hem, 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 qu