Mr. Greatorex had shown some nervousness as the critical moment approached. He insisted on lowering a boat in case the airship came to grief and Tom were thrown into the sea. Timothy Ball, too, looked on with a most woful countenance as the final preparations were made. He had unslung a life belt, ready to slip into it and fling himself overboard if the airship broke down.
“I feel sure in my inside it won’t work,” he said anxiously to Tom, as he stepped to the car. “It’ll be worse than suicide, sir.”
“Why worse, Tim?” asked Mr. Greatorex.
“‘Cos we’re lookin’ on, sir,” said Tim solemnly, and felt much hurt by the burst of laughter with which his explanation was received.
But his anxiety was a vain expenditure of energy. With the vertical screws at full speed, and the horizontal screws half speed, the machine rose like a huge bird from the deck, with a noise like the clattering of hundreds of bats and the humming of innumerable bees. At the height of sixty feet or so Tom stopped the vertical screws, and turned the full power of his engines on to the horizontal propellers, giving to the planes just sufficient inclination to counteract the force of gravity.
“Capital!” exclaimed Mr. Greatorex, as he watched the easy flight. “First-rate! There’s a fortune in that, skipper,” he said to Captain Bodgers at his side.
“Maybe,” said the Captain reflectively. He was a man of few words.
“Rather stay on deck, eh?”
“Well, you can swim in water, sir.”
“Exactly. But how far is the fellow going? It’s getting dark, and he’ll be out of sight directly. By the way, Bodgers, there’s no law about showing lamps on an airship. But there will be—there will be. Ah! here he comes—at a spanking pace, too. He’ll overtake us in no time, going dead slow as we are.”