Apparently Jack was not yet satisfied to drop lower; he would give their present altitude a little more chance to show what it could do in pressing the beastly fog down in the direction of the earth.
“Thunder an’ Mars! aint it awful thick, though?” Perk was telling himself, as he rubbed the glass, and did his best to pierce the miserable stuff by which they were thus bound, so they had no power to break loose. “Don’t b’lieve I ever did see such a mess in all my days. Talk ’bout flyin’ blind, if we aint adoin’ that same right naow I’ll eat my hat!”
Flying blind—yes, that name seemed most appropriate. Perk could look away back to his childhood, and see the boys and girls playing—himself with a handkerchief over his eyes, and trying to grope his way around so as to lay hold of the active dodgers who slipped out of his grip so adroitly. But he also remembered, with a chuckle, how as a rule it was always possible for the bandage to be lifted just a little, allowing the chaser slight glimpses of those whom he was supposed to trap, and catch hold of.
“Huh! no sech luck in this here game up ’bove the clouds,” Perk grumbled, as if much provoked because there was no chance to “peep”—that pea-soup sea covering so many miles in every direction was absolutely impenetrable; and their only resource would be to depend on their reliable instruments; keep their wits about them, so as to know how far they were going in a certain direction; and when relief came be able to about pick their position on the map.
That was supposed to be Jack’s affair, and Perk felt quite willing to trust his side partner to the limit; whatever Jack decided on he was ready to make unanimous, and let it go at that; so why worry his poor brain when his pal was so much better equipped for handling things?
Still, he did worry—it would not have been Perk otherwise; for he found all manner of grewsome possibilities crowding into his mind such as must give him what he called “the willies.”
“Hot-diggetty-dig!” he grumbled to himself “but this is a nasty mixup we’ve tumbled into. Jack, he says to me the weather reports tell haow there seems to be a bit of fog aformin’ off to the mountings—say, if they calls this a bit I wonder what a real smashin’ big fog’d seem like. From the way she acts I’m commencin’ to figger as haow she could keep this way right along fur a hull day’nd night, withaout fazin’ any; an’ that’s no bunk either. S’pose it does that same, what’s bound to happen to us dicks runnin’ wild up here, I want to know?”
That was always Perk’s trouble—anticipating things long before they were really due. He even figured out how, with gas and supplies running low, in the end they might have to make a perilous forced landing, taking most desperate chances of a calamitous smash.
It kept him on “needles and pins” to have such a dire threat loom up so soon after their takeoff, with the work connected with their mission entirely in the future, and unaccomplished.
How the minutes did seem to drag when they were pretty much in the dark as to the progress their ship was making; or whether they had managed to hold on to the course set by Jack in the beginning.