But the Light remained, the Presence, so near as it seemed to Pem at the moment--even as she had felt it before upon a mountain-top, or at some matchless moment of beauty--that she almost lisped confusedly: "Daddy in Heaven!" as once, a two-year-old, she had prattled it at her father's knee. Then what--what? Another voice prattling near her--chattering icily! A bully human voice! "Gosh! Something r-rotten in the State of Denmark," it gasped. "Jove! I like excitement, but I'd rather be warm enough to enjoy it. Oh! Dad, if there are any others left in that car, the one on end, you help 'em. I must attend to these girls." "T-take her first--Una!" flickered Pem, a spicy flicker still, as she felt a strong grasp on her shoulder and looked up into the face of a broad-shouldered youth in a gray sweater; the engine might explode, but, to the last, they should not say of Toandoah's daughter that her courage was a Quaker gun. "Jove! but you're game," flashed the youth. "Well, keep up--hang on--I'll be back in a minute!" The minute was three. He had to lift the second girlish victim almost bodily out of the water and drag her with him as he wriggled and crawled over the broken ice-pack, to reach a firm spot, where he picked her up and--with all the vigor of an athletic eighteen-year-old--carried her to the shore, now not more than twenty yards off. "Humph! I was just in time, wasn't I?" he ejaculated on the transit. "By George! You've got pep, if ever a girl had--I'll wager you pulled your friend out of the parlor-car and held her up! Some horripilation, eh?" breezily. "Now--now what have you and I ever done that the Fates should wish this on to us--that's what I'd like to know?" It was what the daring little ski-runner, Pem, herself, had been vaguely wondering; she liked this jolly wit-snapper who preferred his excitement warm. "Ha! there goes the engine exploding," he gasped a moment later, as he set her down. "Bursting inward! Now, if it had done the mean thing, burst outward, piling up the agony, doing a whole lot of damage, 'twould have been quicker about it.... Oh--you! Dad," to a gray-bearded man, with a gray traveling cap pulled down almost to his eyes. "Here, I'll hand over these girls to you now! Will you look after them? I'd better go back." Simultaneously there was a low, sullen roaring, the crack of doom, as condensed steam sucked in the heavy steel casing of the locomotive's boilers and shattered it like an eggshell. In Pemrose it shattered something too. Wildly she looked into the eyes of the man in the tourist's cap and was conscious that in one of them horror was frozen into a fixed stand, as it was in one of Una's, as he helped her up a snowy bank. And, with that, her brain laid its last egg for the present, as the Thunder Bird would drop its expiring one upon the dead surface of the moon, in the knowledge that, the Fates notwithstanding, she was still alive--still alive, to see the great rocket go!