Simultaneously there was a low, sullen roaring, the crack of doom, as condensed steam sucked in the heavy steel casing of the locomotive’s boilers and shattered it like an eggshell.
In Pemrose it shattered something too.
Wildly she looked into the eyes of the man in the tourist’s cap and was conscious that in one of them horror was frozen into a fixed stand, as it was in one of Una’s, as he helped her up a snowy bank.
And, with that, her brain laid its last egg for the present, as the Thunder Bird would drop its expiring one upon the dead surface of the moon, in the knowledge that, the Fates notwithstanding, she was still alive–still alive, to see the great rocket go!
And as for its completion–as to the little gold mine necessary to gorge it for its record flight–why! the third rich nut of which she had spoken a little while ago in her father’s laboratory, had not yet been cracked: the third mysterious drawer containing the third and last installment of a dead man’s very strange will had not yet been opened.
CHAPTER IV
The Second Wreck
That third nut was cracked just five weeks later in the firelit library of what had been Mr. Hartley Graham’s home–the home of a man who during his lifetime, so it was occasionally said, had been, in some ways, almost as eccentric as his madcap brother–and concerning the latter his college chums, those who knew him long ago, were of the opinion that he was a freak whose “head grew beneath his shoulder.”
The house, a white marble mansion on Opal Avenue, finest of the old residential streets in the University city of Clevedon, was now occupied by the sister of the two, the mother of Una, who had snapped her fingers at the Thunder Bird, calling it a joke, a dummy, a Quaker gun.
That jeering nickname still rankled in the breast of Pemrose, who looked more like a colorless March Primrose, owing to the lingering shock of that train wreck, upon the spring morning in early April when the family lawyer whose duty it was to settle the affairs of the man who had left three separate portions of his will in as many drawers, to be opened on three successive anniversaries of his death, drew forth the last.