Lafe smiled in a superior way.
“All right,” he laughed. “Go ahead. I’ll see that you have a decent funeral.”
Lafe even helped Bud carry the fragile frame down to the head of the switch track grade where Bud had a small tool car—no larger than a hand car. On this the motorless planes were deposited, and when Bud had taken his place on his stomach on the lower frame, an idle workman gave the car a shove.
To young Pennington’s gratification, the experiment was a fiasco. Even after several trials, it was found that the car would not get up sufficient momentum. The model would not leave the moving platform. Finally, Bud got grease for the car wheels, and then stood up with his arm pits resting on the light framework. As the car reached the bottom of the incline, the boy sprang forward. For one moment, the surfaces caught and held the air and the planes seemed about to rise. Then, with a sudden twist, the frame sprang sideways and downward. Bud’s feet struck the gravel and he stumbled. To keep from mixing up with the car, he hurled it from him. The aeroplane sank down with only a few strains, but Bud landed on the side of his face.
The following Saturday, as a sort of a challenge, Bud invited Lafe and a reporter for the Globe-Register to witness his second attempt. This time he abandoned the car. The gravel pit had been cut into the side of the hill. At the edge of the pit, there was a sharp drop of nearly fifty feet. When his guests were ready, Bud had them raise the light car—only twenty feet long—on his shoulders. Balancing the planes, he gripped the lower struts, and before Lafe or the reporter had time to protest, he ran a few feet down the slope—the car had been removed to the old engine house on the hill at the brink of the pit—and stumbled over the precipice.
His guests caught their breaths. But Bud did not fall. When he reached the gravel bed at the bottom, he had flown one hundred and fifty feet, and he came down easily and safely. It was the account of this in the Globe-Register, under the title of “First Aeroplane in Scott County” that cemented Lafe’s jealousy of Bud’s nerve.
[CHAPTER III]
SCOTTSVILLE’S FAIR SECURES AN AVIATOR.
When Bud returned from town, he had a buggy full of material—three large cans of gasoline, three gasoline flare torches, oil, waste, and—what proved to be most essential—his scrap book of airship pictures and plans. Everything was confusion in the airship shed. The crowd had pretty well cleaned out, but Lafe Pennington and his two assistants did not seem to be working with any more ease because of this.