na!" flickered Pem, a spicy flicker still, as she
felt a strong grasp on her shoulder and looked up into the face of a
broad-shouldered youth in a gray sweater; the engine might explode, but,
to the last, they should not say of Toandoah's daughter that her courage
was a Quaker gun.

"Jove! but you're game," flashed the youth. "Well, keep up--hang
on--I'll be back in a minute!"

The minute was three.

He had to lift the second girlish victim almost bodily out of the water
and drag her with him as he wriggled and crawled over the broken
ice-pack, to reach a firm spot, where he picked her up and--with all the
vigor of an athletic eighteen-year-old--carried her to the shore, now
not more than twenty yards off.

"Humph! I was just in time, wasn't I?" he ejaculated on the transit. "By
George! You've got pep, if ever a girl had--I'll wager you pulled your
friend out of the parlor-car and held her up! Some horripilation, eh?"
breezily. "Now--now what have you and I ever done that the Fates should
wish this on to us--that's what I'd like to know?"

It was what the daring little ski-runner, Pem, herself, had been vaguely
wondering; she liked this jolly wit-snapper who preferred his excitement
warm.

"Ha! there goes the engine exploding," he gasped a moment later, as he
set her down. "Bursting inward! Now, if it had done the mean thing,
burst outward, piling up the agony, doing a whole lot of damage, 'twould
have been quicker about it.... Oh--you! Dad," to a gray-bearded man,
with a gray traveling cap pulled down almost to his eyes. "Here, I'll
hand over these girls to you now! Will you look after them? I'd better
go back."

Simultaneously there was a low, sullen roaring, the crack of doom, as
condensed steam sucked in the heavy steel casing of the locomotive's
boilers and shattered it like an eggshell.

In Pemrose it shattered something too.

Wildly she looked into the eyes of the man in the tourist's cap and was
conscious that in one of them horror was frozen into a fixed stand, as
it was in one of Una's, as he helped her up a snowy bank.

And, with that, her brain laid its last egg for the present, as the
Thunder Bird would drop its expiring one upon the dead surface of the
moon, in the knowledge that, the Fates notwithstanding, she was still
alive--still alive, to see the great rocket go!

And as for its completion--as to the little gold mine necessary to gorge
it for its record flight--why! the third rich nut of