His own wings had dodged sparks somehow, run the fire gauntlet unscathed this one time. It was risking fate, but Hal Dane wheeled his aircraft and shot again down the dangers of that fire-fenced air lane.
Hal Dane was using his plane like a gigantic fan to combat the fire’s spread. His very speed must have shed the falling dangers of sparks from his own wings.
Full forty times he drove his ship back and forth between the little house and the flaming barn, making mighty air currents that turned back the peril like a shield of the wind.
The fire-riddled structure collapsed, shooting flames enormously high, then settled into a smouldering mass. This might burn on for days, but its real menace to the farmhouse was ended.
With danger conquered, Hal Dane, like some crusader of the air, whirled skyward, incognito. Those he had saved would never know who had saved them.
But flame and danger had strangely stirred the boy’s heart, had fired his ambition into a steady glow that henceforth was to flinch at nothing.
Emotion—inspiration—a medley of feelings surged up in him as he swirled high into the sky. Higher, higher, back again into the mighty rushing currents of the rivers of the winds! To what did that current flow westward? Some day he must explore it—must know.
High, and higher, till the air pressure sang heavily against his brain. Here in the heights the lure of still another adventure was calling him—the adventure of invention. The world was waiting for that—waiting for man to pit his brain against the dangers of the great ethereal upper strata. Man must conquer air heights as he had conquered earth heights.
It was a new Hal Dane that came down from this sky flight. He was no longer a boy, satisfied with clowning above a carnival in an air machine. In his mind burned a definite desire to master aeronautics instead of merely drifting aimlessly, satisfied to dabble in air flying.
Along with ambition he had the hard common sense to know that he must go back and begin at the bottom, lay his foundations right if he meant to climb high.