Hal squared back his shoulders, lifted his head. He would force dark thoughts out of his mind. There must only be room in his plans for hope.
He sent the throttle up a notch. More speed! His heart caught the lift of power from the throbbing motor. Exultation, and the wild spirit of the Vikings surged through his veins. His Norse ancestors had crossed an ocean in a frail sea skiff. And now he, like some atom adrift in the immense wastes of the sky, was daring the air currents on man-made wings. Hal Dane felt a thrill of power and glory shoot through him. It was speed on to whatever the end was, to death, or to victory!
For this longest of long distance flights where every extra pound counted against success, Hal had stripped his plane to the barest necessities of weight in food and equipment. Then at the last minute he had carried things, light as air, yet weighty in a certain kind of content. God-speed telegrams from his mother, from the faculty of his old flying school, from Colonel Wiljohn! There was also a yellow slip of telegraphic paper bearing him congratulations and word that his gyroscope had won the Onheim Prize. The hopes and thoughts of his friends were going with him on this wild venture.
All unknown to him, the thoughts of a nation were following the Wind Bird. A ship that had glimpsed a flyer going up coast had radioed word back. Other messages swept through the air from a far-out fishing fleet where the lone flyer crossed human sea trails again. This word was bulletined in theaters and picture show houses, was on a million lips. Wind Bird had gone thus far. How was the weather? Could he make it?
At midday the lone flyer checked up position and headed out over the Pacific in a more westerly direction. Far to the north of him would be situated Sitka, behind him should lie Vancouver—it was in this air range that he, on preliminary explorations, had located a great current of the wind that flowed west in the heights.
If he and the Wind Bird could efficiently ride this current it would mean speed such as he had heretofore only dreamed of, would mean time and fuel-saving in the great Trans-Pacific crossing.
In preparation for his chill rise up into the earth’s stratosphere, or upper air, Hal Dane snugly closed the throat of his heavily padded, leather-covered suit of down and feathers. Fur-lined moccasins over his boots, and a leather head mask lined with fur, which with the oxygen mask entirely covered the face, completed the costume. His goggles had already been specially prepared with an inside coating of anti-freezing gelatine, supposed to prevent the formation of ice to minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit. Ice on the inside of the goggles would be a temporary blind, as Hal well knew.
Worse than the terrible cold was the lack of oxygen he would have to combat up in the heights of rarefied air. But a marvelous artificial aid had been prepared for this also. In the Wind Bird was installed a special oxygen apparatus that could furnish him a strong flow of life-giving gas through a tube adjusted to the mouthpiece of his helmet. With minute care, Hal examined every section of his two separate systems of gaseous oxygen, the main system, and the emergency system. He wanted to be very sure that nothing was left to mere luck. Other men before him had ridden high. But today, he must ride the highest stratosphere if he were to really explore the vast speeding wind river that his other searchings had merely tapped.
Hal Dane began to climb. By degrees he forced the Wind Bird up, the curved vacuum of her specially-built wing meeting the air-pull from above to aid in a mighty lifting.
Up he went in great sweeping spirals, ever mounting higher and higher, the engine of the Wind Bird working beautifully. The altimeter told him he was at the height of seventeen thousand feet,—now he had reached eighteen, nineteen, twenty thousand! His ship was still climbing, acting beautifully. But he, Hal Dane, was not acting right. In the face of triumph, his whole sky world went suddenly gray and dreary, he felt a queer lassitude, and a slowing up of faculties.