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. CHAPTER III THE WRONG SIDE OF HER DREAM The ice had been thick-ribbed, product of a bitter winter, but it could not withstand the shock of a hundred and eighty tons of leaping locomotive--it splintered in all directions. Of the whole long train, however, only two cars and the cab had followed the engine's plunge when those skidding pony-wheels turned traitor, and were now ice-bound and flooded in the middle of a small lake, while the remainder of the fast express, with one coach actually standing on its head, hanging pendent between the ice and the bridge, was not submerged. It was as if a steel bar were hurled violently at that solid ice, when one end only would pierce the crust and the remainder be left sticking, slanting, up. When Pemrose, a Camp Fire Girl of America, greater at that moment than when her hand should loose the Thunder Bird, because she was determined that whatever might be said of her father's invention, nobody should ever say that his daughter's courage was a Quaker gun, paddled through the window-gap of that swamped Pullman, towing Una, she found herself in such a vortex of zero water and shattered ice that all the strength behind her gasping breath turned suddenly dummy.