CHAPTER I
A QUAKER GUN
"And will the Thunder Bird really lay its egg upon the moon? Such a hardegg, too! Will it--really--drop a pound weight of steel upon the head ofthe 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--towhom Mammy Moon had been the fairy foster-mother of her childhood, eversince she lay, wakeful, in her little cot, looking up at that silveryface of a burnt-out satellite, picturing it the gate of Heaven and hermother's spirit as bathed in the soft, lunar radiance behind it, caughther breath with a wild little gasp whose triumph was a sob upon thestill laboratory air.
"Lay its egg in a nest of the moon! A dead nest! It will do more thanthat, little Pem!" Toandoah, the inventor, turned from fitting a numberof tiny sky-rockets into the supply chamber of a larger one,--turnedwith that living coal of fire in his eye which only the inventor canknow, and looked upon his daughter. "Yes, it will do more than that! TheThunder Bird will lay its golden egg for us--if it drops its expiringone upon the moon. It will send us back the first record from space, thevery first information as to what it may be that lies up--away up--acouple of hundred miles, or so, above us, in the outer edges of theearth's atmosphere of which less is known at present than of the deepestsoundings of the ocean. Our Thunder Bird will be the--first--explorer."
"Oh! de-ar Mammy Moon--what a shock she'll get." Page 2.]
The man's eyes were dim now. For a moment he saw as in a prism the workof his fingers, those little explosive rockets--the charges of smokelesspowder--which being discharged automatically in flight, would send theThunder Bird upon its magic way, roaring its challenge to the world tolisten, switching its rose-red tail of light.
Then--then as the mist cleared those deep, glowing eyes of his became tohis daughter a magic lantern by which she saw a series of picturesthrown upon the sheeting whitewash of the laboratory wall, culminatingin one which was almost too dazzling for mortal girl of fifteen--thoughborn of a great inventor--to bear.
"And to think," she cried, rising upon tiptoe, swaying there in theFebruary sunlight, "just to think that it's a Camp Fire Girl--a CampFire Girl of America--with the eyes of the world upon her, who will pushthe button, throw the switch upon a mountain-top, launch the ThunderBird upon its glor-i-ous way, send off--send off the firstearth-valentine to Mammy Moon!... Oh! Toandoah--oh! Daddy-man--it's toomuch."
Pemrose Lorry clasped her hands. Her blue-star eyes, blue at the momentas the tiny blossoms of the meadow star-grass for which some fairy hascaptured a sky-beam, were suddenly wet.
A slim, girlish figure in forest green--last sylvan word in Camp Fireuniforms which she was trying on--she hung there, poised upon an innerpinnacle, while sunbeams racing down the whitewash did obeisance beforeher, while spectroscope, lathe and delicate balances, brilliantreflectors, offered her a brazen crown.
"Well--well, it's coming to you, Pem--you sprite." Her father shot asidelong glance at the nixie green as he fitted another little rocketinto its groove in the larger one's interior, where the touch of amechanical appliance, like the trigger of a gun, in the Thunder Bird'stail, would ignite it in flight. "You alone, girl as you are, know thefull secret of the Thunder Bird, as you romantically call it, theprinciple on which I am working, child--in so far as you can understandit--in creating this model rocket for experiments and the mastersky-rocket, the full-fledged Thunder Bird, later, to soar even to themoon 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 tothe name I gave you--"
"My chowchow name!" interjected the girl, winking slily.
"Well! it is a mixture." Her father echoed her chuckle. "But I guessyou've been son and daughter both, you good little pal--you sprite ofthe lab."
"Oh! Toandoah--oh! Daddy-man--I'm so glad."
Here there was a little laboratory explosion, a rocket of feeling firedoff, as the owner of that hybrid name, Pemrose, came down from herpinnacle 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; thatbettered the betty element a little," she confided, the spice of hermixed cognomen floating in her eye.
It was a joke with her, that chowchow name--original mixture--and howshe came by it.
