Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl Part 19

"Absent With-Out Leave, as they set it down in the Army!"

Mischief leaped to the Henkyl Hunter's eye.

He beckoned Peagreen from the gra.s.s to follow him. A whisper in the tender-foot's ear and down the winding sod-steps of the cliff they scrambled!

Pem knew that she ought to call them back; knew it from the white parting at the side of her throbbing little head to the toe of her satin slipper tumultuously beating the ground, as she sank down, an orchid amid her chiffons, to watch.

But it was a moment when the spice of her chowchow name had all spilled over; when the Vain Elf which, according to her father, slept in the shadow of the Wise Woman, was broadly--mutinously--awake.

The boat had drawn in alongside the decked float now.

It was gently rocking there, on and off, the rower having s.h.i.+pped his oars and laid them beside him, his strong fingers now and again hooking the wharf when there was danger of his drifting away, while his obsessed nose was bent closer still to the newspaper sheet, catching the last rays of daylight on it.

He did not look up when the scouts, running out over the plank bridge, spoke to him.

Suddenly one of them--Stud it was--leaned down and s.n.a.t.c.hed the oars, lifted them high in the air, the nick.u.m's evil genius having prompted him to lay them in the boat's side nearest the wharf; perhaps it was the demon which he had dared by sitting in the Devil's Chair.

At the same time Peagreen gave the boat a strong shove outward to where a current caught it and swept it further--mockingly further, towards the darkening center of the Bowl.

"Oh! I say--I say, you fellows, that's no stunt to pull off!" roared the nick.u.m wrathfully. "I'm due at the dance now!"

"You're not coming to the dance. There's a girl here who doesn't want you!" rang back the voice of callow chivalry in the barbarous pipe of the tenderfoot.

And Pem, slipping up from the gra.s.s, her hands to her burning cheeks--for she had not meant it to go as far as this--stole back to the piazza, to dance away from the shamefaced ecstasy of reprisal in her heart.

Perhaps she would have felt that this was too sore a snub to inflict for any rudeness on Jack at a Pinch; perhaps she would have compelled her boy-knights to put out in the camp skiff and return those oars--under pain of not dancing with them, at all--had she seen the illuminated column over which the victim's nose had been so disastrously bent.

It was in every sense a highly colored description of her father's record-breaking invention, dwelling particularly, though vaguely, upon the experiments so soon to take place with a lesser Thunder Bird, a smaller rocket, from the remote and misty top of old Mount Greylock.

CHAPTER XIX

A RECORD FLIGHT

It had come at last, that starless night, that stupendous night of which Pemrose had dreamed for a year, as she perched on a laboratory stool and watched her father at work, when the little Thunder Bird, the smaller rocket, would take its experimenting flight, its preliminary canter, up a couple of hundred miles, or so, into the air,--and on into thin s.p.a.ce.

Most das.h.i.+ng explorer ever was, it would keep a diary, or log, of its flying trip.

But whereas travelers, hitherto, had carried that up a sleeve or in a breast-pocket, it would have its journal in its cone-shaped head; the little openwork box, five inches square, with the tape-like paper winding from one to another of the wheels within and the tiny pencil making shorthand markings, curve or dash, as the air pressed upon it, until it got beyond the air-belt altogether--out into that bitter void of s.p.a.ce, where pressure there was none.

No wonder that the inventor called this log the golden egg, for when the magic Bird had flown its furthest, when all the little powder-rockets which, exploding successively, sent it on its way, were spent, then its dying scream would release the log from its bursting head.

Back that would come, fluttering to earth on the wing of a sable parachute, lit on the way, as it drifted down two hundred miles, or so, by the glowworm gleam of a tiny electric battery,--a little dry cell attached to it!

And this, really, was, as Pemrose had said, the kernel of the present experiment to her father, the only witness to prove that the baby Thunder Bird had, indeed, "got there", flown higher than anything earthly had ever ventured before; and that if a little two-footer in the shape of a sky-rocket had done so much, then there was nothing to prevent a twenty-foot steel Bird from flying on indefinitely,--even to Mammy Moon, herself, or fiery-eyed Mars, perhaps.

