r 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."

[Illustration: "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 fi