THE SECOND WRECK
That third nut was cracked just five weeks later in the firelit library
of what had been Mr. Hartley Graham's home--the home of a man who during
his lifetime, so it was occasionally said, had been, in some ways,
almost as eccentric as his madcap brother--and concerning the latter his
college chums, those who knew him long ago, were of the opinion that he
was a freak whose "head grew beneath his shoulder."
The house, a white marble mansion on Opal Avenue, finest of the old
residential streets in the University city of Clevedon, was now occupied
by the sister of the two, the mother of Una, who had snapped her fingers
at the Thunder Bird, calling it a joke, a dummy, a Quaker gun.
That jeering nickname still rankled in the breast of Pemrose, who looked
more like a colorless March Primrose, owing to the lingering shock of
that train wreck, upon the spring morning in early April when the family
lawyer whose duty it was to settle the affairs of the man who had left
three separate portions of his will in as many drawers, to be opened on
three successive anniversaries of his death, drew forth the last.
She was not the only pale girl present.
By her side was Una, neighbor again in heart as in body, who laid one
little agitated fist on Pem's knee while preparations for reading the
will were being made, the two girls nestling together, as in chummy
days, three years before, when in the peacock pride of thirteen they had
conceitedly measured eyelashes.
And the remorseful affection mirrored in that little near-sighted stand
in one of Una's pretty dark eyes was only typical of an entirely similar
state of feeling in the once scornful breasts of her father and mother.
Mrs. Grosvenor was no longer "on her high ropes," as Pem had said in her
father's laboratory; to-day she seemed to be, rather, on a snubbing-line
which brought her up short now and again, even in the middle of a
speech, when she looked at the inventor's blue-eyed daughter, his trusty
little pal--and that, sometimes, with spray in her eyes, too.
Also, her glances in the direction of the inventor himself, Professor
Lorry, with whose name the world was already beginning to ring, were
appealing--not to say apologetic.
She was quite sure now that any man who could turn out a daughter, not
yet sixteen, to behave in a fearful emergency as Pem had done--without
whom her own daughter would not be here to-day, as Una constantly kept
repeating--could never forge a gun, be it rocket or rifle, that would
hit no mark!
She even expressed some agitated interest in the great invention,
inquiring when the first experiments with the little model Thunder Bird,
upon a mountain-top, were to take place.
And as for her husband, he boldly declared himself deeply interested in
the conquest of the upper air and space--so far beyond the goal which
any aviator had dreamed of reaching yet.
He even went so far as to say that he would be glad to see the remainder
of a fortune, represented by that third section of a will, go for the
furtherance of the professor's wonderful moon-reaching, planet-reaching
scheme, instead of being "hung up" awaiting the return of the dead man's
younger brother who had been such a queer flimflam fellow in
youth,--whose family did not even know whether he was dead or alive.
And, at first, while the shell of that third nut was being solemnly
cracked by the reading of opening sentences of the will--oh! how the
heart of Pemrose jumped, like a nut on a hot shovel--it did seem as if
the kernel were going to be a rich one for the Thunder Bird.
For now, according to the testator's wish, if his brother, Treffrey
Graham, had not yet returned to claim his portion of his elder brother's
wealth, then the money--a little bonanza, indeed, a solid fortune--was
to be turned over, forthwith, to the University of his native city, to
be used for developments in the science of the air--the upper air and
what lay beyond it--chiefly for the furtherance of any inventions that
might be put forward by the dead man's trusted friend, Professor Lorry.
It was here that two pale girls, abruptly transformed from April
primroses to June roses--oh! such pinkly blooming tea-roses--gave
simultaneously a wild little shriek.
It was here that Pem, dazzled, saw the Thunder Bird, with a clear sky,
tear--tear away moonward--and noticed at the same time, through some
little loophole in the watch-tower of her excitement, the figure of a
man with a gray tourist's cap pulled down to his eyes, rather waveringly
crossing the street without.
He circled to avoid an April puddle,--she saw him clearly through the
broad library window, at a distance 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 present to hear, thought a gnashing Pemrose: to the exile who
had been such a hazing firebrand at college, burning out the fine flame
of youth in the straw blaze of senseless pranks,--a griffin and
shatterpated jester.