“It just hunches up,” Frank replied, gravely, “and checks the flow back of it, and then eddies and swirls away, fit to twist an aeroplane into kindling wood.”
“Of course,” broke in Jimmie. “I’ve often read of aeroplanes dropping a thousand feet into holes in the air, and of their being swept against tall trees and buildings by eddies. It takes a cool head to run an air machine in a storm of wind, and that is where Ned won out.”
“If he hadn’t kept the aeroplane going with the wind at full speed,” Frank added, “he would have been in a wreck the first half mile.”
“The more I learn about the atmosphere,” Pat said, “the less I like it. When you get me up in an aeroplane, just send word to the folks that I’m tired of life.”
“Ned ought to have a Carnegie medal for what he did that night,” Jack remarked, “and I’m going to speak to father about it when I get home.”
“There is no doubt that he ought to have one,” Frank said, “but the men who really deserve Carnegie medals never get them.”
“You’re an anarchist!” roared Pat.
“All right,” was the sober reply, “but if I had the giving out of the medals I’d present them to men who work twelve hours a day and provide for families of eight on nine dollars a week—the men who never get rested, and who never have enough to eat. They are the ones who ought to have the medals.”
“Most of them would sell the medals,” Jack said, cynically.
“Well,” Frank replied, “I shouldn’t blame them if they did. I’d rather have a porterhouse steak in the interior than a piece of bronze on the outside.”