Turning from a bench where he sat fiddling with a steel chamber, part of the anatomy of a fledgling Thunder Bird, of one of those small model rockets which he was fitting up for experiments on a mountain-top, the inventor watched her listlessly.
“Hullo! What’s the charm now, the thing of beauty? That–that looks such stuff as dreams are made of.” Toandoah drew a long breath.
“No, it isn’t dream-stuff, father; it’s history, the history of your life and mine, all told in symbols, woven into a chain, a stole–see–to wear with my ceremonial dress. It–it’s my masterpiece.” Pem looked up, all girl, all Rose, now. “I didn’t want to show it to you until it was finished. But now–now–don’t you want to see it?”
Listlessly, still, her father drew near, his tall figure in its long, drab laboratory coat looming like a shadow behind her shoulder.
“See there–there’s where it begins with the Flag I was born under, the Stars and Stripes,” excitedly. “And look,” softly, “that gold star stands for Mother who died when I was two. And there you are, Toandoah, with that queer Indian triangle having the teeth of a saw, the emblem of invention.”
“What! That funny, squat figure, with something like a three-cornered fool’s-cap on my head and the moon above it, looking through a tube!” There was a laugh in the inventor’s throat now; the grim “Get thee behind me, Satan!” look, with the cloud of that codicil to a will, were melting away from him. “Well, go on!” he encouraged smilingly. “Artistic, anyhow! I believe you Camp Fire Girls would weave magic around a clock pendulum.”
“And here–here am I–Wantaam, a Wise Woman. There’s the Thunder Bird, see, the symbol of the great rocket. Here are you and I, Dad, upon a mountaintop, watching it tear–oh! tear away.”
He laughed again at the two stiff, woodeny figures, the comet-like streak of fire above them.
“And this–the quill fluttering down attached to a kite! Humph! That stands for the Thunder Bird’s diary, I suppose, otherwise the golden egg–the little recording apparatus coming down on the wing of its black parachute.”
The inventor laughed amusedly again, glancing sidelong at his masterpiece, the little five-inch openwork steel box, having in it two tiny wheels with paper wound, tapelike, on one and a pencil between them. This carried in the head of the Thunder Bird, big or little, would keep a record of as high as it went by the pencil automatically making marks so long as there was any air-pressure, like a guiding hand, to move it.