"No go. What do you mean?"
"I mean that there isn't anything in the rules, apparently, to prevent a woman or a girl driving an aeroplane if she wants to."
"Come and let's see my father," suggested the girl, presently, "he'll want to know about this. It may mean a complete change of our plans."
"You'll have to change 'em to beat the Golden Butterfly," muttered Fanning; "if only those drawings hadn't been lost we'd have had that balancer, and it looks to me as if we might need it before we get to Cape Charles."
"Why?"
"The wind's freshening. Not more than a half dozen of these aeroplanes will venture up. Bother the luck, if it wasn't for the Golden Butterfly, we'd have a clean sweep."
"This is only the first day," counseled Regina; "the points scored to-day will not count for so very much. There's plenty of time."
"Humph," grumbled Fanning, and as this conversation had brought them up to the Silver Cobweb, he broke it off to communicate his intelligence concerning the Prescott aeroplane to Mortlake, who heard it with a lowering brow.
Bang!
A bomb shot upward and exploded, in a cloud of thick yellow smoke, in mid-air.