“Oh, my prophetic soul!” exclaimed Joe. “What did I tell you when I saw them coming? Didn’t I say they were cooking up something as they came along? I tell you they’re hopeless.”
“I’m afraid they are,” agreed Bob, regretfully. “I really thought that after we’d saved Buck’s life and after all his tears and promises, he might reform. But you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Buck’s yellow through and through.”
“We ought to have let the bears get him when they were clawing at the raft,” declared Herb. “What hasn’t that fellow and his gang tried to do to us? Tried to smash our radio sets and a dozen other things!”
“Feeling better, Jimmy?” inquired Bob, as the four chums resumed their interrupted walk.
“A little bit sore at the pit of my stomach, but the pain’s going away,” replied Jimmy. “It certainly knocked me out for a minute. Thought I’d never be able to breathe again.”
“We’ll just mark that up as another tally in our score against Buck Looker,” said Bob. “And now let’s try to forget that beauty and talk of something pleasanter. Did you fellows read about that radio test by the airplane mail pilot? It was in this morning’s paper.”
None of the others had noticed the item, but as they were all radio fans of the thirty-third degree, they were interested at once.
“Tell us about it,” urged Joe, echoed by the others.
“You see,” explained Bob to his eager auditors, “the post-office department has been having a lot of trouble communicating from the ground to the mail planes and from the mail planes to the ground. In order to have the planes carry as little weight as possible, the radio apparatus they’ve carried has been of reduced size and the antenna facilities have had to be limited, too, so that the range of the aerial set hasn’t been great enough to bring about the best results.
“Then, too, it’s been hard to reach the speeding plane from the ground. This has been due to the noise of the engine and the local interference picked up by the receiver from the ignition and other electrical circuits of the motor.