Suddenly, just ahead as it seemed, and slightly below him, there came a loud shout. Rob was startled, and for an instant he allowed his attention to waver. Like a flash the machine tilted, and with the boy still clinging desperately to its careening form, the Pegasus shot staggeringly downward through the air, driving straight at four dark forms that had just come into view at the foot of the hill.
“Look out!” was all Rob had time to yell before the marvelous flying sled was ploughing at top speed into their midst.
CHAPTER XVI.
“THERE’S MANY A SLIP——”
“Wow! Look out where you’re coming!”
“What is it?”
“It’s a giant owl!”
These and a dozen other exclamations of dismay and alarm mingled with a great splintering, and crashing, and snapping, as Rob came ploughing down to earth. Luckily, he fetched up in a snow bank, into which the velocity with which the winged-sled had been traveling, drove it, for three feet or more.
The wings were reduced to a mass of torn canvas and shattered frames, while the steel-runners were buckled and bent under the strain. A more complete wreck was never seen.
But havoc had been done, likewise, to the group into which Rob had inadvertently plunged. As it so happened, they were the last persons in the world he would have wished to encounter just then, for in the voices that rang out about him, as the four figures were thrown right and left, he had recognized the familiar tones of Freeman Hunt, Bill Bender, Jack Curtiss and Lem Lonsdale. They had, by a strange coincidence, selected the same night upon which Paul’s friends had come to try out their big sleigh with which they intended to capture the silver cup.
“Anybody hurt?” hailed Rob, as he extricated himself from the snow-pile, feeling a little dizzy by the rapidity with which his smash-up had occurred. At one moment he was flying, and the next he was ignominiously toppled into a snow bank, with the splintered wreck of his winged vehicle about him.