Calling upon Una to follow, she headed for a dripping window-gap, to seize the moment when the flood, now lower upon that side, might give her a chance to paddle through–scramble through–escape on to the cracking ice, before the opening was again blotted out.
But together with the cruelty of glass-splinters, ice-spars scratching her set face, came the shock of an inner splinter: an inkling, somehow, that Una was helpless, could not follow, that, battered by concussion, tossing like a log upon the flood’s breast, her senses had almost left her.
Many waters cannot quench love–the love of a daughter for her genius-father.
In that moment–that moment–there leaped up in the breast of Toandoah’s child the fire, the red fire, which alone can carry anything higher, be it rocket or girl’s heart.
They had called her father’s invention a joke, a Quaker gun, Una and her mother.
Never should they say that of his daughter’s pluck: that it was a dummy which would hit no mark,–or only to save itself!
“Una!” Wildly she seized the other girl’s creamy flannels, buoyed like a great, pale water-lily upon the imprisoned lake-water. “Catch–c-catch me by the belt–Una! I–I’ll try-y to save you! Oh-h! s-stick ti-ight now.”
And the daughter of the man, still sitting afar in his quiet laboratory, fitting little powder charges into a model Thunder Bird, set herself to battle through the swirling gap of that half-covered window-frame–clutched and hampered now–yet upholding, even if it was her daring death-thought, Toandoah’s honor in the flood.