“Why, what ever brings you here?” he asked, with the air of easy familiarity which Peggy disliked so much. “I guess that that sign gave you a kind of a start, eh?”
“It certainly did,” agreed Peggy, “and it gives me even more of a start to see you working, Fanning.”
“Huh,” grunted the youth, beneath whose blue overalls were visible a pair of gaudy socks of the kind he affected, “I guess you think that I can’t make good as well as any one else when I try. Roy wouldn’t go into a deal with me on that aeroplane of his, so I just got busy and started a concern of my own.”
“Do you mean you are actually building an aeroplane?”
“Yes. Got orders for several of them,” rejoined the swaggering youth. “So far I’ve only had Gid to help me, but I guess I’ll have to enlarge the plant pretty soon. You see that Roy would have been wiser to sell me that ’plane of his at the start-off. As things are now, the Harding Aeroplane Company is going to discount anything in its line.”
“Well, I am glad of that,” said Peggy, briskly, and with some trace of asperity. Fanning’s conceited, confident air jarred upon her sadly. “But I came over here to find Mr. Gibbons. I want him to repair this rod for me.”
“Why, that’s off an aeroplane!” exclaimed Fanning, eagerly; “you must have come to earth in the Golden Butterfly quite close to here.”
“Why, yes. In that field yonder,” rejoined Peggy, some instinct telling her not to disclose the true object of her visit there; “my motor went wrong and I had to descend.”
“What field did you come down in? That one by the clump of woods round the bend in the road?” asked Fanning, with just a trace of anxiety in his tone.
“Yes. It was lucky I was so close. Morgan and Giles––”