“I shouldn’t wonder,” replied the captain. “She was certainly nearer the ground than she meant to be or thought she was. At that rate of descent, she might have struck the earth in two minutes more. And then what might have happened to the airship and her crew I don’t care to think about. No doubt she’s got other messages, too, tonight at various places that have helped her to escape disaster.”
“I wonder how she got adrift,” remarked Jimmy. “I thought that she was enclosed in a hangar.”
“She has been until recently,” explained the captain. “But a short time ago she was taken from the hangar and fastened to a high mooring mast, to which she was secured by cables, and where she floated at right angles to the mast. You see, it required the services of about three hundred men to get her in and out of her hangar, and that took a lot of time and work, besides which there was always the danger of injury to her envelope in getting her in and out. Now, with the mooring mast, she needs the services of only about three officers and fifteen men.”
“How do you suppose she got loose?” queried Herb.
“I suppose a terrific blast of wind tore her from her moorings,” conjectured the visitor. “You see, with her six hundred feet and more of length, she presents an enormous surface to the wind. Perhaps her cables weren’t strong enough to stand the strain. We’ll read all about it in tomorrow’s papers. But now I think of it, we won’t have to wait that long. The air must be full of messages now, telling all about it. I’ll see what I can catch.”
He resumed the earphones, and the boys listened eagerly as from time to time he repeated what he could pick up from the air. This was necessarily fragmentary and disjointed, but they could piece the bits together well enough to make up a fairly complete story of what had happened.
It appeared that the sudden storm had caught the airship when it had on board a crew of twenty-one men. Luckily, these had included the pilot, a man of great technical skill, as well as of coolness and courage. All accounts agreed that in the great emergency all on board had carried themselves in a way to make their countrymen proud of them.
Disaster had threatened the craft at the very beginning. The blast that snapped the cables had driven the ship close to the ground. She was within a few feet of it when she let go her water ballast, and, with the resulting buoyancy, was able to rise to a safer height.
But up there the wind drove her with resistless force until she was more than sixty miles inland. How badly she had been hurt, no one of her crew at that time fully knew. It developed later that a big hole had been torn in her prow, where it had been ripped from the cable, and that a long strip of her envelope had been peeled away. But, regardless of what might be coming to them, the pilot and the crew kept their heads, and in an exhibition of the finest kind of airmen’s skill held their craft in hand.
It was only after the captain felt sure that the airship was well on her way to her hangar that he laid the earphones aside, with a sigh of relief that was echoed by the Radio Boys.