He felt light of heart, almost giddy with his sense of freedom. Out there on the exhibition grounds by his successful demonstration of the Wiljohn-Dane gyroscope, he had paid his debt to the man that had most befriended him, Colonel Wiljohn.
As they landed out in Mazarin, a man in the Wiljohn uniform, who had been pacing back and forth before one of the low, single-plane hangars, waved to them, then turned about and quickly unlocked the wide, sliding doors.
Hal sped forward in quick, nervous strides, but paused on the threshold. Now that he was here, he was almost afraid to look. They had completed the ship in his absence. Suppose mistakes had been made, suppose—
His heart seemed thundering up into his very ears, his face was white and strained as he plunged into the semi-darkness of the hangar. The attendant slipped in behind him, switched on wall lights, overhead lights.
“A-ah!” It was a long, exultant, in-drawn breath of ecstasy. Hal Dane stared as though he could never get enough of looking.
The ship—his Wind Bird—she was a beauty! Slender crimson body, silver wing, every inch of her streamlined to split the wind like an arrow!
Slenderly beautiful—but what strength there was here! There was a compactness to this winged creation that only an exact knowledge of certain sciences could give. In the peculiar curved shape of the wing surface lay the solution to one of the deepest hidden secrets of flight. The old flat shape of airplane wings had depended entirely upon air pressure from below for the rise. The peculiar curve to the Wind Bird’s silvered wing would take full advantage of a thrice greater power—the air’s suction pull from above. The material in the wing was in itself a marvel, laminated strata, light in the extreme, yet almost as tough as iron.
Engine streamlined, as well as body! To the unpracticed eye, the modernistic Conqueror-Eisel engine might have seemed absurd in its smallness and its simplicity. But Hal Dane knew from long experimentation that in its simplicity lay the fundamental reliability of this new type engine. He spun the motor and sat back on his heels to listen to the smooth gentle hum, music to his mechanic’s ear.
Everything was as he had planned it—great fuel tank for the high-powered oil he would burn instead of gasoline, another tank to hold the liquid, life-giving oxygen he would need in the heights. The latest life-saving devices were installed: radio sending and receiving apparatus, flares, rockets, detachable compass, and a rubber lifeboat in addition to those appliances that, in an emergency, could convert the plane wing itself into a sea-going raft.
It was Hal’s plan that nothing that could be humanly prepared for should be left to mere chance.