Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl Part 3

In Pemrose it shattered something too.

Wildly she looked into the eyes of the man in the tourist's cap and was conscious that in one of them horror was frozen into a fixed stand, as it 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 the Thunder Bird would drop its expiring one upon the dead surface of the moon, in the knowledge that, the Fates notwithstanding, she was still alive--still alive, to see the great rocket go!

And as for its completion--as to the little gold mine necessary to gorge it for its record flight--why! the third rich nut of which she had spoken a little while ago in her father's laboratory, had not yet been cracked: the third mysterious drawer containing the third and last installment of a dead man's very strange will had not yet been opened.

CHAPTER IV

THE SECOND WRECK

That third nut was cracked just five weeks later in the firelit library of what had been Mr. Hartley Graham's home--the home of a man who during his lifetime, so it was occasionally said, had been, in some ways, almost as eccentric as his madcap brother--and concerning the latter his college chums, those who knew him long ago, were of the opinion that he was a freak whose "head grew beneath his shoulder."

The house, a white marble mansion on Opal Avenue, finest of the old residential streets in the University city of Clevedon, was now occupied by the sister of the two, the mother of Una, who had snapped her fingers at the Thunder Bird, calling it a joke, a dummy, a Quaker gun.

That jeering nickname still rankled in the breast of Pemrose, who looked more like a colorless March Primrose, owing to the lingering shock of that train wreck, upon the spring morning in early April when the family lawyer whose duty it was to settle the affairs of the man who had left three separate portions of his will in as many drawers, to be opened on three successive anniversaries of his death, drew forth the last.

She was not the only pale girl present.

By her side was Una, neighbor again in heart as in body, who laid one little agitated fist on Pem's knee while preparations for reading the will were being made, the two girls nestling together, as in chummy days, three years before, when in the peac.o.c.k pride of thirteen they had conceitedly measured eyelashes.

And the remorseful affection mirrored in that little near-sighted stand in one of Una's pretty dark eyes was only typical of an entirely similar state of feeling in the once scornful b.r.e.a.s.t.s of her father and mother.

Mrs. Grosvenor was no longer "on her high ropes," as Pem had said in her father's laboratory; to-day she seemed to be, rather, on a snubbing-line which brought her up short now and again, even in the middle of a speech, when she looked at the inventor's blue-eyed daughter, his trusty little pal--and that, sometimes, with spray in her eyes, too.

Also, her glances in the direction of the inventor himself, Professor Lorry, with whose name the world was already beginning to ring, were appealing--not to say apologetic.

She was quite sure now that any man who could turn out a daughter, not yet sixteen, to behave in a fearful emergency as Pem had done--without whom her own daughter would not be here to-day, as Una constantly kept repeating--could never forge a gun, be it rocket or rifle, that would hit no mark!

She even expressed some agitated interest in the great invention, inquiring when the first experiments with the little model Thunder Bird, upon a mountain-top, were to take place.

And as for her husband, he boldly declared himself deeply interested in the conquest of the upper air and s.p.a.ce--so far beyond the goal which any aviator had dreamed of reaching yet.

He even went so far as to say that he would be glad to see the remainder of a fortune, represented by that third section of a will, go for the furtherance of the professor's wonderful moon-reaching, planet-reaching scheme, instead of being "hung up" awaiting the return of the dead man's younger brother who had been such a queer flimflam fellow in youth,--whose family did not even know whether he was dead or alive.

And, at first, while the sh.e.l.l of that third nut was being solemnly cracked by the reading of opening sentences of the will--oh! how the heart of Pemrose jumped, like a nut on a hot shovel--it did seem as if the kernel were going to be a rich one for the Thunder Bird.

For now, according to the testator's wish, if his brother, Treffrey Graham, had not yet returned to claim his portion of his elder brother's wealth, then the money--a little bonanza, indeed, a solid fortune--was to be turned over, forthwith, to the University of his native city, to be used for developments in the science of the air--the upper air and what lay beyond it--chiefly for the furtherance of any inventions that might be put forward by the dead man's trusted friend, Professor Lorry.

