by Jerry
“No,” said Tubby. “Yes. Lots of things.”
“I can pick anything I want from the light,” the professor answered. “I merely tune my instruments differently. Like wireless, you know—it’s all a matter of vibration. I have picked the most important thing that was happening—the ‘Burning of Rome’ !”
He turned another switch; the clicking sound grew louder. On the sheet, Tubby saw a great city in flames. He seemed to be standing on a hill, looking down at it. In the foreground he saw the young Roman Emperor, with his mistress, his friends and his music, as they reclined at ease, watching the destruction. Tubby stared for a long time, fascinated.
“You are looking into the past,” he heard the professor’s droning voice saying. I “All that has been stored up in the light all these years. It is light itself—the work of God, not of man.
“That is Nero sitting there. No one living to-day on this earth has ever seen him before. But there he is—Nero the Cruel, Emperor of Rome. We see him, you and I, for we are looking into the past—looking into the past.” The professor’s voice trailed off into silence.
Tubby stared breathlessly. His heart was beating fast; he was trembling all over. He felt suddenly a little faint. He was in a cold sweat, and he sat down abruptly in a little wooden chair beside the Light Machine.
The scene before him was very vivid; he could almost hear the Emperor’s music. Why, he did hear music! Funny! The professor had not mentioned that.
The clicking noise grew louder; the scene before him was so bright he could see nothing else around. It was very dark, and very close and stuffy. Where was the professor? Why didn’t he say something about the music?
Tubby grew a little frightened. He shifted his feet uneasily. The little chair in which he was sitting was very uncomfortable. It cramped him; his back hurt. After a little while the scene before him slowly faded. The lights in the room flashed on; a rustling, and a shuffling of many feet sounded in his ears.
Tubby sat up abruptly, blinking in the sudden light.
“Some kid, that Nero—eh, Jake?” said a voice beside him.
“You said it. Some picture. Come on, Tubby, let’s go home,” said the first man.
THE SKY WOMAN
Charles B. Stilson
Out of space she plummeted, to change three lives in one breathtaking instant
CHAPTER I
FIRE
I AM twenty-four years old, and—I may as well say it at the start—quite good to look at; that is, I have black hair, brown eyes, even white teeth, and a clear complexion, and they match up passably well. Also I am sure that I know how to wear my clothes to the best advantage, and am neither overgrown nor too tiny. I don’t know why I mention these things, for they haven’t much to do with what is to follow, though they are quite important to me.
It isn’t necessary to tell that I know little about writing. Old Miss Dyver at Wellesley, it is true, used to compliment me upon my descriptive ability when I had her in English. But in the [missing text] would waggle her flopsy pomp and deplore my lack of imagination.
It was her opinion that it was a sin to possess so much and not the little more requisite to make a gifted writer—I mean imagination.
Miss Dyver was right. I can tell only what I have seen and felt. Nor am I the least bit scientific. I’ve had a course in domestic science—you needn’t sniff at that—but of the things which terminate in “ology” I know next to nothing, and thank Heaven for it!
Yet here am I, Ruth Chasper, as I have introduced myself in three paragraphs, plunging recklessly to tell of what, viewed merely from its scientific side, is without doubt the most wonderful thing which has happened to the world since thinking, sometimes reasoning, women and men were set upon it to wonder why.
“Yee-mah! Yee-mah! Alla ferma na somma!”
The words will ring in my ears forever until I die! What do they mean? Who uttered them? What was she, and whence, and why? Will science in five thousand years more of groping and striving be able to answer? What cosmic secret might the interpretation of that wild, sweet cry lay bare? Or was it but a dying woman’s wail of despair?
“Yee-mah! Yee-mah! Alla ferma na somma!”
No it could not have been despair. The creature was too utterly splendid and daring to have given way to it. She would not have yielded to despair, even when she realized that she had failed, and death was before her. It was not despair. It was an undelivered message—a broken link between two worlds.
So much I allow to my lame imagination. Now I will describe what has happened, though I cannot explain it.
