GIMCRACK ICE
She was thinking of it two hours later--having gained her coaxing
point--seated in the well-nigh empty parlor car of the north-bound
express, that green-aisled Pullman being the first car behind the cab
and plodding engine which, regardless of schedule, crept along slowly
and warily to-day upon ice-shod rails.
But as she caressed the honorable thumb--the little girlish member which
would press the button while all the world wondered--and peered out
through a window fairly frosted, lo! again she saw a landscape dimly in
flames--blood-red--as viewed through the spectroscope of her own raging
thoughts.
For ice was within the car, as without.
There--there, seated almost on a line with her, on the other side of the
moss-green aisle, and only three other distant passengers in the
compartment, was the girl whose caricaturing tongue had repeated the
indelible insult about a Quaker gun; whose mother considered her father
a mere chuckle-headed dreamer, with his visions of bridging the absolute
zero of space--just a mild three hundred degrees, or so, lower than the
biting breath of Mother Earth at the present moment--and reaching worlds
far away amid the starry scope.
Pemrose had kept her word about not speaking. She just dropped one
pointed little icicle in the shape of a nod upon her one-time friend as
she sank into her own swivel chair and threw off the heavy coat with
which she had covered her ski-runner's silken wind-jacket and belted
skiing costume of pure, creamy wool, with its full freedom of
knickerbockers.
"There's Una--Una Grosvenor!" Her face frosted over at the thought. "Oh,
mer-rcy! how I hate her--shall everlastingly hate her--for passing on
that sneer about the Thunder Bird.... And I know-ow her eyelashes aren't
as long as mine now!"
Mingled spice was in the furtive glance which Toandoah's little pal, his
maiden of the chowchow name, threw across the narrow train-aisle at the
delicate young profile opposite, outlined against a crusted window.
"And she still has that funny little near-sighted stand in one of her
dark eyes, too--Una! Although they're pretty eyes--I'll admit that!"
mused the critic further. "Goodness! won't she open them one of these
days when the world is all ringing with talk of Dad and his rocket: when
the Thunder Bird, the finished, full-fledged Thunder Bird, undertakes
its hundred-hour flight to the moon.... For, oh! I know-ow that it will
go, some day--some day." The girl stared passionately now into the
future in the frostscript of the pane near her. "Man would not let it
fail, God _could_ not let it fail--just for lack of funds--however
that third nut may turn out--that third section of a queer will!"
And now the mulled world outside changed again, shading from blood-red
to fairy rose-color as seen through the spectroscope of hope.
She became lost in the most magnificent dream that ever entranced a Camp
Fire Girl yet--with any hope of fulfillment.
Standing of a starless night upon a lofty mountain-top, she was looking
up at Mammy Moon, dear, silver-footed Queen, so near to the heart of
every Earth-daughter!
In the darkness she felt the eyes of the whole world upon her--she but a
satellite reflecting her father's light--its joint ear was bent to catch
the wild, triumphal song-sob of her heart.
And at the words: "Ready! Shoot!", Toandoah's battle-cry, she was
pressing the electric button which, connected with a switch in the
Thunder Bird's tail, would start it off, pointed directly for the moon,
to light up that silver disc with a bright powder-flash visible here on
earth.
She was mesmerized by its wild, red eye. She was watching it switch its
rosy tail feathers, two hundred feet long, that dashing explorer, as,
roaring, it leaped from its mountain platform at incredible speed for an
incredible flight.
She was echoing the college boys' untamed slogan: "Watch it tear; oh!
watch it tear--the fire-eater."
She....
But what--what was this? Was she tearing with it? Was she, she herself,
just a shocked girl, at the heart of its rapid-fire explosions?
Was she being hurled with it through space, blank space, Absolute Zero,
below what human instrument could register,--or human girl encounter and
live?
All she knew was that she was being flung, first forward, then backward;
and then, oh, horrors! against the train window near her where glass was
all splintering and crashing, through which ice and water, mad, mad
water and ice, were rushing together.
There was an awful, punching jolt, a frenzied shriek of steam, a
splashing, hissing roar--that, surely, could not be the steel Thunder
Bird's challenge, unless it had suddenly become a wading goose--and, lo!
she was hurled straight out of her dream across a Pullman aisle, fast
flooding, right into the girl with whom she had once vainly measured
eyelashes,--between whom and herself had existed that thin bridge of ice
but one little minute before.
Alas! poor human ice that couldn't stand a moment under the blows of
Nature's ice-hammer.
Both pairs of girlish lashes were stark with terror now.
"Una! Una! _Una!_ Ac-ci-dent! Tr-rain accident! Gone
through--through into--the--lake!" moaned Pemrose, half stunned, yet
conscious, as she was ten seconds before, that they had been crossing
frozen water.
Water! A pale pond, now plainly seen through awful, swirling,
wave-blocked window-gaps! Yet across its wan and shattering crust there
shone a trail of fire, red fire, heart fire--vivid at that moment as the
Thunder Bird's pink tail feathers switching through the space of
horror--and somewhere in that stretched consciousness which is beyond
thinking, Toandoah's daughter knew that it was the Camp Fire training in
presence of mind.
"Una! M-mer-rcy! Una! Water's r-rushing in-n--in so fast--through
windows--doors ahead--m-may dr-rown right here, 'less we can f-fight
it--get out," was her struggling cry as, paddling desperately like a
little dog, she found herself topping the flood, that lashing, interned
lake-water, now blotting out window-frames on one side of the
car--groping with icy fingers for the painted ceiling of the
Pullman--then undulatingly sinking below them on the other.
For it was a case just half-a-minute before, while Pem was still
sanguinely loosing the Thunder Bird, 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--clutched and hampered now--yet upholding, even if it was
her daring death-thought, Toandoah's honor in the flood.