as echoing the college boys' untamed slogan: "Watch it tear; oh!
watch it tear--the fire-eater."

She....

But what--what was this? Was she tearing with it? Was she, she herself,
just a shocked girl, at the heart of its rapid-fire explosions?

Was she being hurled with it through space, blank space, Absolute Zero,
below what human instrument could register,--or human girl encounter and
live?

All she knew was that she was being flung, first forward, then backward;
and then, oh, horrors! against the train window near her where glass was
all splintering and crashing, through which ice and water, mad, mad
water and ice, were rushing together.

There was an awful, punching jolt, a frenzied shriek of steam, a
splashing, hissing roar--that, surely, could not be the steel Thunder
Bird's challenge, unless it had suddenly become a wading goose--and, lo!
she was hurled straight out of her dream across a Pullman aisle, fast
flooding, right into the girl with whom she had once vainly measured
eyelashes,--between whom and herself had existed that thin bridge of ice
but one little minute before.

Alas! poor human ice that couldn't stand a moment under the blows of
Nature's ice-hammer.

Both pairs of girlish lashes were stark with terror now.

"Una! Una! _Una!_ Ac-ci-dent! Tr-rain accident! Gone
through--through into--the--lake!" moaned Pemrose, half stunned, yet
conscious, as she was ten seconds before, that they had been crossing
frozen water.

Water! A pale pond, now plainly seen through awful, swirling,
wave-blocked window-gaps! Yet across its wan and shattering crust there
shone a trail of fire, red fire, heart fire--vivid at that moment as the
Thunder Bird's pink tail feathers switching through the space of
horror--and somewhere in that stretched consciousness which is beyond
thinking, Toandoah's daughter knew that it was the Camp Fire training in
presence of mind.

"Una! M-mer-rcy! Una! Water's r-rushing in-n--in so fast--through
windows--doors ahead--m-may dr-rown right here, 'less we can f-fight
it--get out," was her struggling cry as, paddling desperately like a
little dog, she found herself topping the flood, that lashing, interned
lake-water, now blotting out window-frames on one side of the
car--groping with icy fingers for the painted ceiling of the
Pullman--then undulatingly sinking below them on the other.

For it was a case just half-a-minute before, while Pem was still
sanguinely loosing the Thunder Bi