CHAPTER III
THE WRONG SIDE OF HER DREAM
The ice had been thick-ribbed, product of a bitter winter, but it couldnot withstand the shock of a hundred and eighty tons of leapinglocomotive--it splintered in all directions.
Of the whole long train, however, only two cars and the cab had followedthe engine's plunge when those skidding pony-wheels turned traitor, andwere now ice-bound and flooded in the middle of a small lake, while theremainder of the fast express, with one coach actually standing on itshead, hanging pendent between the ice and the bridge, was not submerged.
It was as if a steel bar were hurled violently at that solid ice, whenone end only would pierce the crust and the remainder be left sticking,slanting, up.
When Pemrose, a Camp Fire Girl of America, greater at that moment thanwhen her hand should loose the Thunder Bird, because she was determinedthat whatever might be said of her father's invention, nobody shouldever say that his daughter's courage was a Quaker gun, paddled throughthe window-gap of that swamped Pullman, towing Una, she found herself insuch a vortex of zero water and shattered ice that all the strengthbehind her gasping breath turned suddenly dummy.
"S-stick tight, Una! Oh-h! stick tight," was the one little whiff thatspeech could get off before it froze--froze stiff behind her chatteringteeth, in the pinched channel of her throat.
And then--then--she was clinging to the jagged spur of an ice-cake, herleft hand convulsively clutching Una's flannels, while the eddies in thehalf-liberated water around them, spreading from a blue-cold center to awhite ring, made horrid eyes--goggle-eyes--which stared at them.
To Pem--little visionary--plunged from her dreams of pressing the magicbutton on a mountain-top, of watching the Thunder Bird tear, tear awaymoonward, switching its long tail of light, the whole thing seemed anillusion--the wrong side of her dream.
It was as if she had soared with that monster rocket, Toandoah'sinvention, outside the earth's atmosphere, were being hurled about inthe horrible vacuum of space, its unplumbed heart of cold, so far--soannihilatingly far below the balmy zero point of old Mother Earth on aFebruary day when two light-hearted girls were going skiing.
She was growing numb.
In vain did her waterproof wind-jacket, the ski-runner's belted jacketof thin and trusty silk, defend, like a faithful wing--a warm, consciouswing--the upper part of her body.
The deadly water was encroaching, clasping her waist with an icygirdle,--stealing under it, even to her armpits.
And the petrifying little hand which had left its fistling in thetrain,--the thick mitten that should have grasped the balancing stick inall the wild swallow-fun of climbing, stemming, darting amid slope andsnow upon a wintry hillside--could not hold on very long to the glacialspur.
The ice-cake was threatening to slip away, to seesaw, turn turtle andwaltz off, to the tune of blood-curdling sounds: screams for help here,there, everywhere, always with the background of that menacing hiss ofsteam in the great engine's boilers--that low, sneezing uz-z-z! as if itwere taking cold from its bath--the engine that, at any moment, mightexplode.
Frantically she would have struck out, the little girl-mechanic, andfought the whole ice-pack to get away from that threat, to reach a solidcrust, but she knew that she could not "swim" two, herself and Una.
Yet would they go under--one or both--perish in water not deep becauseof the starving cold, even if--if the engine...?
Her teeth snapped together upon the thought, its diddering horror.Surely, it was as bad a predicament as could be for a girl!
But, suddenly, through all the horripilation there seemed to shine alight.
Somehow, Pem was conscious of it in the poor numb sheath of her owngirlish being--and beyond.
And she knew that her stark lips were praying: "Oh! Lord--oh!Father--help me-e to hold on. Don't let us--go--under! I want--I wantso-o to live to see Daddy's rocket go off!... He ..."
The stiff sobs tumbled apart there, as it were.
But the Light remained, the Presence, so near as it seemed to Pem at themoment--even as she had felt it before upon a mountain-top, or at somematchless moment of beauty--that she almost lisped confusedly: "Daddy inHeaven!" as once, a two-year-old, she had prattled it at her father'sknee.
Then what--what? Another voice prattling near her--chattering icily! Abully human voice!
"Gosh! Something r-rotten in the State of Denmark," it gasped. "Jove! Ilike excitement, but I'd rather be warm enough to enjoy it. Oh! Dad, ifthere are any others left in that car, the one on end, you help 'em. Imust attend to these girls."
"T-take her first--Una!" flickered Pem, a spicy flicker still, as shefelt a strong grasp on her shoulder and looked up into the face of abroad-shouldered youth in a gray sweater; the engine might explode, but,to the last, they should not say of Toandoah's daughter that her couragewas a Quaker gun.
"Jove! but you're game," flashed the youth. "Well, keep up--hangon--I'll be back in a minute!"
The minute was three.
He had to lift the second girlish victim almost bodily out of the waterand drag her with him as he wriggled and crawled over the brokenice-pack, to reach a firm spot, where he picked her up and--with all thevigor of an athletic eighteen-year-old--carried her to the shore, nownot more than twenty yards off.
"Humph! I was just in time, wasn't I?" he ejaculated on the transit. "ByGeorge! You've got pep, if ever a girl had--I'll wager you pulled yourfriend out of the parlor-car and held her up! Some horripilation, eh?"breezily. "Now--now what have you and I ever done that the Fates shouldwish this on to us--that's what I'd like to know?"
It was what the daring little ski-runner, Pem, herself, had been vaguelywondering; she liked this jolly wit-snapper who preferred his excitementwarm.
"Ha! there goes the engine exploding," he gasped a moment later, as heset her down. "Bursting inward! Now, if it had done the mean thing,burst outward, piling up the agony, doing a whole lot of damage, 'twouldhave been quicker about it.... Oh--you! Dad," to a gray-bearded man,with a gray traveling cap pulled down almost to his eyes. "Here, I'llhand over these girls to you now! Will you look after them? I'd bettergo back."
Simultaneously there was a low, sullen roaring, the crack of doom, ascondensed steam sucked in the heavy steel casing of the locomotive'sboilers and shattered it like an eggshell.
In Pemrose it shattered something too.
Wildly she looked into the eyes of the man in the tourist's cap and wasconscious that in one of them horror was frozen into a fixed stand, asit was in one of Una's, as he helped her up a snowy bank.
And, with that, her brain laid its last egg for the present, as theThunder Bird would drop its expiring one upon the dead surface of themoon, in the knowledge that, the Fates notwithstanding, she was stillalive--still alive, to see the great rocket go!
And as for its completion--as to the little gold mine necessary to gorgeit for its record flight--why! the third rich nut of which she hadspoken a little while ago in her father's laboratory, had not yet beencracked: the third mysterious drawer containing the third and lastinstallment of a dead man's very strange will had not yet been opened.