CHAPTER XIV. PROGRESS AND A WRECK.
We will leave Frank Armstrong shooting Londonward in the largest passenger-carrying biplane in the Burtside School for Aviators, seated on a mere chip of a seat, holding on with a death grip to the slender upright of seasoned spruce, and turn our attention back to the morning at Brighton.
Contrary to what Gleason and Frank imagined as they sat in their disabled motor on the highway some miles outside of Brighton at the hour their train was scheduled to leave, they were not missed at first. In the hurry of leaving their temporary training quarters, the team managers and assistants had so much to do that they left the business of getting from the hotel to the station, a matter of only a few hundred yards, to the individuals themselves. No one happened to notice, as they left the hotel in straggling groups of three and four, that Armstrong was not with them. At the station half a dozen compartments on the London train having been reserved in advance, the athletes tumbled aboard without even a thought of luggage, taking it for granted, with the usual cheerful carelessness of traveling athletes, that everything would be all right. Each was concerned only for himself. It was not to be thought of for a moment that any member of either team would be so foolish as to get himself left behind.
The ten-thirty on the London and Brighton was the vestibule and corridor type of train, not like the ordinary single compartment coach in common use on English and Continental railroads. It was therefore possible to pass from car to car and from compartment to compartment on this train much the same as on an American Pullman train, and visiting between team members shortly began. Trainer Black, going the rounds, discovered that Armstrong was missing.
At first it was thought that he, with his companion Gleason, had accidentally gotten into a wrong compartment, but a hasty search from end to end of the train disclosed the fact that he was not aboard at all.
"I don't remember having seen him after breakfast," said the Yale captain. "Could he have gone up to London on the train ahead of us by any chance?"
"No," returned McGregor, "Armstrong is very conscientious and would not disobey orders which were explicit enough about this train."
"I'll bet a hat," said Halloby, "that his rattle-headed friend, Codfish Gleason, took him out for a ride this morning, and that something went wrong with the power-plant, and they are sitting on the road somewhere waiting for someone to tow them home."