Toandoah’s battle-cry it was.
A roar as of a small brass cannon, the first gun of the new conquest, responded, as the hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America pressed the button, triumphantly throwing the switch in the nozzle, or tailpart, of the mounted rocket, a hundred feet away.
Simultaneously the flashlights went out.
And in the darkness–into the blackness the little Thunder Bird soared.
Soared with the wild red eye of its headlight challenging the heavens themselves to stop it, with its comet-like tail of red fire streaming out full twenty feet behind it.
At lightning speed,–fifty miles the first minute, a hundred the next,–it leaped from its mountain platform straight up–bound for the vacant lot of space.
Explosion after bright explosion tore the cloud-banks as, one by one, the innumerable little rockets, which Pem had watched her father fitting into their grooves in its interior–far back in that quiet laboratory–went off.
And with each radiant roar higher–faster–it dashed, the little Thunder Bird, with never a puff of smoke to dim the spectacle–the transplendency of its flight.
“Michty! Michty!... Magerful!”
There was just the one skirl from Andrew, to lend it music on its upward way; he had not thought that he came to America to witness a thing like this.