tched and hampered now--yet upholding, even if it was
her daring death-thought, Toandoah's honor in the flood.

CHAPTER III

THE WRONG SIDE OF HER DREAM

The ice had been thick-ribbed, product of a bitter winter, but it could
not withstand the shock of a hundred and eighty tons of leaping
locomotive--it splintered in all directions.

Of the whole long train, however, only two cars and the cab had followed
the engine's plunge when those skidding pony-wheels turned traitor, and
were now ice-bound and flooded in the middle of a small lake, while the
remainder of the fast express, with one coach actually standing on its
head, hanging pendent between the ice and the bridge, was not submerged.

It was as if a steel bar were hurled violently at that solid ice, when
one end only would pierce the crust and the remainder be left sticking,
slanting, up.

When Pemrose, a Camp Fire Girl of America, greater at that moment than
when her hand should loose the Thunder Bird, because she was determined
that whatever might be said of her father's invention, nobody should
ever say that his daughter's courage was a Quaker gun, paddled through
the window-gap of that swamped Pullman, towing Una, she found herself in
such a vortex of zero water and shattered ice that all the strength
behind her gasping breath turned suddenly dummy.

"S-stick tight, Una! Oh-h! stick tight," was the one little whiff that
speech could get off before it froze--froze stiff behind her chattering
teeth, in the pinched channel of her throat.

And then--then--she was clinging to the jagged spur of an ice-cake, her
left hand convulsively clutching Una's flannels, while the eddies in the
half-liberated water around them, spreading from a blue-cold center to a
white ring, made horrid eyes--goggle-eyes--which stared at them.

To Pem--little visionary--plunged from her dreams of pressing the magic
button on a mountain-top, of watching the Thunder Bird tear, tear away
moonward, switching its long tail of light, the whole thing seemed an
illusion--the wrong side of her dream.

It was as if she had soared with that monster rocket, Toandoah's
invention, outside the earth's atmosphere, were being hurled about in
the horrible vacuum of space, its unplumbed heart of cold, so far--so
annihilatingly far below the balmy zero point of old Mother Earth on a
February day when two light-hearted girls were going skiing.

She was growing numb.

In vain did her waterpro