"Ha! Good name for it! Piles up the moon-going romance, eh? Well-ll,"
wearily, "having found out the par-ti-cu-lar night on which the lit-tle
model rocket was to fly, I came up the mountain to a small camp that my
son and I have ne-ar the summit--east side of Greylock. I was standing
on the edge of the spruce woods, watching the whole performance.
Then--then, when the parachute dragging the little recording apparatus
blew towards me in the darkness, almost into my hand, I--why! I snatched
it up and ran with it. Why? Oh, because I suppose the boy has never died
in me: the boy that's 'part pirate, part pig!'" with a grating chuckle.
Incredible as it seemed, the low laughter, the treacherous tinkle, was
echoed by girlish lips as that renascent urchin momentarily swaggered in
the glaze of the suffering eye!
"And then--and then something told me--an aberration, I suppose, as my
impulses usually are--that I had some sort of r-right to see the very
first record man had ever got of that upper air, of Space, if--if I was
go-ing to turn over a couple of hundred thousand dollars, for the
pursuit of the--sov-er-eign invention."
"I--I can't believe it," murmured Pem into the stony teeth of the Man
Killer.
"I meant to return the record next morning, but I was a-fraid your
father might shoot me," to Pemrose. "Then, later, I heard he had gone
down the mountain--that was yesterday and a mistake--I went-down, too,
to beard him. A--a little more water, please! I could not climb again
until to-day; I took the Man Killer trail, as being the shortest.
And--here I am!" grimly.
"Incidentally, I gave our family lawyer a shock, little niece," he went
on, as Una, plucking up courage, adjusted her sweater under his head;
she began to like this uncle with the pebble-like cast in his stone-gray
eye, she began to think that girls--Camp Fire Girls, especially, with
their love of the fanciful--might have more patience with him than
others had had.
"Yes! you bet I gave old Cartwright the staggers!" He laughed down the
twinge of agony in his voice. "Called him up on the long distance
telephone, told him I was Treffrey Graham back; that I had been in the
East nearly six months, with my son; that I came pretty near disclosing
myself on the--on the day when the third installment of my brother's
will was read--actually walked up to the door of my sister's house, then
shied off, because ... Oh, gosh! this knee."
The voice broke; it had really become a feverish babble of excitement
now--pain's wild excitement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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