“Very good,” answered Ned. “Keep her so.”
Then he seated himself at the operator’s table and, for the first time, made use of the tables prepared by their office calculator.
“It’s hardly worth while,” he explained to Alan, “since we’re in sight of known landmarks, but I want to see how it comes out.”
He noted the automatic register of the anemometer for speed, averaged this for speed per minute since they started, deducted the loss in forward flight caused by the quartering southeast breeze as set down in their calculated tables and then figured the actual flight. When he had done this part of his work he frowned.
“Two miles a minute,” he exclaimed. “Pretty slow.”
“It is,” explained Roy, “but it isn’t a fair test. I was down to three-quarters speed during our little unpleasantness and we lost time pickin’ up the package and gettin’ up over the bridge. I’ll keep her there till you pass over Norwalk so you can check her speed.”
“It’ll be beneath us in less than five miles,” announced Ned. “My figures were made at two o’clock, thirty-eight minutes and forty-seven seconds. We were seventeen and a half minutes out and had done thirty-five miles. Beyond Norwalk we’ll have to hit her up. If we can’t do three miles a minute we may as well call it off.”
“When’ll that bring us to Ipswich?” asked Roy. “Here’s Norwalk,” he added quickly.
Before he joined Roy and Ned for a look at the brisk Connecticut town with its factory stacks, long fishing wharfs and deep river harbor, Alan made a calculation himself to answer Roy’s inquiry.
“We’ll cover the distance to Norwalk by two forty-one o’clock. From there to Ipswich it’s one hundred and seventy-five miles. If the Flyer has a three mile a minute gait in her, that’ll take us less than an hour—fifty-eight minutes and twenty seconds. We’re due at Ipswich and the ocean again at thirty-nine minutes and twenty seconds after three o’clock. Call it three forty to be safe,” he added laughing.