“Now, Sis, that isn’t fair!” cried Johnny. “You know you suggested putting on the spools, and if we’d left them off we shouldn’t have started. What we should have thought of was something to make the Flying Machine go up or down as we wanted. Now it only goes ahead or stops.”
“Try guiding it with the rudder,” Janey suggested.
So Johnny twisted the “Start” spool, and as the Flying Machine started forward he pulled one of the rudder strings. The Flying Machine slowly turned and flew in a large circle.
“We can’t do it!” Janey cried, the tears coming to her eyes. “We can’t make it go down as we want to! We’re only flying in a circle above Gran’ma’s farm. See! Gran’ma and Gran’pa and a lot of other people are out looking at us!”
Sure enough, so far below that they looked like tiny specks of dust, the children could see their grandparents and many of the neighbors watching them as they sailed.
Johnny brought the Flying Machine to a stop directly over Gran’ma and Gran’pa and the neighbors, and they could hear Gran’pa calling to them quite distinctly. The children called back at the top of their voices, but they couldn’t make Gran’ma and Gran’pa hear.
Johnny tried twisting first one spool and then the other, but this jerked the Flying Machine so violently that his sister objected. She said she would rather go on than stay just where they were, doing nothing. So the children took off their hats and waved farewell to the people below, and Johnny, twisting the “Start” spool gently at first, increased the speed until the Flying Machine sped along like a meteor, leaving the farm far below and behind.
The different colors in the fields gave the Earth a sort of patchwork effect, but as the Flying Machine climbed higher and higher the yellows and greens and blues blended together until the Earth was more the color of an opal. In fact, the children now saw a continuous change of colors, ranging from a deep yellow to a bluish purple, with every now and then a speck of crimson as the sunlight glanced along a hill.
“Isn’t it beautiful!” Janey cried. “I don’t feel as if I wished to jump any more, do you, Brud?”
“No, I don’t feel like jumping,” her brother answered, and he stopped the Flying Machine so that he could see better. “Look, Sis, what causes that yellow blaze down there?”