And as for its completion--as to the little gold mine necessary to gorge it for its record flight--why! the third rich nut of which she had spoken a little while ago in her father's laboratory, had not yet been cracked: the third mysterious drawer containing the third and last installment of a dead man's very strange will had not yet been opened. CHAPTER IV 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!