“That bolt passed close to us!” yelled Ned, above the thunder-echoes.
“I should say so,” agreed Jerry. “A little bit more and it would have struck us. Smell the sulphur!”
A pronounced odor was noticeable in the cabin.
“Look!” cried Bob, “it put the small dynamo out of business, too. It short-circuited it!”
“That’s right!” cried Jerry, looking at one of the pieces of apparatus used for generating the powerful lifting-gas. “But we won’t need that now, I guess. We ought to be over land pretty soon and able to make a landing.”
“We can’t in this wind,” said Bob, who went over to make a close inspection of the damaged dynamo. “We’d be blown into a tree or house, and smashed.”
“I’m going to try to get out of the path of the storm,” said Jerry, who well understood the danger of going down to earth in this gale. “I think its path is comparatively narrow. Is she much damaged, Bob?” referring to the dynamo.
“No, those new fuses you put in saved her. It just burned out a couple of them. I can connect it up if you say so. We might need it in a hurry.”
“No, we have some gas in the reserve tank yet, and there is no use taking chances monkeying around a dynamo in a thunder-storm. Come away from it!”