CHAPTER II
GIMCRACK ICE
She was thinking of it two hours later--having gained her coaxingpoint--seated in the well-nigh empty parlor car of the north-boundexpress, that green-aisled Pullman being the first car behind the caband plodding engine which, regardless of schedule, crept along slowlyand warily to-day upon ice-shod rails.
But as she caressed the honorable thumb--the little girlish member whichwould press the button while all the world wondered--and peered outthrough a window fairly frosted, lo! again she saw a landscape dimly inflames--blood-red--as viewed through the spectroscope of her own ragingthoughts.
For ice was within the car, as without.
There--there, seated almost on a line with her, on the other side of themoss-green aisle, and only three other distant passengers in thecompartment, was the girl whose caricaturing tongue had repeated theindelible insult about a Quaker gun; whose mother considered her fathera mere chuckle-headed dreamer, with his visions of bridging the absolutezero of space--just a mild three hundred degrees, or so, lower than thebiting breath of Mother Earth at the present moment--and reaching worldsfar away amid the starry scope.
Pemrose had kept her word about not speaking. She just dropped onepointed little icicle in the shape of a nod upon her one-time friend asshe sank into her own swivel chair and threw off the heavy coat withwhich she had covered her ski-runner's silken wind-jacket and beltedskiing costume of pure, creamy wool, with its full freedom ofknickerbockers.
"There's Una--Una Grosvenor!" Her face frosted over at the thought. "Oh,mer-rcy! how I hate her--shall everlastingly hate her--for passing onthat sneer about the Thunder Bird.... And I know-ow her eyelashes aren'tas long as mine now!"
Mingled spice was in the furtive glance which Toandoah's little pal, hismaiden of the chowchow name, threw across the narrow train-aisle at thedelicate young profile opposite, outlined against a crusted window.
"And she still has that funny little near-sighted stand in one of herdark eyes, too--Una! Although they're pretty eyes--I'll admit that!"mused the critic further. "Goodness! won't she open them one of thesedays when the world is all ringing with talk of Dad and his rocket: whenthe Thunder Bird, the finished, full-fledged Thunder Bird, undertakesits hundred-hour flight to the moon.... For, oh! I know-ow that it willgo, some day--some day." The girl stared passionately now into thefuture in the frostscript of the pane near her. "Man would not let itfail, God _could_ not let it fail--just for lack of funds--howeverthat third nut may turn out--that third section of a queer will!"
And now the mulled world outside changed again, shading from blood-redto fairy rose-color as seen through the spectroscope of hope.
She became lost in the most magnificent dream that ever entranced a CampFire Girl yet--with any hope of fulfillment.
Standing of a starless night upon a lofty mountain-top, she was lookingup at Mammy Moon, dear, silver-footed Queen, so near to the heart ofevery Earth-daughter!
In the darkness she felt the eyes of the whole world upon her--she but asatellite reflecting her father's light--its joint ear was bent to catchthe wild, triumphal song-sob of her heart.
And at the words: "Ready! Shoot!", Toandoah's battle-cry, she waspressing the electric button which, connected with a switch in theThunder Bird's tail, would start it off, pointed directly for the moon,to light up that silver disc with a bright powder-flash visible here onearth.
She was mesmerized by its wild, red eye. She was watching it switch itsrosy tail feathers, two hundred feet long, that dashing explorer, as,roaring, it leaped from its mountain platform at incredible speed for anincredible flight.
She was echoing the college boys' untamed slogan: "Watch it tear; oh!watch it tear--the fire-eater."
She....
But what--what was this? Was she tearing with it? Was she, she herself,just a shocked girl, at the heart of its rapid-fire explosions?
Was she being hurled with it through space, blank space, Absolute Zero,below what human instrument could register,--or human girl encounter andlive?
All she knew was that she was being flung, first forward, then backward;and then, oh, horrors! against the train window near her where glass wasall splintering and crashing, through which ice and water, mad, madwater and ice, were rushing together.
