“Whenever you run across him,” went on the Air King, “keep your eyes wide open. I’d like to know just how much truth there is in his talk about entering for the race.”
“Is he a bad man, Mr. Parks?” inquired Andy.
“He was once a confidence man,” explained the aeronaut. “When I knew him he was giving balloon ascensions at a circus. He had a hired crowd picking pockets while people were staring up into the air watching his trapeze acts. Once at a race he slyly slit the balloon of an antagonist, who was nearly killed by the fall.”
“I’ll find out just what he is doing,” exclaimed Andy.
“You can manage, for he knows me,” observed Parks.
Andy said no more. He was pretty sure from the name and description that the fellow whom his employer had just called down was the enemy that Mr. Morse had told him about. He wished he could tell Mr. Parks all that he knew and surmised, but he could not break his promise to the inventor.
“Hello, there, Ridley!” hailed Parks, as they came to where a lithe, undersized man was volubly boasting to an open-mouthed crowd about the superior merits of his machine. “Bragging again?”
“Go on, John Parks,” called the little man good-naturedly. “I’m not in your class, so what are you jumping on me for?”
“Oh, just to stir you up and keep you encouraged. I hear you’ve got a machine that will land just as steadily and balance on top of a telegraph-pole as on a prairie.”
“That’s pretty near the truth, John Parks,” declared Ridley. “I can’t make a mile in thirty seconds, but I can get to the ground on a straight dive ahead of your clumsy old Eagle, or any other racer on the field.”