"I don't believe that Dad has slept for two nights now, thinking about its safe return," said Pemrose to Una, as in the starless, breeze-tickled night the two crouched together upon the mountain-top.

"Well! that little firefly, the tiny electric lamp--the 'wee bit battery', as Andrew calls it--will guide us to finding it when it drifts down," panted the other girl, excitement fixing that little peculiar stand, like a golden lamp, in her dark eye.

"Yes, but--" perhaps her dream in the bungalow of Ta-te, the tempest, was affecting Pemrose--"but suppose, oh! suppose, that the wind--there is a wind--should waft it away--away from us, down the mountainside, to where we couldn't find it in the woods--dark woods--to where somebody, some horrid meddler, might pick it up, and get a look at the Thunder Bird's diary before us ... the first record from so high up. Oh--dear!"

The girl's sigh was echoed by that stealthy wind around her, in whose every whisper there was menace, as it swept through the long gra.s.ses and ruffled the ash trees of Greylock's summit.

Una, to whom this "half the battle", the quick locating of the parachute and its treasure, was not so vital, soared above all threat in this witching-time of excitement--the transcendent hour.

"The Thunder Bird's diary! Oh-h! the Thunder Bird's diary," she repeated dreamily, as if reciting a charm.

Being Camp Fire Girls of fervid imagination, the supreme invention, the beginning of old Earth's reaching out to the heavenly bodies, gained its crowning romance from them.

As moment by moment flew by romance in their young b.r.e.a.s.t.s became a sort of rhapsody that set every thought to wild music.

To Pem it was as she had dreamed it would be, away back in her father's laboratory, before the February train wreck.

Hands seemed reaching out to her from everywhere,--she the satellite reflecting her father's light.

From the four quarters of the habitable earth eyes seemed trained upon her, as she knelt in a little island of flashlight, with her thumb on an electric b.u.t.ton which, connected by wires with a platform about a hundred feet away, would throw the switch and release the magic Bird to flying.

"N-now, keep cool, Pem! Don't get excited--too ex-ci-ted--or-r you may miss the moment when they shout to you: 'R-ready! Shoot!'" breathed Una, so wrought up herself that her words had a sort of little zip, a hiss, in them, like the soft sighing of the breeze at the moment.

Pemrose knew that her father's thoughts were taken up all the time with that summit breeze, on how far it might affect the safe return of the golden egg, as he hovered about the low platform, a hundred feet away, on which the little Thunder Bird was mounted, together with his young a.s.sistant tightening up every bolt and screw for the record flight. A third tall figure hovered near, within the ring of distant flashlight, that of Una's father, as transported now over the whole experiment as if he had never hinted that the far-flying rocket was a Quaker gun.

With the girls in their little fairy-like ring of electric light--to go out like a will o' the wisp presently--was their usual body-guard, old Andrew, who had driven the party up the mountain.

"Cannily noo, la.s.sie! _Cannily._ Dinna be fechless--flighty!" The Scot was breathing like a Highland gust as he cautioned the girl whose tingling little thumb touched lightly as thistledown the fairy b.u.t.ton.

"Whoop!" he grunted sharply. "I reckon they're maist ready, noo, to gie it its fling--let it go!"

It was at this moment that in the distant island of flashlight an arm was flung up. It was that of the professor's young a.s.sistant.

He forgot to bring it down again.

And, lo! a hush, as of a world suspended, fell upon old Greylock,--that grim, black mountain-top.

The long gra.s.ses ceased to whisper. The mountain-ash trees cuddled their little pale berry-babies in awe.

"All R-ready! _Shoot!_"

Toandoah's battle-cry it was.

A roar as of a small bra.s.s cannon, the first gun of the new conquest, responded, as the hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America pressed the b.u.t.ton, triumphantly throwing the switch in the nozzle, or tailpart, of the mounted rocket, a hundred feet away.

Simultaneously the flashlights went out.

And in the darkness--into the blackness the little Thunder Bird soared.

Soared with the wild red eye of its headlight challenging the heavens themselves to stop it, with its comet-like tail of red fire streaming out full twenty feet behind it.