cal fire in him mastering
weakness; at the girl kneeling, bolt upright, with the black rag between
her hands, and the twisted scrap of frame,--the frame which had drifted
down two hundred miles.

[Illustration: The man looked up at her, some dash of whimsical fire
mastering weakness. Page 268.]

"Ar-re you--going--to desert me now?"

Again the anchor held; the noble anchor: Give Service: it was as if a
voice outside of her numbed self spoke the words.

The raven rags dropped from between her fingers,--their reflection from
her face.

Steadily enough, she found the little vial lying amid the top layer in
that pigskin knapsack, shook a few drops from it, into the thimble-like
glass accompanying, mixed them with water, held them to his lips.

At the same time she dipped her handkerchief again and passed it over
his forehead.

"Ha! Pity as well as 'pep' in you, eh? Good!" The sufferer actually
winked one eye as the stimulant trickled down. "Well! my dear, the
little recording apparatus is in that knapsack too; I--I make you a
present of it--and of the codicil to my brother's will, as well.... You
won't have to wait twelve years."

Then, indeed, the trail seemed to double up, to wind itself around Pem's
brain, rocks and all,--only every rock was gold-edged, a nugget.

Her eyes stared straight before her,--blue as the June violet that
caught a drop from the spring near.

"Who--who are you?" screamed Una, forgetting that she was speaking to a
broken man.

"How about my being your uncle, Treffrey Graham, my dear, who--who was
such a mad fellow--in--youth; s-such an oddity? Oh-h! you've heard of
him--have--you?"

The whimsical light in the pain-reddened eyes burned to mockery now. It
showed the hippogriff, the "hot tamale", still there. Evidently
eccentricity wasn't all dead.

"Humph! By Jove! I'm having some fun out of my broken knee, after
all--electrifying you girls," gurgled the still racked voice. "Dramatic
setting for a denouement, too, the old Man Killer trail!"

"But why--oh! why-y did you do it?" Pem snatched up the rag of parachute
again, her eyes going wildly from the soot-like scrap of silk to a
wonderful, antique ring upon the little finger of the pale hand which
twitched so strangely below her.

"What! S-steal the little record, you mean!" The bushy eyebrows were
twitching, too. "Well! maybe I want-ed to make sure, for myself, that
the rocket really had gone higher than anything earthly ever fle