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"How how I can har-rdly wait to throw the switch upon a mountaintop and watch it tear, as the college boys say!" "Sometimes sometimes I'm inclined to think it will never 'tear'; that another than I will be the first to reach the heavenly bodies." Toandoah sighed.
And there you are, Toandoah, with that queer Indian triangle having the teeth of a saw, the emblem of invention." "What! That funny, squat figure, with something like a three-cornered fool's-cap on my head and the moon above it, looking through a tube!"
Turning from a bench where he sat fiddling with a steel chamber, part of the anatomy of a fledgling Thunder Bird, of one of those small model rockets which he was fitting up for experiments on a mountain-top, the inventor watched her listlessly. "Hullo! What's the charm now, the thing of beauty? That that looks such stuff as dreams are made of." Toandoah drew a long breath.
Up and down old Greylock she plodded, looking for it, hand in hand with Toandoah, but ever it eluded them! Muttering, bereft, she tossed; then for a moment awoke, blinkingly sat up, to see the moonlight flickering Mammy Moon's own smile upon the pearl-woven prophecy beside her, from which she could hardly be parted by night or day. Sleep again!
"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."
"Lay its egg in a nest of the moon! A dead nest! It will do more than that, little Pem!" Toandoah, the inventor, turned from fitting a number of tiny sky-rockets into the supply chamber of a larger one, turned with that living coal of fire in his eye which only the inventor can know, and looked upon his daughter. "Yes, it will do more than that!
You've plugged like a boy at your elementary physics in high school, so's to be able to understand and sympathize you've lived up to the name I gave you " "My chowchow name!" interjected the girl, winking slily. "Well! it is a mixture." Her father echoed her chuckle. "But I guess you've been son and daughter both, you good little pal you sprite of the lab." "Oh! Toandoah oh!
Her brother disclaimed responsibility with a shrug while the little lamp winked sarcastically from his hatbrim but in the heedful tone of the boy who had been trained to feel as Toandoah did with his little petticoated pal that Life was a game in which two could hunt together, even upon the trail of a Thunder Bird, and make good headway. "We can't turn him back!" Stud shrugged his khaki shoulders.
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 space.
Her father, Professor Guy Noel Lorry, Fellow of Nevil University, Toandoah, the inventor, she called him, wearing his symbol, a saw-toothed triangle, embroidered with her own upon her ceremonial dress had at one time almost prayed for a son, a boy who might help him to realize the dream, even then taking hold upon his heart, of conquering not the air alone but space zero space, in which it was thought nothing could travel so that old Earth might reach out to her sister planets.
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