“I don’t believe that Dad has slept for two nights now, thinking about its safe return,” said Pemrose to Una, as in the starless, breeze-tickled night the two crouched together upon the mountain-top.
“Well! that little firefly, the tiny electric lamp–the ‘wee bit battery’, as Andrew calls it–will guide us to finding it when it drifts down,” panted the other girl, excitement fixing that little peculiar stand, like a golden lamp, in her dark eye.
“Yes, but–” perhaps her dream in the bungalow of Ta-te, the tempest, was affecting Pemrose–“but suppose, oh! suppose, that the wind–there is a wind–should waft it away–away from us, down the mountainside, to where we couldn’t find it in the woods–dark woods–to where somebody, some horrid meddler, might pick it up, and get a look at the Thunder Bird’s diary before us ... the first record from so high up. Oh–dear!”
The girl’s sigh was echoed by that stealthy wind around her, in whose every whisper there was menace, as it swept through the long grasses and ruffled the ash trees of Greylock’s summit.
Una, to whom this “half the battle”, the quick locating of the parachute and its treasure, was not so vital, soared above all threat in this witching-time of excitement–the transcendent hour.
“The Thunder Bird’s diary! Oh-h! the Thunder Bird’s diary,” she repeated dreamily, as if reciting a charm.
Being Camp Fire Girls of fervid imagination, the supreme invention, the beginning of old Earth’s reaching out to the heavenly bodies, gained its crowning romance from them.
As moment by moment flew by romance in their young breasts became a sort of rhapsody that set every thought to wild music.
To Pem it was as she had dreamed it would be, away back in her father’s laboratory, before the February train wreck.
Hands seemed reaching out to her from everywhere,–she the satellite reflecting her father’s light.