Then, indeed, the trail seemed to double up, to wind itself around Pem’s brain, rocks and all,–only every rock was gold-edged, a nugget.
Her eyes stared straight before her,–blue as the June violet that caught a drop from the spring near.
“Who–who are you?” screamed Una, forgetting that she was speaking to a broken man.
“How about my being your uncle, Treffrey Graham, my dear, who–who was such a mad fellow–in–youth; s-such an oddity? Oh-h! you’ve heard of him–have–you?”
The whimsical light in the pain-reddened eyes burned to mockery now. It showed the hippogriff, the “hot tamale”, still there. Evidently eccentricity wasn’t all dead.
“Humph! By Jove! I’m having some fun out of my broken knee, after all–electrifying you girls,” gurgled the still racked voice. “Dramatic setting for a denouement, too, the old Man Killer trail!”
“But why–oh! why-y did you do it?” Pem snatched up the rag of parachute again, her eyes going wildly from the soot-like scrap of silk to a wonderful, antique ring upon the little finger of the pale hand which twitched so strangely below her.
“What! S-steal the little record, you mean!” The bushy eyebrows were twitching, too. “Well! maybe I want-ed to make sure, for myself, that the rocket really had gone higher than anything earthly ever flew yet, before–before I resigned a fortune to it.”
That was the moment when the nuggets all turned to rocks again for Pemrose. He saw the change in her face.
“Oh! I don’t mean anything der-og-a-tory to your father, my dear”–pain snatched at the man’s breath–“or to his invention, either. I knew him before you did. ‘Why did I do it?’ Curiosity–eccentricity, I suppose–anything you like to call it! I always was such a ‘terror’–a regular zany, my college friends used to call me.”