“The port landing wheel caught a dead tree top,” yelled Phil. “I told you to look out for that drift.”
“Is the wheel gone?” was the only answer of the disgruntled Frank.
Phil dropped to the floor again and flashed the electric light below.
“Seems bent,” he answered, “but I guess she’ll work if we ever get a chance to use it.”
“Well, don’t get sore,” was Frank’s answer. “We learn by experience. I’ll land in the softest wheat or cornfield that happens to be below. But we won’t try it till the lightning flashes again.”
For some moments after the car had again been headed northeast and quartered on the gale once more, the boys waited anxiously for a new flash. When it came they were well beyond the trees. Frank put the car toward the widening fields beneath and Phil lay with open eyes, apprehensive of the dreaded fence, trees or buildings.
“Now—!” yelled Phil excitedly, as the vague surface of a green wheatfield caught his eye and he saw that they were clear of fences and other obstructions. “Put her down.”
Frank’s work was guided by chance and Phil’s stream of instructions. The tremor and whirr behind the boys had been stopped and at last, with a plunge as of a body being dropped into a bed of mortar, the car came to a jarring stop. The operator dropped his wheel, his face wet with perspiration and his hands trembling. Phil sprang from the floor, his hair water-soaked, but his electric flash light aglow.
“Well,” he began with a half laugh, “here we are. Where? I give it up.”