Her father, Professor Guy Noel Lorry, Fellow of NevilUniversity,--Toandoah, the inventor, she called him,--wearing hissymbol, a saw-toothed triangle, embroidered with her own upon herceremonial dress--had at one time almost prayed for a son, a boy whomight help him to realize the dream, even then taking hold upon hisheart, of conquering not the air alone but space--zero space, in whichit was thought nothing could travel--so that old Earth might reach outto 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-boxhad longed for a daughter and aspired to name her Rose, in tender memoryof a dear college chum, a flower no longer blooming upon earth.
And when the little black-haired mite in due time came, when she openedupon her father eyes blue as the empyrean he hoped to conquer, he hadcried out of a core of transport lurking in the very heart ofdisappointment: "Oh! by Jove, I can't quite give up my dream: let's nameher 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 heranything.
Grown to girlhood, the sprite of the laboratory, who had looked througha spectroscope at seven, clapping her small hands over the fairycolors--pure red, orange, green, blue, violet, separated by little dark,thread-like lines, each representing some element in that far-away upperair which her father hoped to master--preferred for herself the boyishPem to the oft-worn Rose.
But in order to square accounts with what she called the "betty" elementin her, she evened things up on becoming a Camp Fire Girl by choosing aname all feminine wherewith to be known by the Council Fire.
Wantaam, signifying Wisdom--a Wise Woman--was the title she bore as onewho wore the Fire Maker's bracelet upon her wrist and had pledgedherself to tend as her fathers had tended and her fathers' fathers sincetime began, that inner, mystic flame which has lit man's way to progressfrom 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 knewthe 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 firstprinciples of mechanics, electricity, optics, heat and the rest--andthose 'grueling' laws of gravitation--that's just nothing, a scantlingcompared to the way I'm going to study and make a hit when I get on intocollege," she cried; "so--so that, some day, I can, really, work withyou, Toandoah--you record-breaking inventor--oh! dearest father everwas."
Laughingly, passionately she flung an arm around the neck of the man inthe long, drab laboratory coat, half strangling him as he bent over thetwo-foot model rocket, testing it with his soul in his finger-tips, fromits cone-shaped steel head to its steering compartment, thence to thesupply chamber with all the little propelling rockets in it, down to itscomplicated nozzle, or tail.
"Why--why! there's no knowing what you and I may be doing yet, when westrain our wits to cracking, is there, Daddy-man?" she exulted further."You say, yourself, that once space is conquered, that horribly cold oldzero space outside the earth's atmosphere, anything devised that willmove through it, as our Thunder Bird can do, then--then there's nolimit! We might be shooting a passenger off to the moon now, providedthe Man in the Moon would shoot him back," gayly, "if only the mastersky-rocket, twelve times as large as this little model you're working onfor experiments, were ready. The re-al moon-going Thunder Bird! Oh,dear!" Her little fing
ers restlessly intertwined. "How--how I canhar-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'; thatanother than I will be the first to reach the heavenly bodies." Toandoahsighed. "For where are the funds coming from, Pem, the littlebonanza--fairy gold-mine--necessary to gorge our Thunder Bird for itsrecord flight--fit it out for its novel migration to the moon, eh?" Theinventor 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-bluewink--"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! infive--" the slight figure swaying like the blue-eyed grass upon its tallgreen stem, blown by a wild breeze--"in five weeks from now that thethird drawer will be opened, containing the third and last installmentof 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 theUniversity, 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 FriendHartley's fortune, all that his sister, Mrs. Grosvenor, hasn't alreadygot, 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 overtwenty years ago and hasn't sent a line to his family since."
"Was Mr. Treffrey Graham--really--such a--zany?" Pem asked the questionfor 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 collegeone could hardly come near him without getting scorched by his tricks.Remember my telling you about my putting in an appearance in class oneday--Physics 3--boasting of the latest thing in student's bags, settingit down beside me--and not seeing it again for three weeks? The terribleTreff, of course! The climax came, as you know, when he locked agray-haired professor into the padded cell for opposing baseball tooearly in the season, while the campus was still soft."
