“I hope you won’t be disappointed in the looks of my motor,” Potter said. “It’s rough—not finished up and polished like these European aeroplane motors. I planned with the idea of a quick and large production, and cut out all folderols.”
He led the way to the machine, and for a couple of hours the Signal Corps men studied it with technical minuteness and precision. They missed no valve, no bolt, no lock-nut.
“Develops a two-hundred horse-power?” asked Captain Ball.
“A fraction over.”
The room was filled with smoke and fumes from the exhaust of the roaring motor. Potter motioned for doors and windows to be opened.
“The ’plane is a bit clumsy,” he said, “but it will show what the motor can do.... And to-day’s as fine for a flight as we’ve had this fall. Will you trust your neck with me, Major?”
The major climbed into the passenger’s seat without a word. The machine was wheeled out, its propeller began to mangle the air, and the craft dropped the earth with a sort of gentle suddenness. Out over the sparkling lake they sped, attaining greater altitude and wafting miles behind them as with a breath. Beautifully, powerfully, rhythmically the motor labored, and the major’s eyes glowed as his skilled brain took note of the performance, analyzing and appraising it.
Suddenly Potter veered to the northward, taking a course he had followed once before with a quite different passenger—a fairy prince—for companion. In a time unbelievably short they were over the piers and the panorama of the Flats expanded before them. Potter descended, veered again over Muscamoot, flew lower and lower. He was looking for something. A couple of hundred feet above the ground he skimmed—and then he saw. Just at his right lay an island, an island he recognized. Dingy buildings were visible.... There was the channel where he had tried to land his hydroplane—there was the tree against which they had brushed, and the broken branches hung as a testimony to the fact. There was no sign of life.
But Potter was satisfied. He knew that his dream had been no dream. None could convince him now that his ’plane had fallen on the distant shores of Baltimore Bay. He knew! He knew that beneath him lay the spot where he had crashed to earth; he knew that himself, his companion, his machine, had been conveyed, at great expenditure of labor, to a distance.... He knew there must have been a reason, but what reason?
Cantor.... That point was vague. There was no evidence in support of that vague memory. Had Cantor bent over him as he lay? Had he seen the face of the man who had become his close acquaintance on that lonely island enfolded in the heart of a great marsh? If the main fact were true the subordinate fact might be true as well.... The whole matter was outré, bizarre, sinister.