But all this, as the girl passionately told herself, was an everyday trick,–just a paper pellet thrown at one beside the overwhelming blow of the loss of her father’s record.
And he who could quote Shakespeare upon “Something rotten in the state of Denmark”, amid the horrors of a zero train-wreck, who “liked his excitement warm”, had a sense of humor.
True humor is never without a sense of proportion.
It knows where to stop.
But if the nickum was not the thief,–who then?
Ta-te, the tempest–otherwise the mountain gusts–had to be acquitted too.
For at the first dawn after the blighted experiment some thin silk rags of a raven parachute were found clinging, soot-like, to bushes in the spruce wood, together with a portion of a twisted and bent wire frame.
There was not a trace of the diary, the golden egg, the little perforated steel box, with the recording pencil and paper in it. Deprived of its wing, that could not have gone on alone,–without some hand carrying it.
So the weary and despondent searchers were forced to accept Andrew’s assertion that “mon or deil” had robbed them; and it was plain from the solemn shake of the “true-penny’s” gray head in its up-to-date chauffeur’s cap that he, himself, was disposed to lay the blame on a “deev.”
“It’s plain to me, noo, that this auld Earth should bide where she belangs,” he told the two girls, “not go outside o’ her ain bit atmosphere–be sending muckle messages outside it–it’s na canny.”