Rickey Moyer is my distant cousin, fourth or fifth. Rickey’s father, D. B. Moyer, as a coal baron, turned a fearful lot of carbon into currency in the Pennsylvania Alleghanies, and then died and left Rickey alone to spend it.
Coal-grubbing never appealed to Rickey. He finished a course at Amherst, sold out the mines, and traveled. He seemed to have a consuming desire to know the world he was living in, and I guess that he has a speaking acquaintance with most of it. He should have; for he started out when he was twenty-one years old, and spent ten years globe-galloping.
Quite’ suddenly he came home again, two years ago, built him a bungalow in the forest on Black Bear Mountain above the old Moyer homestead in Center County, and settled down.
With him—and this is where i come in—he brought Count Giuseppe Natali, of Florence. They had met somewhere in Borneo. Both were cosmopolites, both fearless. They had been through dangers together in the Dyak country, and had formed a friendship which stuck.
I met the count for the first time last summer at Palm Beach. Not to go into tiresome details, we soon became engaged. Count Natali is a thoroughly delightful fellow, a gentleman to his slender fingertips, and no fortune-hunter. Else he would not have picked me; for I’ve none to mention, unless Aunt Caroline—but that has nothing to do with it.
In January of this year Count Natali sailed to Italy to look after business connected with his ancestral estate. I understand that it is immense, and boasts, among other attractions, an ancient feudal castle which makes one think of that creepy old romance, “The Mysteries of Udoipho.” On his return in early April, Rickey kidnaped him away from me in New York and took him off to the Pennsylvania wilds.
Soon afterward came an invitation to me to come out for a fortnight, bringing my chum, Carrie Andrews, with Aunt Caroline for chaperon. Carrie was of my class at college. We were both staying with Aunt Caroline at Bayonne.
All three of us thought that it would be a fine little outing—a sort of rest before the strenuosities of the summer season; so I at once wired Rickey that he was on. Naturally I wasn’t sorrowful at the prospect of seeing Count Natali again so soon! I had felt that I had rather a bone to pick with Rickey for sequestrating my intended as he had.
Rickey’s haunt on Black Bear is no end of a quiet roost; and yet there are plenty of possibilities to while away a couple of weeks, if one cares for them. There is excellent trout-fishing in Forge Run, if one doesn’t mind wading in hip-boots and meeting an occasional rattlesnake. And there are a number of pleasant motor trips one can take, if one doesn’t mind the rough roads and the hills.
I don’t mind these things. I was born in Pennsylvania. So was Aunt Caroline, who isn’t a bit fussy about such matters. As for Carrie: she is one of those big, slow-moving, non-excitable blond creatures, whom nothing ever seems to disturb. She who would encounter an earthquake or a boa-constrictor with the same casual interest she would bestow upon a new dance. Very like Rickey himself, Carrie is.
LATE in the afternoon of April 17 we were deposited from the up-train at Viaduct, and saw the wooded spine of old Black Bear looming above us across the valley to the left of the tracks.
Viaduct is little more than a signal-tower, a tank, a row of laborers’ shanty-shacks, and ten houses—personally I don’t believe there are ten; but I am a Pennsylvanian, and I give Viaduct the benefit of a doubt.
Count Natali met us with Rickey
’s roadster; but Rickey was not with him. Aunt Caroline and Carrie were comfortably discreet while the count greeted me—much more so than a thin-faced woman telegraph-operator, whom I saw watching us with avid interest from the height of her tower. Poor thing! How her eyes would have popped had she known that it was an honest-to-goodness Italian count who was kissing me, or perhaps she did know. Anyhow, she watched, and the proceeding seemed to have her approval.
My first reflection was that Count Natali both looked and felt much better without his mustache. The coating of tan which the spring sun was overlaying on his olive cheeks gave to his thin features the aspect of an Indian chieftain or a Bedouin sheik.
“A-hem!” said Aunt Caroline, after she and Carrie had swept the skyline of Black Bear for what she deemed a proper interval. “A-hem! And where is Richard?”
“Your nephew asked me to make his amends, Mme. Allison,” replied Count Natali. “He was unavoidably denied the pleasure of meeting you this evening. We have had a trifle of excitement.”
