“It sure did!” Fuz answered. “Dane asked me if I was hungry, and I tapped back to him I could eat a—”
“So it did work,” put in Mr. Rand. “Interesting—”
“Quite interesting, and quite dangerous!” Colonel Elwin’s dry, hard voice took up the case again. “You boys risked clogging your motors, and weakening down the exhaust valves, incandescence from carbon!”
“But don’t you think—” Mr. Rand had the floor again—“don’t you think that since it was not mere useless daredeviltry but a real experiment that these boys were trying out, that we might—”
“Well—er, yes, I might be made to see it that way.” A ghost of a smile tugged at Colonel Elwin’s iron mouth. “Shall we let this case drop into what we call suspended judgment?”
“Ah-h!” A vast sigh of relief burst from both boys.
“But remember,” Elwin’s jaw settled back into its iron firmness, “the judgment still hangs over you—it’s merely suspended. No more tampering with engines in the air.”
CHAPTER XII
QUICK ACTION
Against fluffy white clouds below a bright blue sky, an airplane spread its graceful shape.
Down on the Rand-Elwin field a host of students and visitors watched that ship of the air. Its pilot was Hal Dane. For a space he cradled along, a mere speck gently floating up there in the immensity of the ether. Then like a mad thing his ship began to fall, rolling and twisting and turning. At impossible angles it came to life, righted itself to spring upward—only to fall into worse dilemmas. Now he was diving, only two hundred feet above earth, and flying upside down. On the verge of crash, and in an agonizing slow roll, the ship slid back into normal flying position. High again—then a dangerous glide over the dragging tops of trees, and only the climbing reversal of the Chandelle saving him from wreck. Young Dane began to fall into the most deadly spin of them all, the whirling stall. He verged on that spin, yet never quite permitted it to become a spin. Instead, he slipped and stalled and trod the air until he fought his plane back into safety.