life-story was woven in pearls, with
those rainbow flashes of color--the loom with it--she hurried out of the
room.

Never, perhaps, did a professor's laboratory, the stern, hardware "lab."
of a mechanical engineer, react to anything so fairy-like as when Pem,
scurrying down a flight of stairs to the workshop which her father had
fitted up in his own house--not his University laboratory with the tall
spectroscope--sat down to a table and began industriously to weave.

Turning from a bench where he sat fiddling with a steel chamber, part of
the anatomy of a fledgling Thunder Bird, of one of those small model
rockets which he was fitting up for experiments on a mountain-top, the
inventor watched her listlessly.

"Hullo! What's the charm now, the thing of beauty? That--that looks such
stuff as dreams are made of." Toandoah drew a long breath.

"No, it isn't dream-stuff, father; it's history, the history of your
life and mine, all told in symbols, woven into a chain, a stole--see--to
wear with my ceremonial dress. It--it's my masterpiece." Pem looked up,
all girl, all Rose, now. "I didn't want to show it to you until it was
finished. But now--now--don't you want to see it?"

Listlessly, still, her father drew near, his tall figure in its long,
drab laboratory coat looming like a shadow behind her shoulder.

"See there--there's where it begins with the Flag I was born under, the
Stars and Stripes," excitedly. "And look," softly, "that gold star
stands for Mother who died when I was two. And there you are, Toandoah,
with that queer Indian triangle having the teeth of a saw, the emblem of
invention."

"What! That funny, squat figure, with something like a three-cornered
fool's-cap on my head and the moon above it, looking through a tube!"
There was a laugh in the inventor's throat now; the grim "Get thee
behind me, Satan!" look, with the cloud of that codicil to a will, were
melting away from him. "Well, go on!" he encouraged smilingly.
"Artistic, anyhow! I believe you Camp Fire Girls would weave magic
around a clock pendulum."

"And here--here am I--Wantaam, a Wise Woman. There's the Thunder Bird,
see, the symbol of the great rocket. Here are you and I, Dad, upon a
mountaintop, watching it tear--oh! tear away."

He laughed again at the two stiff, woodeny figures, the comet-like
streak of fire above them.

"And this--the quill fluttering down attached to a kite! Humph! That
stands for the Thunder Bird's diary, I s