“Fire!” remarked Aunt Caroline, wrinkling her nose and sniffing. “I hope it destroyed nothing valuable.”
“Not the bungalow!” I cried dismayedly. I, too, had noticed an acrid, wood-smoky odor about the count’s clothes.
“No,” he answered our two queries; “only a few trees. I believe that it is now entirely under control. The railroad authorities sent a force of workmen up the mountain to help us. I believe that is their custom—to protect their property.”
“Umph! I suppose a spark from one of their engines started it, as usual,” commented Aunt Caroline.
“Not so; nothing so prosaic.” Count Natali shook his handsome head. “It was a very unusual fire; in fact, quite an extraordinary occurrence.”
He turned to lead the way to the car. This began to smack of a mystery. I could see that the count was covertly excited, and I began to feel the thrill of an adventure.
A second later we were in the car, and discussion of the fire for the time was ended. The count manages a car prettily. He whirled us up the zigzag road to the summit of Black Bear.
Rickey and the count had been roughing it; but in deference to our coming Rickey had imported servants up from the big house below, including Mrs. Sanders, a cook whom Aunt Caroline had tried vainly to bribe from his service; so we found everything that three famished and train-weary wights could desire.
CHAPTER II
THE MYSTERY-STONE
NO Rickey was waiting for us at the bungalow. He did not come in until we were taking our places at table. When he did put in an appearance he was in such a scandalous condition that I positively was ashamed of him. His tawny hair was all topsyturvy and dark with dust, and his khakis and puttees were smeared with soot and mud, not to mention a black streak across the bridge of his short nose, and numerous holes which flying embers had scorched through his shirt and trousers.
He did not contrast at all favorably with Count Natali, who is always perfection in his get-up. Though, in spite of the dirt and disarray, Rickey still contrived to look cool and efficient.
“Hello, Aunt Caroline and folkses all,” was his welcome. He slipped into a chair, and as soon as decency would permit began to eat like a hungry and hurried man.
Have I said that Rickey is a big fellow? No? He is—big and blond and ruddy, with small blue eyes above high cheek-bones—not piggish eyes, but friendly and twinkly, and not a little shrewd, seeing that he inherited them from the coal baron.
“Glad you came, Ruth,” he said to me presently. “Joe”—so he always referred to Count Giuseppe—“has been pining. I had to send for you or the blue devils would have got him sure. He’s been as disconsolate as a bushman who’s lost his fetish.”
Naturally I had nothing to say to this. Aunt Caroline charged to the rescue. She had been studying Rickey sharply.
“Please don’t talk nonsense, Richard,” she cut in. “Tell us about the fire. You look as though you had been rolled in it.”
“Oh, yes, the fire,” responded Rickey, who had been talking off the top of his mind and thinking hard about something else deeper down.
He glanced at Count Natali, and I think that the count shook his head.
“Well?” from Aunt Caroline.
“Well,” echoed Rickey, “we had one, aunty. It was some fire, too, I’ll inform the universe, while it lasted, and now it’s out.”
A prodigious bite of Mrs. Sanders’ homemade biscuit interrupted communication. I could hear Aunt Caroline’s toe tapping.
Count Natali bridged the gap with questions about our trip. But Aunt Caroline, like an elephant, refused to take the bridge.
“What started it?” she pursued, wading in.
“That’s what twoscore men have been laboring all day to discover, aunty,” said Rickey tantalizingly. Just then I think that he became aware of Aunt Caroline’s foot; for he muttered a hasty word to his biscuit; and at the same time hitched in his chair.
“We thought it was a falling star,” he went on, freeing his utterance. “We’ve been grubbing an amateur coal-mine in the mountain on the strength of finding it and seeing what it’s made of.”
“I’m sure that is nothing to be so secretive about,” declared Aunt Caroline.
“And did you find the star at the bottom of your mine?” asked Carrie.
“Yes,” Rickey answered; “only it isn’t a star.” He turned his voice on Count Natali. “That section boss is interested, Joe,” he said. “He has sent for an armful of dynamite. He wants to blast it.”
“You surely will not allow that?’ Anxiety, if not consternation,. was in the count’s tones.
