She could not look at it, the little Thunder Bird's log of that two-hundred mile trip aloft, she could only jealously clasp it to her breast,--Toandoah's little pal. "T-tell your fa-ther from--me," said the broken voice, "that Treff Graham is the same old Treff; that he m-may be a pirate, but he isn't a pig--not re-al-ly! That," faintly, "he apol-o-gizes--and steps aside; that, with all his heart--it's there, if it is a madcap--" wanderingly, winkingly, he touched his left breast--"he hopes that, a year from now, the highways of the hea-vens may be opened--the im-mor-tal Thun-der Bird will fly!" CHAPTER XXIII THE CELESTIAL CLIMAX A year from then it did! It awoke the World with its challenging roar, silencing for ever, let us hope, the racket of guns upon this dear planet, leading man in future to seek his conquests in more transcendent ways, even outside Earth's atmosphere, as it took its pioneer flight again from the misty top of old Mount Greylock. The World and his wife were there to see: scientists from the four quarters of the globe--Earth's great ones. And other spellbound spectators, too: Una, the White Birch Group, their Boy Scout comrades--Stud fast developing into the type of hotspur who wanted to take passage for the moon--all massed in such a stupendous Get Together as made the mountain seem "moonshine land", indeed, to their thrill-shod feet. And never--oh! never since the history of Mother Earth and her satellite began did such a spectacular traveler start on such a flaming trip as when the hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America threw the switch and the steel explorer, twenty feet long, leaped from its platform high into the air, pointed directly for the moon, with a great inventor's mathematical precision,--trailing its two-hundred-foot, rosy trail of fire. There was not breath--not breath, even, to cry: "Watch it tear!" Only breath enough, in young girls' bodies, at least, to gaze off at Mammy Moon, loved patron of many an outdoor revel, and ponder upon the nature of the shock she would get when the Thunder Bird's last explosion lit up her fair face with a blue powder-flash--lit it up for earth to see! "Do--do you think 'twill ev-er get there--two hundred and thirty thousand miles, about, when--when an eighth of an inch out at the start; and it would m-miss--miss?" breathed a youth who knelt by the heroine of the evening, the inventor's daughter. "Toandoah doesn't miss. My father doesn't miss." The young head of Pemrose Lorry queened it in the darkness, with a pride which made of old Greylock, at that moment, the world's throne. "But how--how are we to live through the next hundred hours--the next four days--the time the Thunder Bird will take to travel?" Yet they did succeed in living through it and in leading time a merry dance too, for young Treffrey Graham, junior, all old scores forgotten, was proving a prince of chums, as spirited in play as he was prompt in a pinch.