ce of some fifty yards, beyond a flight
of marble steps and a graveled entrance.

A queer little shiver, a horrid little shiver--a snowflake in
summer--drifted down her spine!

The figure had an icy background. She had seen it before amid the
terrors of that February train-wreck. The boy who saved her, the boy
with the jolly tongue in his head, humorous amid the "horripilation,"
had addressed it as Dad.

And then--then, she caught her breath sharply, as something blew upon
her, hot and cold together--and came back to the library, to the present
moment.

For the gray-haired lawyer, with his mouth opening gravely, wide as a
church door, with a little forward pounce of his body upon the
typewritten sheets, the sheets that meant life or death--flight or
stagnation--for the Thunder Bird, was beginning to read again.

"Ah, but that's not all, even yet!" he said. "This curious will has
dragged its slow length over three years--and now we haven't finished
with it, quite. Here's a codicil still to be read--its last word,
written later, just two days before Mr. Graham's death, so it seems."

Alack and alas! that was the moment of the second wreck; the moment for
one jubilant girl of the dire breakdown, when the Victory Express to
Clover Land, goal of blossoming success, crashed through into zero
waters of blankest disappointment,--almost as bitter as those in which
she had held up her friend.

For the last word of the strung-out will set forth that, whereas it
seemed borne in upon Mr. Hartley Graham, with life drawing to a close,
that he had not been quite fair to his madcap brother in youth, and that
the latter would some day return, the disposal of his wealth in the
other direction named--to the University and for invention--should not
come into effect for at least twelve years after the opening of that
third drawer.

"And so--and so, it's all hung up for another dozen years--unless
Treffrey Graham comes back to claim the money! Well! I'm sorry,
Professor Lorry; there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip," said the
lawyer, laying down the codicil with a blue look; he was interested in
invention, progressive invention--he had never thought that the Thunder
Bird was a Quaker gun.

"And so it's all hung up for the next twelve years," was the baffled cry
which went around the circle, with no single note of longing for the
wanderer's return.

It would not have been very flattering to the terrible Treff, if he was
alive and