Muttering, bereft, she tossed; then for a moment awoke, blinkingly sat up, to see the moonlight flickering--Mammy Moon's own smile--upon the pearl-woven prophecy beside her, from which she could hardly be parted by night or day. Sleep again! And now it was not only the diary but the Thunder Bird, itself, that was lost,--astray in space, and she with it! She was trying to catch it by the fiery tail-feathers when, all of a sudden--all of a sober sudden--those feathers became soft, flopping, buffeting,--real. They brushed her parted lips. They flopped against her cheek. They even mopped the dews of slumber from her eyes. "Hea-vens! W-what is it-t?" Wildly she sat up--a second time--to see the dawn poking at her with a pink finger and the lake shimmering without, a great pearl found by the morning in an iridescent oyster-shell of mist. And, within, a bumping, buffeting something, soft as moss, dun-gray as terror--blundering into every sleeper's face, as if testing its warmth, bowling its way along the line of cots. "Cluck! Cluck! Flutter! Flutter! Awake! Awake! I'm lost! I'm lost!" it said. "What is it? _What is it?_" Never was such an exciting reveille as girl by girl bounded up--elastic--fingering a brushed, a tickled cheek. The answer was a screech that made the morning blush, as if a ghost had invaded the Tom Tiddler's ground of open day light. Una shrieked in echo. Morale was undermined. Cots were vacated. Maiden jostled maiden, all colliding upon a gaping question that fanned sensation sky-high--until the bungalow fairly rocked upon a hullabaloo. CHAPTER XVII A NOVEL SANTA CLAUS "It's an Owl!" "Only an owl--a little screech owl! Not--not so little, either! Where did it come from?" "Yes! How on earth did it get in? Doors--windows--all are screened." "Glory halleluiah! It came down the chimney. Look--look at the black on its feathers, the wood-smuts clinging to it! Down the big chimney of the living room!" "Like Santa Claus down the chimney! Mercy! d'you suppose it played Santa itself? or did the boys push it down?" "The boys! Those miserable Henkyl Hunters--always on the trail of a joke! If they did, they'll never own up! Never!" Such was the substance of the uproar as the downy ball of mopping feathers took on a beak, claws and big brown eyes, blank and round, perching upon the foot-rail of a cot! "Oh! it's as bad as the bats in Tory Cave. And they were so-o hor-rid!" wailed Una. "It--it just tickled my lips with its wing. Bah!" "Bad! It's not bad, at all; it's dear," cooed Jessie, the merle, feeling instant kinship with the bewildered bird. "Girls! Girls! I believe it's blind--blind as a bat, or as the pale fish in the cave. There it goes--look--knocking its head, this way and that, against the wall!" Yes, the fluttering thing, of a sudden taking to flight again, was now playing shuttlecock, feathered shuttlecock, to the battledore of a broad sunbeam which batted it wildly hither and yon.