"Mer-rcy! And kept him there for ages--in that stuffy little room, allwadded and lined with brown burlap, used for analyzing sound--the profnot 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--nobodyknew where. His engagement was broken off. His brother Hartley saw tothat--married the girl himself."
"I wonder--I wonder if the Terrible Treff ever married?" Pem musinglynursed 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, yearsago--that he was a widower, with a little son. But--apparently--he hasno more use for his family."
"No more--no more than his sister, Mrs. Grosvenor, has for us since youwere made executor of that outlandish will, left, piecemeal in threedrawers, to be opened on the first three anniversaries of Mr. Graham'sdeath--and not her husband!" Now it was an entirely new breeze ofexcitement, a stiffening, pinching draught, which swept the forest-greenfigure upon the tool-chest until its voice grew thin and sharp and edgedas the blades in the box beneath it. "Oh-h, yes! she's at daggersdr-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 Quakergun--a Quaker gun that'll never be fired, never go off--never hitanything!... _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 lowplatform.
Through her raging young body there shot like a physical cramp theknowledge that Quakers, noble-hearted Friends, did not use any guns;that the mocking term was but a by-word, a jesting synonym for all thatwas impotent--non-existent in reason and power--a dummy.
Savagely she applied her eye to the tall, ten-foot spectroscope rearingits brazen height from this low pedestal.
Without, beyond the glaring white-washed laboratory, was a Februaryworld, 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 ThunderBird a joke--a _Quaker Gun_!
"Bah!" Convulsively her little teeth bit into her lower lip as sheadjusted the telescope portion of the instrument for analyzinglight--reducing it to prismatic hues--a little.
And now, lo! a world brilliantly jaundiced--her orange--the snow being awonderful reflector of the sun's divided rays.
"Father! Father-r! I used to love Una Grosvenor. Now I h-hate her! Ifher 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 thisafternoon at the Ski Club, the skiing party out at Poplar Hill, I shan'tspeak to her. And we used to be so chummy! Why--" the girl flutterednow, a green weathercock, upon the two-foot platform--"why, we used tostand side by side and measure eyelashes, to see which pair was going tobe the longer. I'll wager mine are now!"
With a veering laugh the weathercock was here bent forward, striving tocatch some brazen glimpse of a winking profile in the polished brass ofthe spectroscope.
Her father laughed: this was the Rose side of her--of his maiden of thepatchwork name--the Rose side of her, and he loved it!
"But--but Poplar Hill! Poplar Hill! Why! that's away outside the cityline--out at Merryville," he exclaimed, a minute later, inconsternation. "Goodness! child, you're not going off there to skito-day--in a zero world, everything snowbound, no trolley cars running?"
"Oh! the trains--the trains aren't held up, father." The coaxingweathercock 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 adaring ski-runner, Daddy-man; you'll be proud of me when you see! Why! Ican almost herring-bone uphill; and I'm getting the kick-turn 'downfine.' Darting, gliding, stemming, jumping downhill--oh! it's suchperfect fun, such creamy fun; I'm not a girl any longer, I'm just aswallow."
"One swallow doesn't make a summer; all this doesn't change theweather." The inventor glanced anxiously through a window.
"No, but it's such a very short train-run. Pouf! only six miles on thetwo o'clock express bound north, why--why! the very train that you and Iwill be taking, later, Daddy-man, along in May, when you try outexperiments with that little model rocket you're working on now, uponold Mount Greylock--highest mountain of the State. Oh-h! if ever agirl's thumb itched, mine does to press the little electric button andstart it off, to fly up a couple of hundred miles, or so, to send youback your golden egg, siree--the first record from space. Oh! throughall the fun of slope and snow I'll be thinking of that the entire timeto-day--the whole, enduring, livelong time. Yes!"