With the girls in their little fairy-like ring of electric light--to go out like a will o' the wisp presently--was their usual body-guard, old Andrew, who had driven the party up the mountain. "Cannily noo, lassie! _Cannily._ Dinna be fechless--flighty!" The Scot was breathing like a Highland gust as he cautioned the girl whose tingling little thumb touched lightly as thistledown the fairy button. "Whoop!" he grunted sharply. "I reckon they're maist ready, noo, to gie it its fling--let it go!" It was at this moment that in the distant island of flashlight an arm was flung up. It was that of the professor's young assistant. He forgot to bring it down again. And, lo! a hush, as of a world suspended, fell upon old Greylock,--that grim, black mountain-top. The long grasses ceased to whisper. The mountain-ash trees cuddled their little pale berry-babies in awe. "All R-ready! _Shoot!_" Toandoah's battle-cry it was. A roar as of a small brass cannon, the first gun of the new conquest, responded, as the hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America pressed the button, triumphantly throwing the switch in the nozzle, or tailpart, of the mounted rocket, a hundred feet away. Simultaneously the flashlights went out. And in the darkness--into the blackness the little Thunder Bird soared. Soared with the wild red eye of its headlight challenging the heavens themselves to stop it, with its comet-like tail of red fire streaming out full twenty feet behind it. At lightning speed,--fifty miles the first minute, a hundred the next,--it leaped from its mountain platform straight up--bound for the vacant lot of space. Explosion after bright explosion tore the cloud-banks as, one by one, the innumerable little rockets, which Pem had watched her father fitting into their grooves in its interior--far back in that quiet laboratory--went off. And with each radiant roar higher--faster--it dashed, the little Thunder Bird, with never a puff of smoke to dim the spectacle--the transplendency of its flight. "Michty! Michty!... _Magerful!_" There was just the one skirl from Andrew, to lend it music on its upward way; he had not thought that he came to America to witness a thing like this. "Magerful", indeed! Magical, indeed! The others were silent, swept away by the magic of it--the greater, moon-storming magic to come. Only--only, they breathlessly asked themselves: "What next?" Well! the immediate "next" would be the return of the golden egg, the diary, the falling fruit of the experiment, without which there was no proof of its success--of how high the fiery Bird had flown--before, its last automatic charge expended, it sang its swan-song somewhere in space. At the increasing speed with which the little Thunder Bird flew--when miles were but a moment--the record might be expected back in a few minutes. Minutes--but they seemed a moon's age!