She became lost in the most magnificent dream that ever entranced a Camp Fire Girl yet–with any hope of fulfillment.
Standing of a starless night upon a lofty mountain-top, she was looking up at Mammy Moon, dear, silver-footed Queen, so near to the heart of every Earth-daughter!
In the darkness she felt the eyes of the whole world upon her–she but a satellite reflecting her father’s light–its joint ear was bent to catch the wild, triumphal song-sob of her heart.
And at the words: “Ready! Shoot!”, Toandoah’s battle-cry, she was pressing the electric button which, connected with a switch in the Thunder Bird’s tail, would start it off, pointed directly for the moon, to light up that silver disc with a bright powder-flash visible here on earth.
She was mesmerized by its wild, red eye. She was watching it switch its rosy tail feathers, two hundred feet long, that dashing explorer, as, roaring, it leaped from its mountain platform at incredible speed for an incredible flight.
She was echoing the college boys’ untamed slogan: “Watch it tear; oh! watch it tear–the fire-eater.”
She....
But what–what was this? Was she tearing with it? Was she, she herself, just a shocked girl, at the heart of its rapid-fire explosions?
Was she being hurled with it through space, blank space, Absolute Zero, below what human instrument could register,–or human girl encounter and live?
All she knew was that she was being flung, first forward, then backward; and then, oh, horrors! against the train window near her where glass was all splintering and crashing, through which ice and water, mad, mad water and ice, were rushing together.