Isabel Hornibrook

“ I don’t know what we may find on any other–that’s ‘banner’, it’s a marshmallows toast out-of-doors–isn’t it?” chanted Una, intoning her delight to the trees, the low spruce and pine scrub, as she skipped among them, an evergreen sprite, herself, for she, too, now wore the “bonnie green”, the Camp Fire short skirt, middy blouse and captivating Tam-o’-shanter–most nymph-like note in dress for daughters of the woodland.
“And–and I just know the dear-est, loveliest pin-ey nook,” she went on in a choir-boy sing-song; “half-way down the Pinnacle’s softer side it is, where we may build our fire. ”

“ The eyes of Pemrose were a patchwork now, flame embroidered upon their shining blue; oh! if she were to give forth what Life gave to her, which of her Camp Fire Sisters would have such riches to reflect?
It had been hers–hers–to share the dream of a great inventor, to look forward with him to the pioneering moment–the beginning of that which would surely, in time, draw the Universe visibly together–the moment when the Thunder Bird should fly. ”

“ The girls, blanching, shrank against the opposite cave-wall, which shuddered behind them.
A bat, flying low, a winged Fear, brushed Tanpa’s cheek, as she stood, transfixed,–and her cry was almost as hysterical as theirs.
In the blackness of that Tinker’s Pot behind the looming fissure, were there other things–other things besides a boy, a broken braggart of a boy?
Was Death in the pot with him? Had he sipped of its mystery–only to perish? Death–it seemed a raving possibility–in the shape of some wild animal, perhaps–a live, a clutching claw! ”

“ Oh-h! who’s doing it–answering?” breathed Pemrose Lorry, feeling thrown into the shade with her Thunder Bird; which wasn’t altogether bad for her, either. “Oh! it’s you, is it? Where’s the whistle–the bird-caller’s whistle?”
“Here. Look!” A maiden shy as a hermit-thrush herself, with rufous lights in her sleek brown hair, and tiny, red-brown specks flecking the iris of her eyes–corresponding to the many freckles upon her small face, with a luminous quality added–opened a volunteering palm. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Tears sprang to those blue eyes of Pemrose now, as she recalled the half-piteous tone in the voice.
Toandoah was discouraged. Toandoah was tempted–tempted to sacrifice the 51 highest claim of his intellect, his original dream, or the dream whose originality he had made practical, of reaching the heavenly bodies; of being a pioneer in exploring the Universe outside his own earth and its enveloping atmosphere; of finding out the secrets of that mysterious upper air, and where it ended, of getting back a record of it–the Thunder Bird’s golden egg, the first record from space. ”

“ Jack at a Pinch had made gorgeous his incivility and was parading it before her eyes.
“Oh, boy! Look at that middle fellow. He’d have a grosbeak ‘skun a mile’!” gasped Stud, following the direction of her glance, with a virtuous consciousness of his own cave-soiled khaki, moderately lit by merit badge and service stripe.
“‘Grosbeak!’ Oh, but I love grosbeaks! And all that color–why! it paints the landscape,” came flutteringly from Aponi, the White Birch Butterfly, least Priscilla-like in her tastes of the Group, when she was not in Camp Fire green, or soft-toned ceremonial dress. ”

“ And never–oh! never since the history of Mother Earth and her satellite began did such a spectacular traveler start on such a flaming trip as when the hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America threw the switch and the steel explorer, twenty feet long, leaped from its platform high into the air, pointed directly for the moon, with a great inventor’s mathematical precision,–trailing its two-hundred-foot, rosy trail of fire. ”

“ When Pemrose, a Camp Fire Girl of 32 America, greater at that moment than when her hand should loose the Thunder Bird, because she was determined that whatever might be said of her father’s invention, nobody should ever say that his daughter’s courage was a Quaker gun, paddled through the window-gap of that swamped Pullman, towing Una, she found herself in such a vortex of zero water and shattered ice that all the strength behind her gasping breath turned suddenly dummy. ”

