iet
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 fra