ious
thoughts upon each other.

There was the terrible trip--the worst mile ever traveled--down the Man
Killer trail, for him, strapped to the stretcher, after the doctor had
examined the injury and found the delicate kneecap both slipped and
broken.

"I guess if--if I pull through this, I'll be a--reformed--character; no
more--no more eccentricity for me," he murmured dizzily to Pemrose who,
when the trail permitted, walked beside him, stroking his hand,--and he
rolled his eyes faintly, through the veil of the opiate which the doctor
had given, at the knapsack beside him, wherein lay the golden egg.

And with his own hands, the Man Killer at last conquered, as they laid
him in an ambulance, he took the five-inch, open-work steel box, the
precious record, from that knapsack's depth and handed it to her.

She could not look at it, the little Thunder Bird's log of that
two-hundred mile trip aloft, she could only jealously clasp it to her
breast,--Toandoah's little pal.

"T-tell your fa-ther from--me," said the broken voice, "that Treff
Graham is the same old Treff; that he m-may be a pirate, but he isn't a
pig--not re-al-ly! That," faintly, "he apol-o-gizes--and steps aside;
that, with all his heart--it's there, if it is a madcap--" wanderingly,
winkingly, he touched his left breast--"he hopes that, a year from now,
the highways of the hea-vens may be opened--the im-mor-tal Thun-der Bird
will fly!"

CHAPTER XXIII

THE CELESTIAL CLIMAX

A year from then it did!

It awoke the World with its challenging roar, silencing for ever, let us
hope, the racket of guns upon this dear planet, leading man in future to
seek his conquests in more transcendent ways, even outside Earth's
atmosphere, as it took its pioneer flight again from the misty top of
old Mount Greylock.

The World and his wife were there to see: scientists from the four
quarters of the globe--Earth's great ones.

And other spellbound spectators, too: Una, the White Birch Group, their
Boy Scout comrades--Stud fast developing into the type of hotspur who
wanted to take passage for the moon--all massed in such a stupendous Get
Together as made the mountain seem "moonshine land", indeed, to their
thrill-shod feet.

And never--oh! never since the history of Mother Earth and her satellite
began did such a spectacular traveler start on such a flaming trip as
when the hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America threw the switch and the
steel explorer, twenty