Ten paces more, and the pilot crouching up there under the wing yelled, “Turn loose! Let her go!”
Already the fellow at the wing had stood away. At the yell “Let her go!” the others dropped ropes, which fell free from the down-pointed hooks they had been merely held against by pressure. Now with the back pull relaxed, the glider shot upward and forward like a stone hurled from a catapult.
Wedged between some spruce sticks under a stretch of cloth, Hal was off on his motorless flight.
When on the ground this contraption of wood and wires had seemed an ungainly, waddling freak. But now as it soared upward on air currents in its sky-element, it swooped with a marvel of grace.
Instead of a short flight and a mere slide down a wind hill, the boy began to twist and turn to take advantage of every rising current of air so as to ascend to a greater height than that from which he had started.
Though he couldn’t hear it, the crowd below him let out a gasp of admiration. Rex Raynor stood, head bent back so as not to miss a movement of the rider of the wind.
Already the wind bird had climbed a hundred feet above the take-off; it banked again for another climb. Now it circled, swept in a series of loops, and began to drift easily down a landing at the foot of the starting hill.
Then through the valley swept a gust from the wind clouds that had been rolling up all day. Like a leaf the lazily dropping wind machine was caught up in the blast, swept high again, hurled this way and that, dipping crazily.
“Gosh!” shrieked Fuz McGinnis in a bleat of terror. “Oh, my gosh! He’s going to head on his stand!” Fuz always said his words hind part before when he got excited.