rd, of small pony-wheels on the big
express engine striking a frog in the rails, an icy groove, and
skidding,--then recklessly plunging down four feet, those runaway
ponies, from the low bridge which they were crossing on to the ice,
dragging the engine, the cab and the two front cars with them.

And now--now--to the inventor's daughter, the girl-mechanic, who had
plugged so hard at her high school physics that she might understand her
father's work, came a thought that was worse, worse even than the hiss
of the imprisoned flood, tossing her like a cork: the engine might
explode--the sneezing, sobbing engine, with the steam condensing in its
boilers--wreck the car she was in--she and Una!

No! She did not think of herself alone. All the frail girlish ice was a
gimcrack now.

But the terrors of the swamped car, that snuffling threat of steam
ahead--a deep bass uz-z-z!--momentarily made a gimcrack of other things
too--of everything but the desperate instinct to get out--free, somehow.

Calling upon Una to follow, she headed for a dripping window-gap, to
seize the moment when the flood, now lower upon that side, might give
her a chance to paddle through--scramble through--escape on to the
cracking ice, before the opening was again blotted out.

But together with the cruelty of glass-splinters, ice-spars scratching
her set face, came the shock of an inner splinter: an inkling, somehow,
that Una was helpless, could not follow, that, battered by concussion,
tossing like a log upon the flood's breast, her senses had almost left
her.

Many waters cannot quench love--the love of a daughter for her
genius-father.

In that moment--that moment--there leaped up in the breast of Toandoah's
child the fire, the red fire, which alone can carry anything higher, be
it rocket or girl's heart.

They had called her father's invention a joke, a Quaker gun, Una and her
mother.

_Never_ should they say that of his daughter's pluck: that it was a
dummy which would hit no mark,--or only to save itself!

"Una!" Wildly she seized the other girl's creamy flannels, buoyed like a
great, pale water-lily upon the imprisoned lake-water. "Catch--c-catch
me by the belt--Una! I--I'll try-y to save you! Oh-h! s-stick ti-ight
now."

And the daughter of the man, still sitting afar in his quiet laboratory,
fitting little powder charges into a model Thunder Bird, set
herself to battle through the swirling gap of that half-covered
window-frame--clu