Hal could have shed buckets full of tears over his efforts at the joy stick of the Puddle Duck. He who had flown real ships tied to this thing!
A huge surprise to young Dane was the finding of Fuz McGinnis as an upper-classman here. There had been no chance for writing or receiving letters in the past months of Hal’s track-hopping at various country fairs. Circumstances had forced him out of touch with Old Fuz and the rest of the home gang. And now here was McGinnis grades ahead of him, doing flights in a late model sky ship while he wrestled with the Puddle Duck.
He and Fuz eagerly fell back into the old jolly comradeship in the little time school duties allowed.
For Hal, time seemed forever filled with motors,—motors in sections, motors in mixed masses waiting for him to learn their functions and to reassemble their anatomies.
Only gritted teeth and the sputtering flicker of his river of the wind ambition held him to his bewildering task day after day. He thought he hated motors.
Then in a blinding flash of understanding, he began to “see” engines, to grasp their mechanical beauty.
It was the marvel of the piston that first got him. He began to sense something of the power of that driving force that man has learned to harness. It had taken man thousands of years to learn to explode a mixture of gasoline vapor and air in an engine’s cylinder where a piston caught the force to hurl forward power in a four-stroke cycle. That four-stroke cycle could speed an automobile over the highway or a wind ship over the airways.
And he, Hal Dane, had fretted at giving a few weeks to study this master power! Realization came to him of how primitive were all his notions of aircraft as compared with the perfection man had already reached. Into the building of one airship had to go the knowledge of more than half a hundred crafts and trades.
Instead of mere rods and tubes of metal, Hal now saw pistons and cylinders as power-containers. To help his understanding, he visualized how a pinch of gunpowder can easily be put into a gun cartridge. But when the powder is exploded it expands into gases that would fill a house. It is the expansion that shoots the bullet. So it was that the air-gas mixture exploded in a cylinder rushed out to force the piston into unbelievable speed. This speed harnessed to gear and camshaft was the power that was hurling the motor world forward—first on wheels, now on wings.
Hal forgot grease and grime in the sheer wonder of mechanism. Those black engines of iron, steel, aluminum and alloy became beautiful—more beautiful than the spread wings that had once fascinated him entirely. For motors gave power to those wings.