Yet old Earth had still her individual romance of seedtime and harvest, sun and storm, peril and deliverance.
Emblematically depicted these were in the pearl strip of a girl, with a winsome reflection of Andrew’s thistle-burr in her speech. Born “far awa’ in bonnie Scotland”, the thistle and America’s goldenrod blent their purple and gold upon her young shoulders; there was an idealized plow, representing the peaceful agricultural calling of her father,–and a jump from peace to peril in the primitively symbolized scene of a shipwreck through which she had been with him when crossing the Atlantic in a sailing vessel.
“We had all to take to the boats, you see,” said Jennie McIvor, “for the ship was leaking so badly that she couldn’t keep afloat but a wee bit longer; and we had a verra rough time until we were picked up.”
A rough time, indeed, typified by the wildly driven little canoes–the most primitive form of the boat–tossed upon stiff water-hills, brooding above them the quaint, corkscrew figure, with the eye in its head, of Ta-te, the tempest.
Somehow, this eye–the spying wind’s eye–haunted Pemrose that night, curled up in a previous suggestion of the Guardian’s which, momentarily, had twisted itself, snake-like, around her heart.
Suppose Ta-te should prove cruel to her, as to Jennie whom she had eventually spared! Suppose, on the great night of the first experiment with Toandoah’s little rocket, Ta-te, jealous of a rival in the small Thunder Bird which could out-soar all the winds of Earth–out-soar even the air, their cradle–should meanly seize upon the black, silk parachute, light as soot, anchored to the golden egg, the little recording apparatus! Suppose it should whirl both off, away from the eager hands stretched out to claim them, hide them in a dark recess of the mountain side, maybe, where they could not be found for days,–possibly never!
Ta-te could play fast and loose with her father’s reputation, she knew; at least, with the witness to his success as an inventor.
“If the wind should do that,” she thought, “then the World, some part of it–the horrid World–will say that Mr. Hartley Graham’s last thoughts about that mile-long will were wise ones: that it was better–better to leave all that money ‘hung up’ awaiting the possible return of that madcap younger brother–who’ll make ducks and drakes of it, most likely–than–than to turn it over to a Thunder Bird,” with a faint flash of a smile, “in spite, oh! in spite of the fact that daring volunteers–skilled aviators–are wild to take passage in the far-flying Bird.”
Yes! even that youthful hotspur who used the cream of rough-edged paper, and was willing to try anything once, though it should be once for all.
The girl’s thought reverted to him now as she gazed into the bungalow fire, seeing in the gusty flicker of every log that menacing spiral,–the brooding wind’s eye.