“ Pem was staring intently at the speaker, her black brows drawn together over eyes as speculatively blue as ever they had been in Toandoah’s laboratory when grasping, or trying to, grave problems of the air.
“Oh! I know. I know!” she cried suddenly, the blue breaking up in the firelight into a harlequin patchwork of merry gleams. “A henkyl! Why-y! it’s a joke. A joke that they’re forever chasing up and down, trying to get a laugh against somebody,–that absurd brigade!”
“Companionship with a Thunder Bird has sharpened your wits,” smiled the Guardian. ”

“ And now–now–to the inventor’s daughter, the girl-mechanic, who had plugged so hard at her high school physics that she might understand her father’s work, came a thought that was worse, worse even than the hiss of the imprisoned flood, tossing her like a cork: the engine might explode–the sneezing, 28 sobbing engine, with the steam condensing in its boilers–wreck the car she was in–she and Una!
No! She did not think of herself alone. All the frail girlish ice was a gimcrack now. ”

“ 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 2 with a wild little gasp whose triumph was a sob upon the still laboratory air. ”

“ The Pinnacle, the green Pinnacle, towered until it seemed very near to her with the mounting pride in one girl’s breast.
“Toandoah, the inventor, is my father–oh! Professor Lorry, I mean. The Thunder Bird–the record-breaking Thunder Bird–is his invention. I call it that; an ordinary rocket he says it is.”
Well! the sky was in Pem’s eyes, of a truth, now, enough blue to make a Blue Peter, the flag of embarking, the flag of adventure; no rudeness of “nickum”, earthbound, boastful, could ever humiliate her again, with Toandoah’s emblem in her heart. ”

“ Joking apart, it does draw the Universe very near together, doesn’t it–open the road to such wonderful possibilities!”
Her hands came together as she gazed, that graceful, green-clad woman, speechless, transfigured, along the aërial high-road on which the Thunder Bird would first pay toll by dropping its golden egg, 106 its record, off–off beyond the low night-clouds to the mysterious sky-ways where daylight now mated with dusk and the lunar lamps were being softly lighted, even to the gateway of Mammy Moon herself. ”

“ She never qualified that dream by an if, wherever the funds to equip it might come from–or even if it had to wait a dozen years, Toandoah’s triumph, like that fortune “hung up–” for the great Bird to 178 make its new migration to the moon, in proof that space was no barrier–when the Thunder Bird, giving all, as the log had done, would drop its skeleton upon the desert of that silent satellite. ”

“ Jubilate! It’s our anniversary day as a White Birch 119 Group when we hold a sort of carnival in he afternoon in honor–in honor of the de-ar birch trees just bursting into leaf.” Aponi fluttered like green tree-hair, herself. “And that’s to be followed–whoopee!–by a party: a real, full-blown June dance in the evening–to which all the boys are invited. And–and, maybe, some girls not of our Groups will find an invitation tucked into their stockings, too,” slily. “But for the picnic this week the Boy Scouts are hosts.” ”

“ And, oh! won’t it–won’t it be a sight to watch–it–tear?”
Drooping towards the fire-glow, lips parted in entranced assurance, the slight figure became lost in the same dream which had held it months before in a February Pullman, while a daring flame, like a red-capped pearl diver, plunging into the mystery of that fairy thing, that gleaming stole about her neck brought out milky flashes of luster–together with those New Jerusalem tints, jade and gold and ruby. ”

“ For ice was within the car, as without.
There–there, seated almost on a 21 line with her, on the other side of the moss-green aisle, and only three other distant passengers in the compartment, was the girl whose caricaturing tongue had repeated the indelible insult about a Quaker gun; whose mother considered her father a mere chuckle-headed dreamer, with his visions of bridging the absolute zero of space–just a mild three hundred degrees, or so, lower than the biting breath of Mother Earth at the present moment–and reaching worlds far away amid the starry scope. ”

