“I guess so,” replied Ned.
“Interested in balloons; eh?”
“Sure thing,” replied Bart. “Have you been running ’em long?”
“Fifteen years. Ain’t much I don’t know about ’em, though I don’t go up very often. I won’t do the parachute business, and they want a man who does that now-a-days. I’m getting too old for that.”
By this time the ballast had been deposited where the man in charge wanted it.
“Hook it into the cordage now,” he ordered to the little man, “and you take charge around here, Bill. She’s filling now and I’m going to breakfast.”
“All right,” responded Bill, the newly-made acquaintance of the chums. The boys wanted to ask him more questions, but he saved them the trouble.
“Ever see a balloon fill?” he inquired.
“No. How do they do it?” asked Frank.
“First we spread the bag out on the ground,” the little man explained. “Then we see to the top valve. That’s to let the gas out when it’s up in the air. There’s a cord runs from the valve down to the basket. You pull it a little bit and two little trap doors, worked by springs open, and the vapor escapes from the top. Then we have what’s called the ‘ripping cord.’ That’s colored red. It hangs down just as the other one does. Only if you yank that it tears a strip out of the balloon and lets the gas out in a hurry.”