“And to think,” she cried, rising upon tiptoe, swaying there in the February sunlight, “just to think that it’s a Camp Fire Girl–a Camp Fire Girl of America–with the eyes of the world upon her, who will push the button, throw the switch upon a mountain-top, launch the Thunder Bird upon its glor-i-ous way, send off–send off the first earth-valentine to Mammy Moon!... Oh! Toandoah–oh! Daddy-man–it’s too much.”
Pemrose Lorry clasped her hands. Her blue-star eyes, blue at the moment as the tiny blossoms of the meadow star-grass for which some fairy has captured a sky-beam, were suddenly wet.
A slim, girlish figure in forest green–last sylvan word in Camp Fire uniforms which she was trying on–she hung there, poised upon an inner pinnacle, while sunbeams racing down the whitewash did obeisance before her, while spectroscope, lathe and delicate balances, brilliant reflectors, offered her a brazen crown.
“Well–well, it’s coming to you, Pem–you sprite.” Her father shot a sidelong glance at the nixie green as he fitted another little rocket into its groove in the larger one’s interior, where the touch of a mechanical appliance, like the trigger of a gun, in the Thunder Bird’s tail, would ignite it in flight. “You alone, girl as you are, know the full secret of the Thunder Bird, as you romantically call it, the principle on which I am working, child–in so far as you can understand it–in creating this model rocket for experiments and the master sky-rocket, the full-fledged Thunder Bird, later, to soar even to the moon itself–Mars, too, maybe–you alone know and you have kept it dark. You’ve plugged like a boy at your elementary physics in high school, so’s to be able to understand and sympathize–you’ve lived up to the name I gave you–”
“My chowchow name!” interjected the girl, winking slily.
“Well! it is a mixture.” Her father echoed her chuckle. “But I guess you’ve been son and daughter both, you good little pal–you sprite of the lab.”
“Oh! Toandoah–oh! Daddy-man–I’m so glad.”
Here there was a little laboratory explosion, a rocket of feeling fired off, as the owner of that hybrid name, Pemrose, came down from her pinnacle and, perching upon a low tool-chest at the inventor’s side, took the humbler place she loved,–fellow of her father’s heart.
“I–I used to wish I was all boy until I became a Camp Fire Girl; that bettered the betty element a little,” she confided, the spice of her mixed cognomen floating in her eye.
It was a joke with her, that chowchow name–original mixture–and how she came by it.