Chapter III: The Wrong Side of Her Dream

The ice had been thick-ribbed, product of a bitter winter, but it could not withstand the shock of a hundred and eighty tons of leaping locomotive--it splintered in all directions.

Of the whole long train, however, only two cars and the cab had followed the engine's plunge when those skidding pony-wheels turned traitor, and were now ice-bound and flooded in the middle of a small lake, while the remainder of the fast express, with one coach actually standing on its head, hanging pendent between the ice and the bridge, was not submerged.

It was as if a steel bar were hurled violently at that solid ice, when one end only would pierce the crust and the remainder be left sticking, slanting, up.

When Pemrose, a Camp Fire Girl of 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.

"S-stick tight, Una! Oh-h! stick tight," was the one little whiff that speech could get off before it froze--froze stiff behind her chattering teeth, in the pinched channel of her throat.

And then--then--she was clinging to the jagged spur of an ice-cake, her left hand convulsively clutching Una's flannels, while the eddies in the half-liberated water around them, spreading from a blue-cold center to a white ring, made horrid eyes--goggle-eyes--which stared at them.

To Pem--little visionary--plunged from her dreams of pressing the magic button on a mountain-top, of watching the Thunder Bird tear, tear away moonward, switching its long tail of light, the whole thing seemed an illusion--the wrong side of her dream.

It was as if she had soared with that monster rocket, Toandoah's invention, outside the earth's atmosphere, were being hurled about in the horrible vacuum of space, its unplumbed heart of cold, so far--so annihilatingly far below the balmy zero point of old Mother Earth on a February day when two light-hearted girls were going skiing.

She was growing numb.

In vain did her waterproof wind-jacket, the ski-runner's belted jacket of thin and trusty silk, defend, like a faithful wing--a warm, conscious wing--the upper part of her body.

The deadly water was encroaching, clasping her waist with an icy girdle,--stealing under it, even to her armpits.

And the petrifying little hand which had left its fistling in the train,--the thick mitten that should have grasped the balancing stick in all the wild swallow-fun of climbing, stemming, darting amid slope and snow upon a wintry hillside--could not hold on very long to the glacial spur.

The ice-cake was threatening to slip away, to seesaw, turn turtle and waltz off, to the tune of blood-curdling sounds: screams for help here, there, everywhere, always with the background of that menacing hiss of steam in the great engine's boilers--that low, sneezing uz-z-z! as if it were taking cold from its bath--the engine that, at any moment, might explode.

Frantically she would have struck out, the little girl-mechanic, and fought the whole ice-pack to get away from that threat, to reach a solid crust, but she knew that she could not "swim" two, herself and Una.

Yet would they go under--one or both--perish in water not deep because of the starving cold, even if--if the engine...?

Her teeth snapped together upon the thought, its diddering horror. Surely, it was as bad a predicament as could be for a girl!

But, suddenly, through all the horripilation there seemed to shine a light.

Somehow, Pem was conscious of it in the poor numb sheath of her own girlish being--and beyond.

And she knew that her stark lips were praying: "Oh! Lord--oh! Father--help me-e to hold on. Don't let us--go--under! I want--I want so-o to live to see Daddy's rocket go off!... He ..."

The stiff sobs tumbled apart there, as it were.

But the Light remained, the Presence, so near as it seemed to Pem at the moment--even as she had felt it before upon a mountain-top, or at some matchless moment of beauty--that she almost lisped confusedly: "Daddy in Heaven!" as once, a two-year-old, she had prattled it at her father's knee.

Then what--what? Another voice prattling near her--chattering icily! A bully human voice!

"Gosh! Something r-rotten in the State of Denmark," it gasped. "Jove! I like excitement, but I'd rather be warm enough to enjoy it. Oh! Dad, if there are any others left in that car, the one on end, you help 'em. I must attend to these girls."

"T-take her first--Una!" flickered Pem, a spicy flicker still, as she felt a strong grasp on her shoulder and looked up into the face of a broad-shouldered youth in a gray sweater; the engine might explode, but, to the last, they should not say of Toandoah's daughter that her courage was a Quaker gun.

"Jove! but you're game," flashed the youth. "Well, keep up--hang on--I'll be back in a minute!"

The minute was three.

He had to lift the second girlish victim almost bodily out of the water and drag her with him as he wriggled and crawled over the broken ice-pack, to reach a firm spot, where he picked her up and--with all the vigor of an athletic eighteen-year-old--carried her to the shore, now not more than twenty yards off.

"Humph! I was just in time, wasn't I?" he ejaculated on the transit. "By George! You've got pep, if ever a girl had--I'll wager you pulled your friend out of the parlor-car and held her up! Some horripilation, eh?" breezily. "Now--now what have you and I ever done that the Fates should wish this on to us--that's what I'd like to know?"

It was what the daring little ski-runner, Pem, herself, had been vaguely wondering; she liked this jolly wit-snapper who preferred his excitement warm.

"Ha! there goes the engine exploding," he gasped a moment later, as he set her down. "Bursting inward! Now, if it had done the mean thing, burst outward, piling up the agony, doing a whole lot of damage, 'twould have been quicker about it.... Oh--you! Dad," to a gray-bearded man, with a gray traveling cap pulled down almost to his eyes. "Here, I'll hand over these girls to you now! Will you look after them? I'd better go back."

Simultaneously there was a low, sullen roaring, the crack of doom, as condensed steam sucked in the heavy steel casing of the locomotive's boilers and shattered it like an eggshell.

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.