It was just as well that this were so, for it balanced the team. Andy was an impetuous fellow and apt to rush things without ceremony.
“Don’t you think we might take the chances?” he had said several times during the morning, as he looked up anxiously into the heavens like a bird that longed to be soaring aloft.
“Not at all,” answered the other, decisively. “I’ve got a hunch that along about noon there’ll come something of a change, and this wind die down. Then will be our chance. Think how silly we’d feel if we made the try now, broke some of the parts of the aeroplane, even if we didn’t our precious necks in the bargain, and then when helpless, saw a dead calm settle down.”
“Well, I suppose it can’t be helped. But it’s tough waiting. Oh, yes! There was that drawer in the work bench; I dreamed I found my wrench in there,” and he hurried back into the shed, filled with new zeal.
As he once more reappeared five minutes later, scratching his head, and with a look of gloom on his usually merry face, Frank decided that the great puzzle had not yet been solved. Dreams, then, were not always to be relied upon when searching for things that had gone astray.
It was about eleven o’clock and the breeze certainly did show some signs of going down, when Frank heard his cousin give utterance to an exclamation.
“There! you see some people don’t seem to be afraid to take chances!” Andy was saying, with a touch of discontent in his voice.
Looking up, Frank saw the biplane rising above the trees again. Both boys were plainly noticeable and it was Puss who was piloting the aircraft.
The biplane made several furious dashes this way and that, as slants of wind caught her extended planes. Puss lacked the experience of a skilled aviator and apparently hardly knew how to avoid the full force of those gusts. Again and again Frank caught his breath, fully believing that the biplane was doomed to make an ignominious plunge back to the earth, for the gyrations through which it went seemed to point that way.
“Good for Puss!” he said, after one of these wild exhibitions, from which the airship managed to recover and move along fairly decently. “He’s learning, all right. But I tell you, Andy, they’re taking big chances. I’d rather go a little slow in the start until I’d learned the ropes. Oh, look at that dip, would you? That was a near call. I hope nothing happens to them. I’d hate, for lots of reasons, to see them spilled out or the biplane wrecked so soon.”