Yesterday afternoon was the time set for the ascension. How the two children managed alone to raise the heavy machine from the workshop floor to the roof by means of the trap-door and pulleys father had used in the previous experiment will always remain a mystery. But they did! At last it stood among the chimney-pots, with rakish sails and scarred sides, looking for all the world like “a tipsy eagle-bird,” as Ernie enthusiastically declared. Even by this time neither of the little idiots seems to have had the least realisation of what it was they were attempting. On the contrary, they were quite wild with the frolic and excitement of the thing.
Geof straightened out the sails, and opened the manœuvre valve. Tick-tock, sounded the motor. The framework quivered response.
“Hold on there,” shouted Geoffrey, as he ran to attach the short length of anchor line to a hook in the stone coping at the front of the roof. “Don’t get in yet, Ernie. The place in the middle belongs to me. I’ve got to manage the steering gear.”
“All right,” Ernie answered, climbing over the side, nevertheless. “I’m just looking to see which of these levers starts her.”
And then,—no one will ever know how it happened, Geoffrey had his back turned, Ernie can’t explain,—there was a whiz, a whirr, deep in the interior regions of the old airship, a sudden tug on the mooring-line that sent Geof sprawling into the tin gutter, and with a swoop, entirely unprecedented, I believe, in the whole history of aërial ascensions, the apparatus had risen, perhaps some twenty feet! The voyage was begun. Ernie, alone in the flying-machine, circled and jibed above the chimney-pots!
Geof, regaining his feet, made one desperate grab for the safety-line. It slipped through his fingers, and swung to the left,—just out of reach beyond the stone coping.
“Aunt Peggy! Aunt Peggy!” he then bawled with such a panic of woe in his voice that mother, who had been sewing on Ernie’s new school-dress in the nursery while I read aloud to her and Robin from Tanglewood Tales, dropped her work to the floor and fled up the attic stairs.
I followed at top speed. Geof’s face, thrust on a long neck through the trap-door in the roof, stared whitely down upon us. His eyes and mouth were wide. He looked for all the world like a terror-stricken gargoyle.
“Ernie!” he gasped. “She got away from me. She’s flying!”
“Geoffrey!” says mother, stern as any Spartan, “are you mad?”