"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!" CHAPTER VI A HOTSPUR "Oh! I'm so glad--just so glad I don't know what to do with myself--that those experiments with the lesser Thunder Bird, the smaller sky-rocket, which won't make the four-day trip to Mammy Moon, but will only fly up a couple of hundred miles, or so, and drop its golden egg, the diary, to tell you where that blank No Man's Land of space begins will still be carried out this spring from the top of old Mount Greylock. If they had been given up, it would have broken my heart--so it would!" It was evening now, late evening, in the dining room of the professor's home, looking upon the green University campus. The girl with the grafted Rose in her name, grafted on to a foreign stem, was pouring out her father's after dinner coffee--and her own full heart, at the same time. "Ouch!" She shivered a little. "I don't like to think of that 'diddering' cold of empty space; not--not since the train-wreck. I'm like the big boy who saved us then, and was so jolly; I'm out for excitement if I'm warm enough to enjoy it, eh?" "Humph! Well, here's somebody who's willing to take a chance on carrying his warmth, his fun too, with him into space." The professor laughed as he drew a sheet of thick letter paper, broad and creamy, from his pocket. "Oh! is it somebody else ... you don't mean to say it's another hotspur applying for a passage in the real Thunder Bird when you start the big rocket off for the moon, eh?" The girl glanced over her father's shoulder. "Yes, one more candidate for lunar honors! And this one is the limit for a Quixote. Young, too, I should say!" Again Toandoah's deep chant of laughter buoyed his daughter's treble note, as he began to read: "Professor G. Noel Lorry, Nevil University. My dear Sir, Having learned that you are perfecting an apparatus that will reach any height--even go as far as the moon--and that it will be capable of carrying a passenger, I should like to volunteer for the trip.