It was here that two pale girls, abruptly transformed from April primroses to June roses--oh! such pinkly blooming tea-roses--gave simultaneously a wild little shriek.

It was here that Pem, dazzled, saw the Thunder Bird, with a clear sky, tear--tear away moonward--and noticed at the same time, through some little loophole in the watch-tower of her excitement, the figure of a man with a gray tourist's cap pulled down to his eyes, rather waveringly crossing the street without.

He circled to avoid an April puddle,--she saw him clearly through the broad library window, at a distance of some fifty yards, beyond a flight of marble steps and a graveled entrance.

A queer little shiver, a horrid little shiver--a snowflake in summer--drifted down her spine!

The figure had an icy background. She had seen it before amid the terrors of that February train-wreck. The boy who saved her, the boy with the jolly tongue in his head, humorous amid the "horripilation,"

had addressed it as Dad.

And then--then, she caught her breath sharply, as something blew upon her, hot and cold together--and came back to the library, to the present moment.

For the gray-haired lawyer, with his mouth opening gravely, wide as a church door, with a little forward pounce of his body upon the typewritten sheets, the sheets that meant life or death--flight or stagnation--for the Thunder Bird, was beginning to read again.

"Ah, but that's not all, even yet!" he said. "This curious will has dragged its slow length over three years--and now we haven't finished with it, quite. Here's a codicil still to be read--its last word, written later, just two days before Mr. Graham's death, so it seems."

Alack and alas! that was the moment of the second wreck; the moment for one jubilant girl of the dire breakdown, when the Victory Express to Clover Land, goal of blossoming success, crashed through into zero waters of blankest disappointment,--almost as bitter as those in which she had held up her friend.

For the last word of the strung-out will set forth that, whereas it seemed borne in upon Mr. Hartley Graham, with life drawing to a close, that he had not been quite fair to his madcap brother in youth, and that the latter would some day return, the disposal of his wealth in the other direction named--to the University and for invention--should not come into effect for at least twelve years after the opening of that third drawer.

"And so--and so, it's all hung up for another dozen years--unless Treffrey Graham comes back to claim the money! Well! I'm sorry, Professor Lorry; there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip," said the lawyer, laying down the codicil with a blue look; he was interested in invention, progressive invention--he had never thought that the Thunder Bird was a Quaker gun.

"And so it's all hung up for the next twelve years," was the baffled cry which went around the circle, with no single note of longing for the wanderer's return.

It would not have been very flattering to the terrible Treff, if he was alive and present to hear, thought a gnashing Pemrose: to the exile who had been such a hazing firebrand at college, burning out the fine flame of youth in the straw blaze of senseless pranks,--a griffin and shatterpated jester.

CHAPTER V

SHE SAVED A CITY

"And so--and so it's all hung up for another twelve years--the Thunder Bird's flight! For I don't suppose there's much chance of the money coming from another direction."

Pemrose Lorry echoed the cry, repeated it desolately, hours later, standing in her own room--a room that was a sort of sequel to herself, as every Camp Fire Girl's nest should be.

Her father had echoed it, as she sat very close to him, driving home in the Grosvenor's limousine.

"Well! so far this strung-out will has been for us much cry and little wool, eh, girlie," he muttered; and for the first time she heard discouragement in his voice; perhaps he had "banked" upon that third nut more than he admitted.

"So the money is hung up for the next dozen years, as far's any benefit to the invention is concerned," he went on presently, just before his own home was reached. "I'd better be putting my time into something else, I guess," with a raw sc.r.a.pe in the tones. "How--how about a machine for the manufacture of paper clothing, eh, or airdrawn rugs--"

sarcastically--"prosperity, _riches_, in that! Ha! Get thee behind me, Satan--but don't push!" added the inventor whimsically, thrusting his head out of the auto window,--with a sound that was neither laugh nor groan.

"Get thee behind me, Satan--and don't push!"

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 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 s.p.a.ce.

And the girl in her buoyant young heart of hearts felt that hope--nay, certainty--were still there, green, springing, as the first signs of happy springtime in the world outside.

How--how was she to make him feel it; she his little Wise Woman, his laboratory pal?