“Last one in’s a nigger baby!” yelled Wart Ware.
There was a whirlwind of flying clothes, shoes and stockings.
“Say,” exclaimed Trevor, “here!” The scurrying boys paused in various stages of disrobing. “Let’s all throw in our money an’ have a real aeroplane.”
“A real aeroplane?” came instantly from two or three.
“Two or three thousand dollars!” shouted Alex Conyers, rolling over in high glee. “Let’s make a steam engine, too.”
“Three thousand dollars nothin’,” snorted Art. “There ain’t a thing about an aeroplane except the engine us kids can’t make. You know that.”
“Except the engine,” laughed Connie anew. “Why don’t you say ‘we can—only we can’t’? You mean a glider?”
“I don’t mean anything but what I said,” came back Art resentfully. “What d’you suppose an engine costs?”
“A Curtiss costs about twelve hundred dollars,” replied Colly Craighead proudly.
“It does,” answered Art. “But a pack o’ kids don’t need to count on going for the altitude record or on crossin’ the continent. There’s a firm in Philadelphia makin’ a four-cylinder, twenty horse power, air-cooled motor that’s guaranteed to speed up to eighteen hundred revolutions a minute. An’ it only weighs a hundred pounds.”