“The—w-wood!” Una stared at him feebly, making no motion to pick up the little metal cup, blistered by heat, which he unhooked from the aviator’s belt and flung towards her.
“Yes, the wood! Air ‘ye jacky-witted’? Oh! shame fer a lassie to be ginge’-bread at sech a time. Well, deil-mak’-matter! I’ll go meself.”
But it was at that moment that the “deil”, called upon, seemed to make the matter in question his own.
It was at that moment that the world went quite to perdition with a roar as, aloft in the tree top, the gasolene tank blew up.
Flaming fragments, bits of wing that seemed wrenched from imps, red imps, blazing splinters, scraps of wire and red-hot metal rained all around the girl in the terrified grass—still blanched with dew.
“Warry!” shrieked Andrew. “Down, lassie—down flat, ere the fiery off-fall hit ye!”
But that “fiery off-fall” dropped a curtain between Una and her visions of the wood. In a delirium she picked up the cup—and fled, not back to the wood, but to the nearest garden hydrant.
A fragment of linen wing, aëroplane wing, treated with the preparation that was so inflammable, swept her cheek—a scarlet butterfly. But she managed to fetch the water, her brief dizziness shriveled, like that doped wing, into a frenzy—red frenzy.
As cool drops fell upon his face, moistened his blistered lips, the boy aviator opened his eyes.
“Gosh! but this is an aw-ful note.” He blinked mockingly at motes of his wings swimming before him in the red glare, at his aëroplane fast being reduced to a blackened motor and a few twisted wires in the tree top. “Aw-ful note!” He grinned.