felt that this was too sore a snub to inflict for
any rudeness on Jack at a Pinch; perhaps she would have compelled her
boy-knights to put out in the camp skiff and return those oars--under
pain of not dancing with them, at all--had she seen the illuminated
column over which the victim's nose had been so disastrously bent.

It was in every sense a highly colored description of her father's
record-breaking invention, dwelling particularly, though vaguely, upon
the experiments so soon to take place with a lesser Thunder Bird, a
smaller rocket, from the remote and misty top of old Mount Greylock.

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