SHE SAVED A CITY
"And so--and so it's all hung up for another twelve years--the Thunder
Bird's flight! For I don't suppose there's much chance of the money
coming from another direction."
Pemrose Lorry echoed the cry, repeated it desolately, hours later,
standing in her own room--a room that was a sort of sequel to herself,
as every Camp Fire Girl's nest should be.
Her father had echoed it, as she sat very close to him, driving home in
the Grosvenor's limousine.
"Well! so far this strung-out will has been for us much cry and little
wool, eh, girlie," he muttered; and for the first time she heard
discouragement in his voice; perhaps he had "banked" upon that third nut
more than he admitted.
"So the money is hung up for the next dozen years, as far's any benefit
to the invention is concerned," he went on presently, just before his
own home was reached. "I'd better be putting my time into something
else, I guess," with a raw scrape in the tones. "How--how about a
machine for the manufacture of paper clothing, eh, or airdrawn rugs--"
sarcastically--"prosperity, _riches_, in that! Ha! Get thee behind
me, Satan--but don't push!" added the inventor whimsically, thrusting
his head out of the auto window,--with a sound that was neither laugh
nor groan.
"Get thee behind me, Satan--and don't push!"
Tears sprang to those blue eyes of Pemrose now, as she recalled the
half-piteous tone in the voice.
Toandoah was discouraged. Toandoah was tempted--tempted to sacrifice the
highest claim of his intellect, his original dream, or the dream whose
originality he had made practical, of reaching the heavenly bodies; of
being a pioneer in exploring the Universe outside his own earth and its
enveloping atmosphere; of finding out the secrets of that mysterious
upper air, and where it ended, of getting back a record of it--the
Thunder Bird's golden egg, the first record from space.
And the girl in her buoyant young heart of hearts felt that hope--nay,
certainty--were still there, green, springing, as the first signs of
happy springtime in the world outside.
How--how was she to make him feel it; she his little Wise Woman, his
laboratory pal?
Her eye went to the emblems upon her wall: a pine tree on a poster,
typical of strength, a banner with a sunburst, the sun shedding warmth
upon the earth.
And then--then! To the little squat figure of a woman, as the Indians
depicted her, with a torch in her hand, Wisdom's torch--her own emblem
as Wantaam of the Council Fire.
But there was another representation of that Wantaam--that Wise Woman.
Pem had designed it herself, painted it herself upon a two-foot poster,
gaining thereby a green honor-bead for handicraft.
And before that the girl, wrestling with the heavy disappointment of
that tantalizing will, brought up--her hands clasped.
It was a curious scene: a lot of little tents with a wall around them,
the same symbolic figure of the woman with the torch stood upon the
wall, pointing a stiff arm at a man outside, a warrior, who had a knife
in hand.
Underneath were printed in flaming characters two Indian words: "Notick!
Notick!" signifying: "Hear! Hear!"
"I always did feel fascinated by that Wise Woman who saved--a--city."
Pem looked adoringly at her handiwork. "A besieged Jewish city, away
back in King David's time! To be sure, one reads of it in--in what's a
bloodthirsty chapter of the Old Testament! And she saved the town by
ordering the death of a rebel, a traitor, proclaiming that she, herself,
was loyal and faithful to the king--so were her people--making Joab,
David's captain, that man with the knife, outside the wall, listen when
she cried to him: 'Hear! Hear!' She had more sense than the men about
her--and one isn't told the least thing further about her, not even her
name. That's what makes her mysterious--and fascinating.... Yet she
saved a city!"
The girl drew a long breath--a suddenly fired breath.
Was it up to her now to save a city: the citadel of her father's
courage--of that rose-colored conviction which is half the battle on
earth or in the air? How was she to do it?
Her eye went wandering around the room. Trained to the eloquence of
symbols, it lit on something. Just a sheen of pearls and a little loom
upon a table--myriads of pearly beads, woven and unwoven, with here and
there a ray of New Jerusalem colors, ruby, emerald, blazing through
them--the New Jerusalem of hope.
"Ah-h!"
Breathlessly she caught it up, that something, four feet and a half of
the beaded history of a girl,--pearl-woven prophecy, too!
Hugging it to her breast, that long leather strip, an inch and a half in
width, on which her glowing young 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 suppose, otherwise the golden
egg--the little recording apparatus coming down on the wing of its black
parachute."
The inventor laughed amusedly again, glancing sidelong at _his_
masterpiece, the little five-inch openwork steel box, having in it two
tiny wheels with paper wound, tapelike, on one and a pencil between
them. This carried in the head of the Thunder Bird, big or little, would
keep a record of as high as it went by the pencil automatically making
marks so long as there was any air-pressure, like a guiding hand, to
move it.
"Yes." The weaver nodded. "And here--here is the Will being read!"
The girlish voice was lower now, the girlish feet treading doubtful
ground, as she pointed again to those two quaint, stubby figures, with a
third one reading from a parchment.
But there was no doubt at all in the young voice which presently
gathered itself for a climax.
"And see--see there--those little yellow dots I'm weaving in now; those
are gold pieces, father, the money that _is_ coming to us from
somewhere for you to finish your invention. Yes! and I'm going on to
weave in the moon, too, and the little blue powder-flash before her
face, to show the Thunder Bird has got there. For it is going to get
there, you know!" Pem's blue-star eyes were dim now, but in them was the
wisdom of babes--the wisdom oft hid from the wise and prudent.
"Daddy-man!" She bowed her head over the pearl-woven prophecy, speaking
very low. "I could always tell you my thoughts. Somehow, at that awful
time of the train-wreck, when we were in the icy water, Una and I,
before the boy came, the big boy who saved us, through--through all the
'horripilation', as he called it, I seemed to see a light; the--the
Light of Light Eternal, as we sing--God--and I knew, oh-h! I knew-ew, at
the last, that we weren't going to dr-rown.... I know just as certainly
now that you're going to launch the Thunder Bird, to go-o where
nothing--Earthly--has ever gone before.... Father-r!"
Silence fell upon that passionate little cry in the dim workshop.
Only the beauty of the pearl-woven thing upon the table spoke--the
record to go down to posterity.
Then into the silence tiptoed the voice of a man, whimsical, slightly,
yet with a touch of tender awe in it, too:
"And none knew the Wise Woman who saved the city!"