w yet,
before--before I resigned a fortune to it."

That was the moment when the nuggets all turned to rocks again for
Pemrose. He saw the change in her face.

"Oh! I don't mean anything der-og-a-tory to your father, my dear"--pain
snatched at the man's breath--"or to his invention, either. I knew him
before you did. 'Why did I do it?' Curiosity--eccentricity, I
suppose--anything you like to call it! I always was such a 'terror'--a
regular zany, my college friends used to call me."

A flash from those prankful days, erratic as a shooting star, shot the
glaze in the sufferer's eye.

"And, then--and then, I really am interested in everything connected
with the conquest of the air--of space--myself," the hampered speaker
went on. "I've done a little flying, out West,--my son, too! I found out
when the experiments with your father's in-vention--"

"We call it the Thunder Bird," put in Una, as pain again called for a
break.

"Ha! Good name for it! Piles up the moon-going romance, eh? Well-ll,"
wearily, "having found out the par-ti-cu-lar night on which the lit-tle
model rocket was to fly, I came up the mountain to a small camp that my
son and I have ne-ar the summit--east side of Greylock. I was standing
on the edge of the spruce woods, watching the whole performance.
Then--then, when the parachute dragging the little recording apparatus
blew towards me in the darkness, almost into my hand, I--why! I snatched
it up and ran with it. Why? Oh, because I suppose the boy has never died
in me: the boy that's 'part pirate, part pig!'" with a grating chuckle.

Incredible as it seemed, the low laughter, the treacherous tinkle, was
echoed by girlish lips as that renascent urchin momentarily swaggered in
the glaze of the suffering eye!

"And then--and then something told me--an aberration, I suppose, as my
impulses usually are--that I had some sort of r-right to see the very
first record man had ever got of that upper air, of Space, if--if I was
go-ing to turn over a couple of hundred thousand dollars, for the
pursuit of the--sov-er-eign invention."

"I--I can't believe it," murmured Pem into the stony teeth of the Man
Killer.

"I meant to return the record next morning, but I was a-fraid your
father might shoot me," to Pemrose. "Then, later, I heard he had gone
down the mountain--that was yesterday and a mistake--I went-down, too,
to beard him. A--a little more water, please! I could not climb again
until to-day; I took t