CHAPTER II
GIMCRACK ICE
She was thinking of it two hours later–having gained her coaxing point–seated in the well-nigh empty parlor car of the north-bound express, that green-aisled Pullman being the first car behind the cab and plodding engine which, regardless of schedule, crept along slowly and warily to-day upon ice-shod rails.
But as she caressed the honorable thumb–the little girlish member which would press the button while all the world wondered–and peered out through a window fairly frosted, lo! again she saw a landscape dimly in flames–blood-red–as viewed through the spectroscope of her own raging thoughts.
For ice was within the car, as without.
There–there, seated almost on a line with her, on the other side of the moss-green aisle, and only three other distant passengers in the compartment, was the girl whose caricaturing tongue had repeated the indelible insult about a Quaker gun; whose mother considered her father a mere chuckle-headed dreamer, with his visions of bridging the absolute zero of space–just a mild three hundred degrees, or so, lower than the biting breath of Mother Earth at the present moment–and reaching worlds far away amid the starry scope.
Pemrose had kept her word about not speaking. She just dropped one pointed little icicle in the shape of a nod upon her one-time friend as she sank into her own swivel chair and threw off the heavy coat with which she had covered her ski-runner’s silken wind-jacket and belted skiing costume of pure, creamy wool, with its full freedom of knickerbockers.
“There’s Una–Una Grosvenor!” Her face frosted over at the thought. “Oh, mer-rcy! how I hate her–shall everlastingly hate her–for passing on that sneer about the Thunder Bird.... And I know-ow her eyelashes aren’t as long as mine now!”
Mingled spice was in the furtive glance which Toandoah’s little pal, his maiden of the chowchow name, threw across the narrow train-aisle at the delicate young profile opposite, outlined against a crusted window.
“And she still has that funny little near-sighted stand in one of her dark eyes, too–Una! Although they’re pretty eyes–I’ll admit that!” mused the critic further. “Goodness! won’t she open them one of these days when the world is all ringing with talk of Dad and his rocket: when the Thunder Bird, the finished, full-fledged Thunder Bird, undertakes its hundred-hour flight to the moon.... For, oh! I know-ow that it will go, some day–some day.” The girl stared passionately now into the future in the frostscript of the pane near her. “Man would not let it fail, God could not let it fail–just for lack of funds–however that third nut may turn out–that third section of a queer will!”
And now the mulled world outside changed again, shading from blood-red to fairy rose-color as seen through the spectroscope of hope.