Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl

Excerpt

CHAPTER I
A Quaker Gun

“And will the Thunder Bird really lay its egg upon the moon? Such a hard egg, too! Will it–really–drop a pound weight of steel upon the head of the Man in the Moon?... Oh! de-ar Mammy Moon–what a shock she’ll get.”

The girl, the fifteen-year-old Camp Fire Girl–all but sixteen now–to whom Mammy Moon had been the fairy foster-mother of her childhood, ever since she lay, wakeful, in her little cot, looking up at that silvery face of a burnt-out satellite, picturing it the gate of Heaven and her mother’s spirit as bathed in the soft, lunar radiance behind it, caught her breath with a wild little gasp whose triumph was a sob upon the still laboratory air.

“Lay its egg in a nest of the moon! A dead nest! It will do more than that, little Pem!” Toandoah, the inventor, turned from fitting a number of tiny sky-rockets into the supply chamber of a larger one,–turned with that living coal of fire in his eye which only the inventor can know, and looked upon his daughter. “Yes, it will do more than that! The Thunder Bird will lay its golden egg for us–if it drops its expiring one upon the moon. It will send us back the first record from space, the very first information as to what it may be that lies up–away up–a couple of hundred miles, or so, above us, in the outer edges of the earth’s atmosphere of which less is known at present than of the deepest soundings of the ocean. Our Thunder Bird will be the–first–explorer.”

“Oh! de-ar Mammy Moon–what a shock she’ll get.”    Page 2.

The man’s eyes were dim now. For a moment he saw as in a prism the work of his fingers, those little explosive rockets–the charges of smokeless powder–which being discharged automatically in flight, would send the Thunder Bird upon its magic way, roaring its challenge to the world to listen, switching its rose-red tail of light.

Then–then as the mist cleared those deep, glowing eyes of his became to his daughter a magic lantern by which she saw a series of pictures thrown upon the sheeting whitewash of the laboratory wall, culminating in one which was almost too dazzling for mortal girl of fifteen–though born of a great inventor–to bear.

“And to think,” she cried, rising upon tiptoe, swaying there in the February sunlight, “just to think that it’s a Camp Fire Girl–a Camp Fire Girl of America–with the eyes of the world upon her, who will push the button, throw the switch upon a mountain-top, launch the Thunder Bird upon its glor-i-ous way, send off–send off the first earth-valentine to Mammy Moon!... Oh! Toandoah–oh! Daddy-man–it’s too much.”

Pemrose Lorry clasped her hands. Her blue-star eyes, blue at the moment as the tiny blossoms of the meadow star-grass for which some fairy has captured a sky-beam, were suddenly wet.

A slim, girlish figure in forest green–last sylvan word in Camp Fire uniforms which she was trying on–she hung there, poised upon an inner pinnacle, while sunbeams racing down the whitewash did obeisance before her, while spectroscope, lathe and delicate balances, brilliant reflectors, offered her a brazen crown.

“Well–well, it’s coming to you, Pem–you sprite.” Her father shot a sidelong glance at the nixie green as he fitted another little rocket into its groove in the larger one’s interior, where the touch of a mechanical appliance, like the trigger of a gun, in the Thunder Bird’s tail, would ignite it in flight. “You alone, girl as you are, know the full secret of the Thunder Bird, as you romantically call it, the principle on which I am working, child–in so far as you can understand it–in creating this model rocket for experiments and the master sky-rocket, the full-fledged Thunder Bird, later, to soar even to the moon itself–Mars, too, maybe–you alone know and you have kept it dark....