"Why, don't you know that gas makes balloons go up?" said Bikey. "They just cram the balloon as full of gas as they can get it and up she sails. That's my idea. Fill my rubber tires with gas and up we'll go. What do you say?"
"I'll do it," cried Jimmieboy with enthusiasm. "I'd love more than anything else to go biking through the clouds, for to tell the truth clouds look a great deal softer than grocery carts and lawn mowers, and I wouldn't mind running into one of them so much. Skybicycling"——
"Pooh! What a term," retorted Bikey. "Skybicycling! Why don't you use your mind a little and call it skycycling?"
Jimmieboy laughed.
"Perhaps skycling would be better than that," he suggested.
"Or skiking," smiled the little bicycle. "If it works you know I'll be simply grand. I'll be a sort of Christopher Columbus among bicycles, and perhaps I'll be called a skicycle instead of bicycle. Oh, it would be too beautiful!" he added, dancing joyously on his hind wheel.
"It will indeed," said Jimmieboy, "but let's hurry. Seems to me as if I could hardly wait."
"Me too," chuckled Bikey. "You go up and get the rubber tube, fasten it to the gas pipe, and inside of ten minutes we'll be off—if it works."
So Jimmieboy rushed off to the attic, seized a piece of rubber tubing that had been used to carry the supply of gas to his little nursery stove in the winter, and running back to where Bikey was waiting fastened it to the fixture in the hall.
"Now," said Bikey, unscrewing the cap of his pneumatic tire, "hold the other end there and we'll see how it goes."