“The rising lever! Quick!” he cried.
“I can’t move it. It’s stuck!” shouted back Jack.
Ned braced his foot against the sector and both boys threw the last ounce of their strength into making the refractory bit of machinery move. It did, with a suddenness that threw them both to the floor of the pilot house.
But the next instant they gave a glad shout of delight which echoed from one end of the craft to the other.
The Electric Monarch was rising, shooting straight upward toward the blue heavens at tremendous speed!
Jack scrambled to his feet like a shot. For one instant the Electric Monarch was shooting skyward without a guiding hand at the wheel. The next moment her young skipper, with a firm grasp of the spokes, was directing her course due eastward toward the ocean.
While he did this, Ned set to work with oil can and file on the lever which had so nearly caused disaster. He soon had it fixed and had taken to heart a lesson which had for its text, “It’s the little things that count.”
“Gracious,” he said to Jack, as they shot straight onward at a height the barograph showed to be 2,500 feet, “that lever came near wrecking us.”
“Never mind that now,” was the response, “just see how splendidly she is behaving. Ned, old boy, the Electric Monarch is a success. A bigger success than we dared to hope.”
“She is indeed,” said Ned, almost reverentially, as he glanced down from the pilot house window at the landscape flying by far below them. It was his first experience in the air and he felt just a bit creepy and scared.