And never–oh! never since the history of Mother Earth and her satellite began did such a spectacular traveler start on such a flaming trip as when the hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America threw the switch and the steel explorer, twenty feet long, leaped from its platform high into the air, pointed directly for the moon, with a great inventor’s mathematical precision,–trailing its two-hundred-foot, rosy trail of fire.
There was not breath–not breath, even, to cry: “Watch it tear!”
Only breath enough, in young girls’ bodies, at least, to gaze off at Mammy Moon, loved patron of many an outdoor revel, and ponder upon the nature of the shock she would get when the Thunder Bird’s last explosion lit up her fair face with a blue powder-flash–lit it up for earth to see!
“Do–do you think ’twill ev-er get there–two hundred and thirty thousand miles, about, when–when an eighth of an inch out at the start; and it would m-miss–miss?” breathed a youth who knelt by the heroine of the evening, the inventor’s daughter.
“Toandoah doesn’t miss. My father doesn’t miss.” The young head of Pemrose Lorry queened it in the darkness, with a pride which made of old Greylock, at that moment, the world’s throne. “But how–how are we to live through the next hundred hours–the next four days–the time the Thunder Bird will take to travel?”
Yet they did succeed in living through it and in leading time a merry dance too, for young Treffrey Graham, junior, all old scores forgotten, was proving a prince of chums, as spirited in play as he was prompt in a pinch.
And together–hand clasped in hand, indeed–by virtue of her being the inventor’s daughter, he the son of the man who had resigned a fortune to the transcendent invention, side by side with two or three of those Very Great Ones, they stood, four nights later, looking through a monster telescope upon a mountaintop, and saw–saw the celestial climax, the first of the heavenly bodies reached.
Saw the blue powder-flash light up the full, round face of the Silver Queen they loved, while the Thunder Bird, expiring, dropped its bones upon her dead surface.
“It’s–got–there,” breathed the youth. “What next? Some day–some day, maybe, we’ll be shooting off there–together?”
“Yes! if only the Man in the Moon could shoot us back!” breathed Pemrose.