“I wonder–I wonder if the Terrible Treff ever married?” Pem musingly nursed her chin,–and with it a wildfire interest in the “hot tamale.”
“I heard he did. Somebody said so–somebody who met him out West, years ago–that he was a widower, with a little son. But–apparently–he has no more use for his family.”
“No more–no more than his sister, Mrs. Grosvenor, has for us since you were made executor of that outlandish will, left, piecemeal in three drawers, to be opened on the first three anniversaries of Mr. Graham’s death–and not her husband!” Now it was an entirely new breeze of excitement, a stiffening, pinching draught, which swept the forest-green figure upon the tool-chest until its voice grew thin and sharp and edged as the blades in the box beneath it. “Oh-h, yes! she’s at daggers dr-rawn with us now–on her high ropes all the time, as you’d say. And–and she sneers at your inventions, father! She calls the rocket, the rocket,” half-hysterically, “the moon-reaching rocket,–a Quaker gun–a Quaker gun that’ll never be fired, never go off–never hit anything!... Oh-h!”
With her hand to her green breast at the insult, the girl bounded, blindly as a ball, from her box, across the laboratory–and on to a low platform.
Through her raging young body there shot like a physical cramp the knowledge that Quakers, noble-hearted Friends, did not use any guns; that the mocking term was but a by-word, a jesting synonym for all that was impotent–non-existent in reason and power–a dummy.
Savagely she applied her eye to the tall, ten-foot spectroscope rearing its brazen height from this low pedestal.
Without, beyond the glaring white-washed laboratory, was a February world, equally white, of zero ice and snow.
Through the spectroscope she saw a world in flames–blood-red.
It was not more flaming than her thoughts.
Her father’s transcendent invention just a faddist’s dream! The Thunder Bird a joke–a Quaker Gun!