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 space.

Most dashing 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 space, 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 grasses 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 breasts 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 button 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 assistant 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, lassie! _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 button. "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 assistant.

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 grasses 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 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.

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.

At lightning speed,--fifty miles the first minute, a hundred the next,--it leaped from its mountain platform straight up--bound for the vacant lot of space.

Explosion after bright explosion tore the cloud-banks as, one by one, the innumerable little rockets, which Pem had watched her father fitting into their grooves in its interior--far back in that quiet laboratory--went off.

And with each radiant roar higher--faster--it dashed, the little Thunder Bird, with never a puff of smoke to dim the spectacle--the transplendency of its flight.

"Michty! Michty!... _Magerful!_"

There was just the one skirl from Andrew, to lend it music on its upward way; he had not thought that he came to America to witness a thing like this.

"Magerful", indeed! Magical, indeed! The others were silent, swept away by the magic of it--the greater, moon-storming magic to come.

Only--only, they breathlessly asked themselves: "What next?"

Well! the immediate "next" would be the return of the golden egg, the diary, the falling fruit of the experiment, without which there was no proof of its success--of how high the fiery Bird had flown--before, its last automatic charge expended, it sang its swan-song somewhere in space.

At the increasing speed with which the little Thunder Bird flew--when miles were but a moment--the record might be expected back in a few minutes.

Minutes--but they seemed a moon's age!

It was Una--Una--who saw it first: the tiny speck of star-dust drifting down, down among the woolly clouds--dark as if the night had been shorn and its fleece hung out to dry--alighting here and there, the little firefly, in other words the atomy electric battery attached to the precious record, trying so hard, with the parachute's aid, to find its way back to earth from the lonely height it had reached.

Another quarter of a minute, and they could trace the outline of the black silk parachute, itself, a drifting crow with their prize in its claws; that prize which the inventor, at least, would have given ten years of his life to grasp--if, grasping it, he could see that the little pencil had duly made its record markings--the proof that his Thunder Bird had "got there."

"Glory halleluiah! it's drifting down right into our laps--into the old mountain's lap, rather! The wind won't carry it far, I bet! 'Twill land within quarter of a mile of us, anyhow," shrieked the professor's young assistant, a college boy, an athlete, who had led the quarter-mile sprint on many a hard-won field, when the racing honor of a school was at stake; and he ran as never before to get the better of the tricky gusts and seize the parachute--faster, even, than the nickum, that mysterious youth, had run, when he saved the day for the mountain team at baseball.

"Hoot mon! Dinna ye let it get away frae ye into the dar-rk woods!" skirled Andrew, equally excited, and filled with awe of the raven parachute now springing, like a great, black mushroom, out of the night--and of the firefly which had been up so high.

"Oh! it is--it is drifting towards the dark spruce woods--where we'll have hard work to find it."

In the wild chase after the prize, Pemrose made a good third, as she thus shouted her fear.

"See--oh! see, it _is_ landing," she cried again, "c-coming down--touching earth."

Yes! for one fleeting instant it did alight upon a mound, the shooting starlet, the little electric dry cell, winking brilliantly against the background of somber evergreens, now dark as Erebus, that girdle old Greylock's crown.

Then, freakish firefly, there, it was off again, the prey of the nickum gusts, before ever a hand could touch it--the black parachute rotating like a whirligig.

Never--oh, never--was such a chase for such a prize since mountain was mountain and man was man!

Once again the steely clog, the weight of the five-inch box containing the recording apparatus, the precious log, almost dragged it to a standstill! But the summit gusts were strong.

Even the college boy began to have heart-quakes and Pemrose heart-sinkings.

"Jove! What a stunt you're pulling off on us, you old black crow of a parachute--you booby-headed umbrella!" groaned he. "C-can't you stay put for just a second? Or are you bent on leading us a dance through the woods?"

He began to lose hope of its landing in his lap, that breezy athlete, as it made straight for the jaws of darkness now, the inky spruce-belt--the parachute coquetting with its pursuers, like a great black fan.

Was--was it the wind then?

Something--something caught it up, the golden log--the first record from space--something snatched it up and whisked it off, off into those blackamoor woods, while the feet of the foremost runner were still many yards away.

"'Twas na the wind! 'Twas mon or deil; I saw it loop out frae the boggart trees!" roared Andrew.

And now in his skirl there was a wild ring of superstition that turned girlish hearts quite cold.

"I saw it loup out frae the dark--dar-rk woods!" he insisted hoarsely.

Ah! but those dim spruce woods were faintly illumined now with strange little dots and dashes of light--the firefly winking passionately, as if somebody, some thief, were running with it.

And _they_ ran, too, its rightful owners, in full cry, calling frantically upon the robber, whether thief, or tempest, to stop.

And the girls kept bravely up with the men. Or one of them did! For all the spice of her chowchow name was afire in Pemrose Lorry now; and she would have tackled the thief, single-handed, to get back her father's record.

Into the core of darkness--in among the ebony spruce-boughs--the jetty, frowning trunks, the snarling, brambly underbrush, dashed the chase, the hue and cry, not daring to turn on a flashlight and in its glare lose the one little piloting blink ahead, which now seemed to have considerable odds on them, as it fled helter-skelter through the woods.

"My word! this--this beats anything I ever dr-reamed of," gurgled the college boy. "The Thing, whatever it is, has us nicely fooled. There--there, it has switched off the 'glim' now--the little, telltale battery. Now--where are we?"

No one could tell, as they floundered about, three men, and two girls, in the mysterious night-woods--without a clew--Pemrose clinging desolately to her father now, Una to hers--while Andrew, the Church Elder, muttered weird Highland curses.

Nobody could tell where they were, indeed, figuratively, of course, except--except that the experiment was a failure, so far as any proof to the World was concerned!

Except that Toandoah's hopes were dashed,--if not broken!

The first record from Space was stolen,--or lost.