“Perhaps,” replied his cousin; “not that it would make much difference in the end, though, for they couldn’t have kept their secret much longer. But I’m going over to town now and see if that canvas has arrived at Spencer’s Emporium.”
“This time,” said Andy, “my wheel ought to hold out, for you put the plug in yourself, and I humbly confess that I’m far from a success as a mechanic. My jobs look well, but hang the luck, they don’t just seem to hold good.”
Frank was quickly off. He never felt so happy before in all his life. Everything seemed to be as fine as the weather. Their little monoplane was about ready for its trial spin, once they fastened the new canvas to the planes. There was this competition, which pleased him more than words could tell. And then the indefinite future beckoned beyond, holding all sorts of wonderful possibilities for a couple of bold spirits, fully devoted to solving the secrets of the upper air.
“I only hope the weather is just like this on that same Old Home day,” he was saying to himself, as he pushed on the pedals and went spinning along the road to town. “Not a breath of air stirring around and just a few clouds lazily floating up yonder above the crown of Old Thunder Top.”
He turned to cast a glance toward the peak that hung over the waters of peaceful Lake Sunrise, and memory carried him back to several occasions when he had been baffled in trying to scale the upper tier of frowning cliffs, that up to now had made the top of the peak inaccessible to climbers.
It was a positive fact that so far as was known to the oldest inhabitant of Bloomsbury no one had ever attained that summit, though many had tried. The upper cliffs made a complete circle around the crown and were something like eighty feet in height.
It had long been the one desire of Frank’s boyish heart to find out some method of surmounting the difficulties that had thus far debarred any one from planting a flag up on that lofty summit.
And to think that the idea had also come to Old Colonel Josiah, who possibly in his younger years may have climbed the Matterhorn or scaled some of those awful peaks in the northern Himalayas.
It would indeed be a proud day for Frank if he were ever allowed to put foot on that elevated plateau of solid rock, up to now only the lonely eyrie for the eagles that sailed through the blue vault of heaven.
And strangely enough at about that same moment Andy was standing outside the shed that sheltered the idol of their hopes, with his eyes also glued upon the indistinct crown of Old Thunder Top.