“How fast?” he asked, in a nervous voice and between his set teeth.
“Twenty-five miles,” gasped Tom, with a quick glance at the anemometer. “Hadn’t you better—?” But the sentence was not finished. Reaching ahead, to throw the forward rudder up for a still higher flight, preliminary to putting on more speed, Bob’s straining ear had caught the lessened beat that denoted a dead cylinder. He acted on impulse, and swiftly. As the forward rudder came to a level and the guiding planes in the rear shifted to stay the upward flight and bring the machine over the roadway to the left, Bob’s left hand shut off the engine.
Tom asked no questions, but he knew something had happened. The aeroplane, hurtling along under its own momentum, settled swiftly toward the earth. Up went the forward rudders again, and the quick descent was checked.
Then, released once more, the semi-buoyant machine fell on another slant, and, the cold perspiration of intense excitement on both boys’ faces, the landing wheels struck squarely on the smooth road—ran forward swiftly in lessening bounds until, with a clamp of his foot on the spoon brake, Bob brought the car to a full stop.
Tom’s hands were so tensely gripped about the section uprights that he could scarcely release them. Bob’s knees were shaking.
“Wha—what’s the matter?” mumbled Tom.
“A cylinder stopped,” answered Bob in the tone he might have used to say one of his parents had died.
“Can you—you fix it?”
Bob was already partly recovered. But there was no color in his face.
“I reckon so,” he answered, none too confidently. “I’ve fixed them on automobiles.”