"S-stick tight, Una! Oh-h! stick tight," was the one little whiff that speech could get off before it froze--froze stiff behind her chattering teeth, in the pinched channel of her throat. And then--then--she was clinging to the jagged spur of an ice-cake, her left hand convulsively clutching Una's flannels, while the eddies in the half-liberated water around them, spreading from a blue-cold center to a white ring, made horrid eyes--goggle-eyes--which stared at them. To Pem--little visionary--plunged from her dreams of pressing the magic button on a mountain-top, of watching the Thunder Bird tear, tear away moonward, switching its long tail of light, the whole thing seemed an illusion--the wrong side of her dream. It was as if she had soared with that monster rocket, Toandoah's invention, outside the earth's atmosphere, were being hurled about in the horrible vacuum of space, its unplumbed heart of cold, so far--so annihilatingly far below the balmy zero point of old Mother Earth on a February day when two light-hearted girls were going skiing. She was growing numb. In vain did her waterproof wind-jacket, the ski-runner's belted jacket of thin and trusty silk, defend, like a faithful wing--a warm, conscious wing--the upper part of her body. The deadly water was encroaching, clasping her waist with an icy girdle,--stealing under it, even to her armpits. And the petrifying little hand which had left its fistling in the train,--the thick mitten that should have grasped the balancing stick in all the wild swallow-fun of climbing, stemming, darting amid slope and snow upon a wintry hillside--could not hold on very long to the glacial spur. The ice-cake was threatening to slip away, to seesaw, turn turtle and waltz off, to the tune of blood-curdling sounds: screams for help here, there, everywhere, always with the background of that menacing hiss of steam in the great engine's boilers--that low, sneezing uz-z-z! as if it were taking cold from its bath--the engine that, at any moment, might explode. Frantically she would have struck out, the little girl-mechanic, and fought the whole ice-pack to get away from that threat, to reach a solid crust, but she knew that she could not "swim" two, herself and Una. Yet would they go under--one or both--perish in water not deep because of the starving cold, even if--if the engine...? Her teeth snapped together upon the thought, its diddering horror. Surely, it was as bad a predicament as could be for a girl! But, suddenly, through all the horripilation there seemed to shine a light. Somehow, Pem was conscious of it in the poor numb sheath of her own girlish being--and beyond. And she knew that her stark lips were praying: "Oh! Lord--oh! Father--help me-e to hold on. Don't let us--go--under! I want--I want so-o to live to see Daddy's rocket go off!... He ..." The stiff sobs tumbled apart there, as it were.