There was an awful, punching jolt, a frenzied shriek of steam, asplashing, hissing roar--that, surely, could not be the steel ThunderBird's challenge, unless it had suddenly become a wading goose--and, lo!she was hurled straight out of her dream across a Pullman aisle, fastflooding, right into the girl with whom she had once vainly measuredeyelashes,--between whom and herself had existed that thin bridge of icebut one little minute before.
Alas! poor human ice that couldn't stand a moment under the blows ofNature's ice-hammer.
Both pairs of girlish lashes were stark with terror now.
"Una! Una! _Una!_ Ac-ci-dent! Tr-rain accident! Gonethrough--through into--the--lake!" moaned Pemrose, half stunned, yetconscious, as she was ten seconds before, that they had been crossingfrozen water.
Water! A pale pond, now plainly seen through awful, swirling,wave-blocked window-gaps! Yet across its wan and shattering crust thereshone a trail of fire, red fire, heart fire--vivid at that moment as theThunder Bird's pink tail feathers switching through the space ofhorror--and somewhere in that stretched consciousness which is beyondthinking, Toandoah's daughter knew that it was the Camp Fire training inpresence of mind.
"Una! M-mer-rcy! Una! Water's r-rushing in-n--in so fast--throughwindows--doors ahead--m-may dr-rown right here, 'less we can f-fightit--get out," was her struggling cry as, paddling desperately like alittle dog, she found herself topping the flood, that lashing, internedlake-water, now blotting out window-frames on one side of thecar--groping with icy fingers for the painted ceiling of thePullman--then undulatingly sinking below them on the other.
For it was a case just half-a-minute before, while Pem was stillsanguinely loosing the Thunder Bird, of small pony-wheels on the bigexpress engine striking a frog in the rails, an icy groove, andskidding,--then recklessly plunging down four feet, those runawayponies, from the low bridge which they were crossing on to the ice,dragging the engine, the cab and the two front cars with them.
And now--now--to the inventor's daughter, the girl-mechanic, who hadplugged so hard at her high school physics that she might understand herfather's work, came a thought that was worse, worse even than the hissof the imprisoned flood, tossing her like a cork: the engine mightexplode--the sneezing, sobbing engine, with the steam condensing in itsboilers--wreck the car she was in--she and Una!
No! She did not think of herself alone. All the frail girlish ice was agimcrack now.
But the terrors of the swamped car, that snuffling threat of steamahead--a deep bass uz-z-z!--momentarily made a gimcrack of other thingstoo--of everything but the desperate instinct to get out--free, somehow.
Calling upon Una to follow, she headed for a dripping window-gap, toseize the moment when the flood, now lower upon that side, might giveher a chance to paddle through--scramble through--escape on to thecracking ice, before the opening was again blotted out.
But together with the cruelty of glass-splinters, ice-spars scratchingher set face, came the shock of an inner splinter: an inkling, somehow,that Una was helpless, could not follow, that, battered by concussion,tossing like a log upon the flood's breast, her senses had almost lefther.
Many waters cannot quench love--the love of a daughter for hergenius-father.
In that moment--that moment--there leaped up in the breast of Toandoah'schild the fire, the red fire, which alone can carry anything higher, beit rocket or girl's heart.
They had called her father's invention a joke, a Quaker gun, Una and hermother.
_Never_ should they say that of his daughter's pluck: that it was adummy which would hit no mark,--or only to save itself!
"Una!" Wildly she seized the other girl's creamy flannels, buoyed like agreat, pale water-lily upon the imprisone
d lake-water. "Catch--c-catchme by the belt--Una! I--I'll try-y to save you! Oh-h! s-stick ti-ightnow."
And the daughter of the man, still sitting afar in his quiet laboratory,fitting little powder charges into a model Thunder Bird, setherself to battle through the swirling gap of that half-coveredwindow-frame--clutched and hampered now--yet upholding, even if it washer daring death-thought, Toandoah's honor in the flood.