Her hands came together as she gazed, that graceful, green-clad woman, speechless, transfigured, along the aërial high-road on which the Thunder Bird would first pay toll by dropping its golden egg, its record, off--off beyond the low night-clouds to the mysterious sky-ways where daylight now mated with dusk and the lunar lamps were being softly lighted, even to the gateway of Mammy Moon herself. Throbbing, she flushed from head to heel, as she thought of the two hundred and thirty thousand miles to be traversed before the first barrier between the heavenly bodies had been let down--and the Thunder Bird had won home.
"It's--too--gr-reat for words," she said, a break in her voice now. "Well-ll! if we are not playing hostess to the Man in the Moon--quite yet--at least, we seem to be entertaining angels unawares, with the latest rumors from the sky," laughingly. "How about supper now? Later on maybe we can show you two dear girls that we--as a Group--can do something with red fire, too, a very earth-bound something, mere child's play compared to the future of your celestial Bird. Ha! But--what's--that?"
And then, for the first time in its yet unwritten story, the Thunder Bird had its nose put out of joint by a modest little earth-bird--a hermit, too, as it would be among the starry spaces--by a little, brown-backed evening thrush singing its good-night song in a thicket of scrub near by.
it caroled, as a naturalist has translated the wonderful, silver-sweet prelude of the master-singer of the woods, the nightingale of America, rising, trilling until--now--with the voice-throwing magic of the ventriloquist, its song seemed to come from quite another corner of the thicket, while girls' hearts melted in their breasts, as, climbing a maypole of ecstasy, the notes trembled--fluted--upon a gossamer pinnacle of gladness at the close of a perfect day.
There was no breath in girlish bodies for more than the one answering note of passion.
No wonder the Thunder Bird's nose was out of joint.
But was it ventriloquism at large? Had the hermit power to throw his melody right into the center of the ring of girls--so to answer himself?
It was the visitors' turn now for a stupendous sensation.