“Not all in a chunk, anyway.”
Aunt Caroline set down her teacup with firmness.
“Richard, will you have the goodness to inform us just what it is that you have found in the hole, which you will or will not blast, and why?” she demanded.
“A meteorite, aunty,” replied Rickey, reduced to terms. “At least, by all the rules of the game, it should be a meteorite. It’s a large one. The heat engendered by the friction of its hurried transit through our mundane atmosphere was what started the fire and led to its discovery.”
“But why not blast it?” I asked, coming to Aunt Caroline’s aid, as she had to mine. “Is it dangerous? Is it still too hot?”
“Why blast it at all?” queried Carrie.
Rickey appeared somewhat embarrassed. which in itself was unnatural.
“Joe and I may be a pair of blithering idiots,” he returned; “but we are agreed that this star or meteorite or mystery—mystery, whether star or meteorite—is a very extraordinary proposition. It has—well, it has an uncanny sort of a handmade appearance.”
Aunt Caroline drained her third cup of tea and set it down with a decision that threatened the china.
“Richard,” she said, “your explanations are as clear as a Moshannon fog. The only portion of them which is understandable is your hint at your mental condition. How far from here is this phenomenon? I propose to see it before I close my eyes.”
It was evident that this declaration relieved Rickey. He brightened up.
“Not more than a mile, aunty,” he answered. “We can go the best part of the way in the car, and there will be a fine moon to see by. After you folks have looked the thing over will be time enough to diagnose my mental symptoms. It’s either what it ought to be, and Joe and I are jack-donkeyed, or else it’s one of the marvels of the ages.”
“How intensely interesting you make it sound, Mr. Moyer,” volunteered Carrie; and that ended the table conversation so far as concerned the meteorite.
I couldn’t help being impressed by Rickey’s manner. The mere fact that he was excited—and excitement fairly oozed from his pores—was impressive to one who knew him. But what was he driving at? How on earth could a meteorite be handmade? What were we about to see up yonder on Black Bear by the light of the moon? If I had possessed a little more imagination, I am sure that I should have shivered.
&
nbsp; SOON after our meal Rickey led the way to his touring-car, and the five of us piled in. We three women sat in the tonneau, which was already occupied by Frisky, Rickey’s Skye terrier. Frisk, too, had been digging in the burned ground, to judge by appearances, and in his exuberance at seeing so many old acquaintances he insisted upon making a mess of our skirts.
Before we started Rickey fetched out from the bungalow an armful of blankets, which he hung over the robe-rail. As the night was quite warm, I wondered what he wanted of them.
We rolled off northwestward along the crest of Black Bear ridge behind the bungalow clearing, following a narrow, rutty old lumber trail which I remembered from having explored it as a child in search of arbutus, honeysuckle, and tea-berries.
After twenty minutes’ driving, which the difficulties of the road made very slow, we reached the edge of the burned area. A grand moon had risen, and cast a peculiar light on the carpet of ashes which the fire had left, and against which the jagged stumps of broken trees and the scorched, distorted bodies of those still standing were limned in sharply defined silhouettes.
At intervals a light breeze set this arboreal cemetery to creaking and groaning lugubriously, and fanned our faces with an acrid warmth that was not of the night. Somewhere in the dusky distance a bird was clamoring for the immediate castigation of poor Will. Nearer at hand an owl hooted dolefully—doubtless mourning over having been burned out of her house and home in a hollow log.
“Isn’t this delightfully spooky?” whispered Carrie, who would hobnob with a ghost with animation were the opportunity offered, and consider herself in luck. Aunt Caroline sniffed. Frisky yapped at the owl. I kept still and stared. I may be deficient in imagination, but I really did shiver a little. The picture was compelling.
Rickey halted the car.
He jumped out and shouldered his blankets.
We followed him across the soft, crisp flooring of ashes.
Occasionally we passed smoking heaps where the breeze would stir the embers so that little spurts of flame leaped up and danced like elves of mischief over the destruction they had done. These were too far isolated from the main forest, Rickey said, to be accounted dangerous. Besides, watch was being kept.
