“This dock is certainly a big place,” said Mr. Hammond, staring about.
“Yes,” replied Colonel Porter. “It is hard to realize its size. You can give its footage, twelve hundred feet long, three hundred and twenty-five feet wide, and two hundred and four feet high, but that doesn’t convey much. But pause to remember that if it was placed in front of the national Capitol at Washington, it would hide the entire building except a little bit of the spire. Or you could lay the Woolworth building and Washington monument down in it, side by side, and almost lose them. Or you could stage ten full-sized football games in it at the same time, and still have plenty of room to spare.”
They made their way down through the hull to the gondola, where workmen were now busy putting on electric light fixtures, and went back to Colonel Porter’s office.
CHAPTER IV
ASSISTANT PILOT
A small and well-worn automobile was parked near the great hangar on the Goodlow lot. On the bent and sagging running board sat its owners, David Ellison and Red Ryan. Over three years had passed since the day David had been enrolled as a student in the Goodlow school for apprentices; three years of hard and often discouraging work, but the work had developed him. He was no longer a diffident boy. Manhood sat easily on his broad shoulders. Looking at him, Red Ryan’s honest and loyal heart swelled with pride. He wondered if David had the least idea of his own success. Ryan knew—knew what the other fellows were saying, knew how the officers and pilots talked sometimes, while they stood watching his trained fingers making magical repairs on some weak or broken part. It never occurred to Red that his own uncanny cleverness had set him apart as the best mechanic on the lot. His thought was all for David—David, only twenty-two, and gosh-a-mighty, what he didn’t know about dirigibles! What he hadn’t already done with ’em!
Right now David was gazing lovingly through the open doors of the hangar at the vast silver shape rapidly approaching perfection and completion under the hands of its pygmy workmen. The vastness of the place, and the ship’s tremendous bulk seemed to deaden the noise of hammers and bolts. She seemed to float there in the hangar. To David she seemed already restless to be away. He imagined a ripple of light down her silver side; a stir, as though she could no longer wait, but would break away and slip through the great door to be off alone into the infinite troubled tides of the sky.
Red followed David’s entranced look.
“Ain’t she the cat’s whiskers, just?” he enquired lovingly. “Say, if she makes good on her trial flight, I’m just goin’ to lay right down there, front of everybody, and cry, or pray, or swear, I dunno which.”
“A little of each, perhaps,” said David, snapping out of his dream. “I’ll be right with you, bully boy.”
“You know, David, they have told you off to do a lot of important work on that ship. I don’t believe you appreciate the fact. All the fellows are talking about it.”