“ I’ve never been in bathing so early in the year before,” shook out Pemrose, to whom the experience–the 199 lingering chill of this mountain Bowl many hundred feet above sea-level–was rather too much of a weak parody upon her last freshwater ducking.
“Oh! you’ll soon warm up. Come, hurry and dress! It’s no end of fun studying water-snails and egg-boats–gnats’ funny egg-boats–under a microscope, with the Scoutmaster,” encouraged Tomoke, in everyday life Ina Atwood, blue as her lightning namesake, and rather hankering after the warmth of her pine-knot torch. ”

“ She crept, for reassurance, very close to the mountain woman, the typical June woman, with the normal rose in her cheeks, and the golden buttercup for a heart, as she picnicked, subdued, by the trail fire.
“I don’t think–oh! I don’t believe I ever met anybody q-quite like you before. But I’m so glad you’re in the world!” she murmured gratefully.
“And I just wish you could come into my world often, girlie,” was the cuddling answer, “for it’s lonely as old Sarum here on the mountainside–though where old Sarum is I don’t know myself!” breezily.
“Nor I!” laughed Una. ”

“ My father doesn’t miss.” The young head of Pemrose Lorry queened it in the darkness, with a pride which made of old Greylock, at that moment, the world’s throne. “But how–how are we to live through the next hundred hours–the next four days–the time the Thunder Bird will take to travel?”
Yet they did succeed in living through it and in leading time a merry dance too, for young Treffrey Graham, junior, all old scores forgotten, was proving a prince of chums, as spirited in play as he was prompt in a pinch. ”

“ A roar as of a small brass cannon, the first gun of the new conquest, responded, as the hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America pressed the button, triumphantly throwing the switch in the nozzle, or tailpart, of the mounted rocket, a hundred feet away. ”

“ Pem smiled; in the present crisis of her young life she didn’t care if her friend’s eyelashes were longer than hers by a whole ell. And Andrew sighed because of that one “sair memory” which had oppressed him on the Pinnacle.
The serio-comic passion in the green-framed face, the fervor in the one little clenched fist drooping at Una’s side, might well have won over all the good fairy-hosts that ever landed in the wake of the Pilgrims, and set them to scouring Greylock for the missing record from on high.
“Now then! Pemrose, it’s up to you! Turn your backbone into a wishbone.” ”

“ Well! star-dust never blinded the eyes. But it certainly dazzled those of 211 Pemrose, that young visionary, as she pressed earth around her sapling’s root: would there ever come a time when the Camp Fires of Earth would hail the Camp Fires of some other planet across that illimitable No Man’s Land of Space, first–oh! ”

“ In her young blood, as in Andrew’s, was the extravagant excitement of the whole experiment,–this first step in the ladder of demonstration which was by and by to reach the moon–lending to all an unearthly touch.
“The–the Man Killer trail! Why! that’s one place where we haven’t searched–yet!” A moping Pemrose suddenly awoke. ”

“ Girls! Dear–girls!” The eyes of Tanpa, the Guardian, were ablaze now with more than the firelight’s glow, as she tossed her browned cakes on to a platter. “Dear girls! In the new, the wider future before us–soon to confront all of you–let us bring to it our Camp Fire hall-mark: the hall-mark of the woods: purity of the Pinnacle’s breath, the ‘pep’ of the outdoor dawn–tenderness of the twilight, when we feel that God is near!... ”

“ Those eyes were now fastened to the back of the nickum’s close-cropped head, to his broad shoulders in a rough, gray sweater, noting a certain “bully” shrug of those shoulders at the surrounding landscape, as if, monarch of all he surveyed, he yet felt himself a usurper in his present seat.
“Something rotten–something rotten in the State of Denmark!” crowed Pemrose 68 softly. “I wonder if he’s getting that off now? Una! Una! It’s He ... He!”
“Who? Who?”
“The man–the boy–who saved us after the train-wreck ... without whom we mightn’t be here–now! ”