Her father, Professor Guy Noel Lorry, Fellow of Nevil University,–Toandoah, the inventor, she called him,–wearing his symbol, a saw-toothed triangle, embroidered with her own upon her ceremonial dress–had at one time almost prayed for a son, a boy who might help him to realize the dream, even then taking hold upon his heart, of conquering not the air alone but space–zero space, in which it was thought nothing could travel–so that old Earth might reach out to her sister planets.
He planned to call the boy Pemberton after his own father.
Likewise the mother of the maiden in green now seated upon the tool-box had longed for a daughter and aspired to name her Rose, in tender memory of a dear college chum, a flower no longer blooming upon earth.
And when the little black-haired mite in due time came, when she opened upon her father eyes blue as the empyrean he hoped to conquer, he had cried out of a core of transport lurking in the very heart of disappointment: “Oh! by Jove, I can’t quite give up my dream: let’s name her Pemrose. If she had been a boy, I’d have called her Pem.”
The young mother blissfully agreed–and did not live long to call her anything.
Grown to girlhood, the sprite of the laboratory, who had looked through a spectroscope at seven, clapping her small hands over the fairy colors–pure red, orange, green, blue, violet, separated by little dark, thread-like lines, each representing some element in that far-away upper air which her father hoped to master–preferred for herself the boyish Pem to the oft-worn Rose.
But in order to square accounts with what she called the “betty” element in her, she evened things up on becoming a Camp Fire Girl by choosing a name all feminine wherewith to be known by the Council Fire.
Wantaam, signifying Wisdom–a Wise Woman–was the title she bore as one who wore the Fire Maker’s bracelet upon her wrist and had pledged herself to tend as her fathers had tended and her fathers’ fathers since time began, that inner, mystic flame which has lit man’s way to progress from the moment when he forged a bludgeon to conquer his own world, until, to-day, when he was inventing a Bird to invade others.
And it was that Wise Woman who spoke now; she, of all others, who knew the secret of the magic Thunder Bird; and who, trustworthy to the core, had “kept it dark.”
“Oh! if I’ve ‘plugged’ hard in the past over those fierce first principles of mechanics, electricity, optics, heat and the rest–and those ‘grueling’ laws of gravitation–that’s just nothing, a scantling compared to the way I’m going to study and make a hit when I get on into college,” she cried; “so–so that, some day, I can, really, work with you, Toandoah–you record-breaking inventor–oh! dearest father ever was.”