Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl

This, the first story written upon the latest and unique conquest of the age, the conquest of empty Space, with the subsequent reaching out to the Heavenly Bodies, has the permission of the conquering inventor, Professor Robert H. Goddard.

May it bring to every Camp Fire in America, and to boys as well, the romance of the transcendent achievement, beside which all dressing of fiction pales!

The Author also acknowledges her indebtedness to Professor Frank G. Speck for permission to reprint the music of the Leaf Dance.

CONTENTS Chapter Page I. A QUAKER GUN 1 II. GIMCRACK ICE 20 III. THE WRONG SIDE OF HER DREAM 31 IV. THE SECOND WRECK 40 V. SHE SAVED A CITY 49 VI. A HOTSPUR 60 VII. THE PINNACLE 69 VIII. A USURPER 78 IX. JACK AT A PINCH 86 X. CAMP FIRE SISTERS 98 XI. MOTHER EARTH'S ROMANCE 109 XII. OLD ROUND-TOP 124 XIII. COBWEB WEED 134 XIV. STOUTHEART 147 XV. AIRDRAWN AEROPLANES 160 XVI. THE COUNCIL FIRE 174 XVII. A NOVEL SANTA CLAUS 190 XVIII. REPRISALS 207 XIX. A RECORD FLIGHT 229 XX. THE SEARCH 244 XXI. THE MAN KILLER 262 XXII. A JUNE WOMAN 280 XXIII. THE CELESTIAL CLIMAX 296

ILLUSTRATIONS

Not a remote sign of a biplane decorated the sky overhead Frontispiece

"Oh! de-ar Mammy Moon--what a shock she'll get" PAGE 2

"Keep cool! Don't stir! I'll reach you in a moment!" 86

The man looked up at her, some dash of whimsical fire mastering weakness 268

PEMROSE LORRY

CAMP FIRE GIRL

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."

[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."