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Updated: June 25, 2025
And, at first, while the shell 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.
Yet when still another six weeks had passed and Pemrose, with all the green world of spring in her heart, stood, breathless, upon that Lenox pinnacle a pine-clad mountainette some thirteen hundred feet above sea-level lo and behold! there was a nickum sitting coolly in the Devil's Chair. A brazen feat it was!
"My father!... Oh! my fa-ther!" It was a wild little cry to which the Man Killer rang now, as the head of Pemrose Lorry went down upon her knees. "Yes, I'm glad his way is clear though, I suppose, only a man 'whose head grew under his arm' would have managed the thing as I have done." The sufferer winked through the veil of pain. "Now! my son is different.
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. "And so and so it's all hung up for another twelve years the Thunder Bird's flight!
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.
But of one climax, more celestial still, Pemrose Lorry could not speak, not even to these her Camp Fire Sisters: of the evening of the second wreck the wreck of hope after that third installment of a disappointing will had been read when she had taken the four feet and a half of pearl poem to her father's workshop, the grim hardware laboratory, and out of the home of light, which she herself hardly understood, in her young, young heart, had told him, doubtful of the future, that she knew the invention would win out the Thunder Bird go where nothing earthly had ever gone before.
The fragrance of that imaginary heather-bloom tucked away in the impassive chauffeur's breast was occasionally apparent in a furtive glance thrown skyward, or in a momentary glisten of mist in the gray shell of the mechanical eye. It had made the whole family of his employers very sympathetic towards Andrew, as to a friend. And now a whiff of that heather memory stood Pemrose in good stead.
Up the rude sod steps of the cliff they trooped a bevy of shivers fleeing for warmth and the shelter of the bungalow. "Oo-oo-oo! I've never been in bathing so early in the year before," shook out Pemrose, to whom the experience the 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.
"Little girl!" Treffrey Graham's eye winked upon a mote of fun that softened to a mist. "Your fa-ther's invention is the gr-reatest thing yet; it's a Success I know that from the one glimpse I had at the record " Pemrose winced "but but you may tell him from me that I doubt if, after all, his Thunder Bird is the best thing he's turned out." "Some-somebody coming!
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 space.
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