“I guess if–if I pull through this, I’ll be a–reformed–character; no more–no more eccentricity for me,” he murmured dizzily to Pemrose who, when the trail permitted, walked beside him, stroking his hand,–and he rolled his eyes faintly, through the veil of the opiate which the doctor had given, at the knapsack beside him, wherein lay the golden egg.
And with his own hands, the Man Killer at last conquered, as they laid him in an ambulance, he took the five-inch, open-work steel box, the precious record, from that knapsack’s depth and handed it to her.
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.