Crawford, the man who had taken Billy Barnes’ place on the Planet, was a skilled writer, and an excellent man to work up such a story as the cross-continental challenge. It was he who first broached to Stowe the idea of flinging down the gauntlet to the Despatch and inviting that paper to start its contestants on the same day as those of the Planet, the winner to take the prizes of both papers. This would give the struggle tremendous added interest, and attract worldwide attention, he argued.
While events were thus shaping themselves with the Planet and the Despatch, Billy Barnes had visited his friends, the Boy Aviators, and told them, with a rueful face, of his misfortune.
His manner of so doing was characteristic. A few days after he had left the newspaper he called on them at their work shop. To his surprise he found there old Eben Joyce, the inventor whom Luther Barr had treated so shabbily in the matter of the Buzzard aeroplane of which Joyce was the creator—as told in The Boy Aviators’ Treasure Quest; or, The Golden Galleon.
Joyce and the two boys were busied over the Golden Eagle when Billy arrived, adjusting a strange-looking mechanism to it, consisting of a boxed flywheel of glittering brass encased in a framework of the same metal. It seemed quite a heavy bit of apparatus, withal so delicately balanced, that it adjusted itself to every movement of its frame. A second glance showed Billy that it was a gyroscope.
The boys and the aged inventor were so deeply interested in examining the bit of machinery that they did not hear Billy come in, and it was not till he hailed them with a cheery:
“Come down from the clouds, you fellows!” that they turned with a shout of recognition.
“Why, hullo, Billy Barnes!” they cried, “what are you after now? If you want an aeroplane story here’s a good one—a new adjustable gyroscopic appliance for attachment to aeroplanes which renders them stable in any shifting wind currents.”
“It’s a jim-dandy,” enthusiastically cried Harry.
“But it’s a story you can’t use,” added Frank, “because the appliance, which is the invention of Mr. Joyce—has not yet been fully patented. He has been good enough to let us try it out.”
“It looks fine,” said Billy, who knew about as much about gyroscopes as a cat knows of the solar system; “but you needn’t worry about my printing anything about it, Frank. You see, I’m fired,” he added simply.