharp and edged as the blades in the box beneath it. “Oh-h, yes! she’s at daggers dr-rawn with us now–on her high ropes all the time, as you’d say. And–and she sneers at your inventions, father! She calls the rocket, the rocket,” half-hysterically, “the moon-reaching rocket,–a Quaker gun–a Quaker gun that’ll never be fired, never go off–never hit anything!... Oh-h!”

With her hand to her green breast at the insult, the girl bounded, blindly as a ball, from her box, across the laboratory–and on to a low platform.

Through her raging young body there shot like a physical cramp the knowledge that Quakers, noble-hearted Friends, did not use any guns; that the mocking term was but a by-word, a jesting synonym for all that was impotent–non-existent in reason and power–a dummy.

Savagely she applied her eye to the tall, ten-foot spectroscope rearing its brazen height from this low pedestal.Without, beyond the glaring white-washed laboratory, was a February world, equally white, of zero ice and snow.

Through the spectroscope she saw a world in flames–blood-red.

It was not more flaming than her thoughts.

Her father’s transcendent invention just a faddist’s dream! The Thunder Bird a joke–a Quaker Gun!

“Bah!” Convulsively her little teeth bit into her lower lip as she adjusted the telescope portion of the instrument for analyzing light–reducing it to prismatic hues–a little.

And now, lo! a world brilliantly jaundiced–her orange–the snow being a wonderful reflector of the sun’s divided rays.

“Father! Father-r! I used to love Una Grosvenor. Now I h-hate her! If her mother made that hor-rid speech about a Quaker gun, she repeated it, before all the boys and girls in our Drama Class, too! If I see her this afternoon at the Ski Club, the skiing party out at Poplar Hill, I shan’t speak to her. And we used to be so chummy! Why–” the girl fluttered now, a green weathercock, upon the two-foot platform–“why, we used to stand side by side and measure eyelashes, to see which pair was going to be the longer. I’ll wager mine are now!”

With a veering laugh the weathercock was here bent forward, striving to catch some brazen glimpse of a winking profile in the polished brass of the spectroscope.

Her father laughed: this was the Rose side of her–of his maiden of the patchwork name–the Rose side of her, and he loved it!

“But–but Poplar Hill! Poplar Hill! Why! that’s away outside the city line–out at Merryville,” he exclaimed, a minute later, in consternation. “Goodness! child, you’re not going off there to ski to-day–in a zero world, everything snowbound, no trolley cars running?”

“Oh! the trains–the trains aren’t held up, father.” The coaxing weathercock now had a green arm around the neck of the man in the long, drab coat. “And I just couldn’t give up going! I’m becoming such a daring ski-runner, Daddy-man; you’ll be proud of me when you see! Why! I can almost herring-bone uphill; and I’m getting the kick-turn ‘down fine.’ Darting, gliding, stemming, jumping downhill–oh! it’s such perfect fun, such creamy fun; I’m not a girl any longer, I’m just a swallow.”

“One swallow doesn’t make a summer; all this doesn’t change the weather.” The inventor glanced anxiously through a window.

“No, but it’s such a very short train-run. Pouf! only six miles on the two o’clock express bound north, why–why! the very train that you and I will be taking, later, Daddy-man, along in May, when you try out experiments with that little model rocket you’re working on now, upon old Mount Greylock–highest mountain of the State. Oh-h! if ever a girl’s thumb itched, mine does to press the little electric button and start it off, to fly up a couple of hundred miles, or so, to send you back your golden egg, siree–the first record from space. Oh! through all the fun of slope and snow I’ll be thinking of that the entire time to-day–the whole, enduring, livelong time. Yes!”