For the first and last time in his life the reporter was fairly taken back.
“Well, Lathrop, I will admit that I am a first-class, blown-in-the-bottle chump,” he exclaimed contritely. The next cranking proved successful and after the engines had settled down to a quiet easy purr, Lathrop with a warning cry of:
“Hold tight, I’m going to throw in the clutch!” started the big aeroplane on its flight of rescue.
With a swift, wobbling motion that threw Billy from side to side of the car the Golden Eagle II, under the direction of her unskilled pilot, skidded across the top of the mound-builders’ island while Quatty waved his arm in farewell.
Unaccustomed as he was to the Golden Eagle II, Lathrop made his first mistake when he tried to raise her after too short a run. To his despair and amazement she refused to rise when he raised his upward planes. They were traveling over the ground at a rapid speed, now with the two big propellers threshing the air at a rate of 1200 revolutions a minute; the roar of the exhaust was like the discharge of a score of gatling guns.
Lathrop set his teeth desperately and jerked the planes at an even acuter angle in his effort to get her to rise. They were only a few yards from the edge of the mound now and if she refused to rise by the time they reached it they would be inevitably dashed down to death in the ruins of the big sky-skimmer. With that desperate determination that comes in the face of crucial emergency, Lathrop threw in another speed on the engine and they attained a velocity of 1500 revolutions a minute.
“I’ll make her rise or bust,” he said grimly to himself.
But the end he feared did not come; under the added impetus of her increased speed and the acute angle at which the boy had set the rising planes the Golden Eagle II shot into the air, as abruptly as a sky-rocket, as she reached the edge of the mound. The result for an instant, however, threatened to be almost as serious as if she had gone over the edge without rising.
In his excitement Lathrop had set the rising planes at such an abrupt angle that when the ship shot up she reared like a horse, hurling Billy Barnes back among the engines and almost overboard and causing Lathrop to let go of his steering wheel for the fragment of a second to grasp a stanchion. At the same instant the aeroplane, left unguided for a second, gave a sickening plunge sideways, like a wounded hawk. Lathrop in his agitation seized the wheel and gave it a twist that brought her round, it is true, but as her starboard propeller was working in direct opposition to the curve he wished her to describe, he almost twisted her rudder off and made her careen at just as alarming an angle in the opposite direction.
To Billy it looked as if they were gone but Lathrop, who was fast learning the peculiarities of the craft he had under his control, managed by a skillful manipulation to right her and the next minute with her propellers beating the air at top speed the big craft dashed forward as steadily as an ocean liner. It had been a narrow escape, though, and taught Lathrop something about navigating a twin screw air-ship. In a craft of this kind, in a maneuver executed to port, the course of the ship is bound to receive a backward pull from the starboard propeller and vice versa. It is necessary for the operator, then to swing in an easy curve to avoid pulling his steering gear out by the roots and being dashed to death.