“What damage!” howled the farmer, feigning great rage and indignation; “hosses jumped the fence and smashed down the gate; chickens so scared they won’t lay for a month; wife in a spasm, and that there ornament up there—why, I brought that clear from the city.”
“All right, neighbor; what’s your bill?”
“Two hundred dollars.”
The aeronaut laughed.
“You’re not modest or anything!” he observed. “See here; I’ll toss you a five-dollar bill, and that covers ten times the entire trouble I’ve made you.”
The farmer lifted his gun. He squinted across the long, awkward barrel, and he pointed it straight up at the sky-rider and his craft.
“Mister,” he said fiercely, “my bill is two hundred dollars, just as I said. You pay it, right here, right now, or I’ll blow that giddy-fangled contraption of yours into a thousand pieces!”
CHAPTER VII—JOHN PARKS, AIRSHIP KING
“Keep right on,” ordered the aeronaut to Andy in a low tone.
Andy squeezed under a bulge of muslin and wood and reached what looked like a low, flat-topped stool.