From the four quarters of the habitable earth eyes seemed trained upon her, as she knelt in a little island of flashlight, with her thumb on an electric button which, connected by wires with a platform about a hundred feet away, would throw the switch and release the magic Bird to flying.
“N-now, keep cool, Pem! Don’t get excited–too ex-ci-ted–or-r you may miss the moment when they shout to you: ‘R-ready! Shoot!’” breathed Una, so wrought up herself that her words had a sort of little zip, a hiss, in them, like the soft sighing of the breeze at the moment.
Pemrose knew that her father’s thoughts were taken up all the time with that summit breeze, on how far it might affect the safe return of the golden egg, as he hovered about the low platform, a hundred feet away, on which the little Thunder Bird was mounted, together with his young assistant tightening up every bolt and screw for the record flight. A third tall figure hovered near, within the ring of distant flashlight, that of Una’s father, as transported now over the whole experiment as if he had never hinted that the far-flying rocket was a Quaker gun.
With the girls in their little fairy-like ring of electric light–to go out like a will o’ the wisp presently–was their usual body-guard, old Andrew, who had driven the party up the mountain.
“Cannily noo, lassie! Cannily. Dinna be fechless–flighty!” The Scot was breathing like a Highland gust as he cautioned the girl whose tingling little thumb touched lightly as thistledown the fairy button. “Whoop!” he grunted sharply. “I reckon they’re maist ready, noo, to gie it its fling–let it go!”
It was at this moment that in the distant island of flashlight an arm was flung up. It was that of the professor’s young assistant.
He forgot to bring it down again.
And, lo! a hush, as of a world suspended, fell upon old Greylock,–that grim, black mountain-top.
The long grasses ceased to whisper. The mountain-ash trees cuddled their little pale berry-babies in awe.
“All R-ready! Shoot!”