A “hole in the air” to the sky traveler is what a yawning chasm is to a speeding automobile or an unexpected cataract to a hydroplane. It is worse than a “killed” motor or even a threatened “turn turtle.” Every part of the machine suddenly goes useless. The heavy mechanism simply drops. In a word, the Gossamer had been caught in a dead void caused by two opposing air currents colliding, and shutting the machine into an absolute pocket, or vacuum.
If Dave had remained inert, or had hesitated for a single instant of time, the Gossamer would have been doomed. A slender thread of hope presented itself and he was quick to utilize it to the limit. “Feeling” the air with one cheek, he noticed the tail of the machine give a quick switch. This he at once understood indicated that the master air current was from the north. Dave hoped there was power enough left in the propellers to make a sharp, quick turn. He set the apparatus for the speediest whirl he had ever attempted.
The machine was tipping, dropping steadily. Dave banked to the left at a most critical angle. There was a dizzying spin and then a dive. A great breath of relief swept from Dave’s lips as the Gossamer righted. The wings caught the violent blast of the gust, and the machine fairly bored its way ahead, true as an arrow, into the teeth of the storm.
A drenching shower shut the aerial wayfarers into a blinding deluge of rain drops. Then their course lightened, and Dave knew that the thinning veil of moisture indicated sunlight beyond it. He shut down speed slightly. The air pressure was fast decreasing as the Gossamer emerged from the clouds. Dave gradually worked the head of the machine due southwest once more. The former head wind was regained, and sunny progress offered beyond.
“A close shave,” said Dave, to himself, and turned to see how his passenger had taken it.
“I suppose that scared you somewhat, Miss Winston?” he remarked.
Amy’s face was pale, and she showed the strain of her startling experience, but she replied:
“I could not be frightened with you. Anybody as kind and thoughtful as you are to a poor girl in distress like myself, could not be anything but brave.”
Dave’s heart warmed at the compliment. He admired the girl, too. As he thought back, he realized that his nerves had been at a tension where any outcry or movement on the part of his passenger might have upset his self-control, and have prevented the prompt action which had saved the day.
He felt proud and pleased at his success in turning a hard corner. His passenger, too, became more light-hearted as the prospect of soon reaching the side of her invalid mother became more assured. Once or twice as they flew over chicken coops in farm yards there was great excitement beneath them, and she could not help but smile.
“That is Easton,” she leaned over finally to say to Dave, as the steeples and factory chimneys of a little town came into view.
The girl pointed out her home a few minutes later, and Dave prepared to make a landing. The Gossamer came to earth in the middle of a field a few hundred yards distant from the house the girl had designated.
Long before Dave had released the ropes that had held his passenger in her seat, people who had viewed the novelty of a real airship came flocking to the spot from all directions. Amy seized the hands of the young aviator, bubbling over with gratitude. She tried to thank him as she wished to, but the words would not come.
“Don’t delay, Miss Winston,” said Dave. “I know they must be very anxious about you at home.”
Dave led his little charge to the fence surrounding the field and helped her over it. Then he returned to the Gossamer. He found that the propellers had gone through some strain during his adventure in the storm, and he had some little work to do with chisel, hammer and wrench. While he was thus occupied almost a mob surrounded the airship, curious, gaping and delighted.
A man wearing a big star, and evidently the policeman of the town, made himself very officious keeping the crowd back. He had seen an airship once at a county fair and paraded his knowledge now. He tried industriously to make himself very agreeable to the young aviator. Dave had to laugh secretly to himself as the man pinched his fingers describing to a local newspaper man that this was the “magenta” – meaning magneto; and that the “carbutter” – meaning the carburetor.
“You must have been reading up on airships,” spoke the newspaper man to the policeman, as the latter walked importantly about the craft, now and then sternly calling on some small lad to “git back out th’ way.”
“I have,” came the confident answer. “I know a lot about ’em. Of course I haven’t ever sailed in one, but my brother, he’s a policeman in Long Island, and once, when I was on a visit to him, he was detailed to go out to a place where they was havin’ one of these airyplane contests, and keep order. I went with him, and he swore me in as his deputy assistant. I seen a lot of them foreign fellers fly, and I picked up a lot of information.”
“I suppose so,” murmured the newspaper man, who was new in town, and did not know enough to discount the boasting talk of the officer.
“Yes, indeed!” went on the constable. “Why, once one of them birdmen – they call ’em ‘birdmen’ you know,” he explained as though he knew it all, “once one of ’em run out of gasoline just as he was goin’ to start in a prize flight, and if it hadn’t been for me he’d never won it.”
“How’s that?” asked the reporter.
“Why I hustled over to the hangar – that’s the French word for a balloon shed,” he explained condescendingly, “I rushed over to the hangar and got him a can of gasoline and he went up as slick as anything and won the prize. He said I helped him a lot, and he gave me a dollar. I didn’t want to take it, but he insisted. Oh, I know a lot about airships.”
Dave was so busy tightening some of the guy wires that had come loosened at the turn buckle, by reason of the great strain, that he paid little attention to the reporter and the constable for a few minutes.
The young aviator, however, noticed that the officious officer was becoming more and more familiar with the machine, touching the different parts, often calling them by their wrong names, and totally unconscious of his errors. Nor was the reporter any the wiser.
“I don’t exactly understand what makes the airship move,” confessed the newspaper man to the self-appointed instructor. “Is it – ?”
“It’s these here perpellers,” explained the constable. “They work just like an electric fan, you know.”
“I see, but then the blades of an electric fan go around but the fan doesn’t sail in the air. Why is that?”
“Well – er – it’s because – Oh, here’s something I forgot to explain,” said the constable quickly, finding himself unexpectedly in deep water. “I’ll tell you about the perpellers later. This here’s the radiator,” he went on. “It’s full of water, just like in the radiator of an automobile, and it keeps the gasoline from boiling over – cools it off you know.”
“Indeed,” said the reporter, who knew a little about autos. “But I thought the water was to keep the engine from getting overheated.”
“Not in an airship,” insisted the constable. “In an airyplane the radiator keeps the gasoline cool. I’ll jest show you how it works,” and, before Dave could stop the man, he had opened a small faucet in the radiator, designed to drain out the water.
Now it happened that Dave had been running his engine very fast, and, in consequence, the water in the radiator – which really did cool the motor and not the gasoline – this water was very hot – in fact some steam was present.
No sooner did the meddlesome constable open the stop-cock that a jet of steam shot out, burning his fingers severely. The man jumped back with an exclamation of pain.
“I