feet long, leaped from its platform high into the
air, pointed directly for the moon, with a great inventor's mathematical
precision,--trailing its two-hundred-foot, rosy trail of fire.

There was not breath--not breath, even, to cry: "Watch it tear!"

Only breath enough, in young girls' bodies, at least, to gaze off at
Mammy Moon, loved patron of many an outdoor revel, and ponder upon the
nature of the shock she would get when the Thunder Bird's last explosion
lit up her fair face with a blue powder-flash--lit it up for earth to
see!

"Do--do you think 'twill ev-er get there--two hundred and thirty
thousand miles, about, when--when an eighth of an inch out at the start;
and it would m-miss--miss?" breathed a youth who knelt by the heroine of
the evening, the inventor's daughter.

"Toandoah doesn't miss. My father doesn't miss." The young head of
Pemrose Lorry queened it in the darkness, with a pride which made of old
Greylock, at that moment, the world's throne. "But how--how are we to
live through the next hundred hours--the next four days--the time the
Thunder Bird will take to travel?"

Yet they did succeed in living through it and in leading time a merry
dance too, for young Treffrey Graham, junior, all old scores forgotten,
was proving a prince of chums, as spirited in play as he was prompt in a
pinch.

And together--hand clasped in hand, indeed--by virtue of her being the
inventor's daughter, he the son of the man who had resigned a fortune to
the transcendent invention, side by side with two or three of those Very
Great Ones, they stood, four nights later, looking through a monster
telescope upon a mountaintop, and saw--saw the celestial climax, the
first of the heavenly bodies reached.

Saw the blue powder-flash light up the full, round face of the Silver
Queen they loved, while the Thunder Bird, expiring, dropped its bones
upon her dead surface.

"It's--got--there," breathed the youth. "What next? Some day--some day,
maybe, we'll be shooting off there--together?"

"Yes! if only the Man in the Moon could shoot us back!" breathed
Pemrose.

Already it had come to be "we" bound up with "What next?" for it would,
indeed, be a zero "next" in which the hands of youth and maiden would
not meet in comradeship--and love.

But the sun and center of the girl's heart was still--and would be for
long--her father.

The greatest moment of that unprecedented night came when Toandoah bent
to her, and said:

"