"Are you going to take that leather case along with you?" Sherbrand's voice had a note of surprise in it. "You'll find it a handicap, let me say. You can't sit on it or lean against it, and if you tried to put it under you, you'd find it dead-certain to foul the controls."
To Sherbrand's voice, von Herrnung's answered harshly and rather angrily:
"Surely I shall be able to carry this? It is nott-thing but a folding camera, with a telephoto lens made especially for Survey and Reconnaissance. There is still a good light. If I fly with the sun behind me, I shall be able to take quite a panorama of London North-West. It is not forbidden—no? Your Government would not object?"
"I don't suppose my Government would care a little hang!" Sherbrand's voice answered. "But—this isn't one of your German Army Albatros's or Kondors, and I don't see where you're to stow your camera, unless in the observer's pit. Of course the hovering installation takes up a lot of room, and I can't possibly risk your hampering the controls."
"Ganz recht! Very good!" came von Herrnung's voice, giving in with simulated heartiness. In another moment his long legs, followed by his great body, came scrambling into the forward cockpit, and his hands busied themselves about the stout belt of pig-leather that secured the boy in the observer's seat.
"Look here, my fellow! You will take care of this for me? See, I have passed the belt-strap through the handle. Do not touch it!" The guttural whisper had menace in it. "I shall be sure to know if you touch it, or try to unbuckle the strap."
"What's up?" Sherbrand's head and shoulders came thrusting over the other side of the cockpit. "Why did you unstrap him?" he demanded brusquely of von Herrnung. "Don't you know that he is my friend's son, and that it is my business to see to this?" Sherbrand's hand felt over Bawne's belts and bucklings before his head and shoulders vanished. Then von Herrnung's big body withdrew itself. His voice, sounding from the pilot's pit on the other side of the low wind-shield, gave a peremptory order, and the tractor began slowly to revolve. An instant later, with a blinding flash, it began to roar and whizz round furiously. The Bird, freed from the hands that detained her, leaped forwards, hurtling over the smooth turf at the speed of a racing motor-car. The smooth floor of the cockpit unexpectedly tilted up, and a rough cold wind buffeted Bawne about the head and shoulders, sent eddies down about his dangling feet, bellowed in his covered ears and made him gasp for breath. Then—houses and people, trees, and hangars fell suddenly away, and he knew that the Bird was rushing upwards at the bidding of its "Gnome" motor—long superseded now, but then the latest marvel in aërial engineering—towards the blue sky with its lines of gilt mackerel clouds. On each side of the roaring, flashing whirl that meant the tractor, spread North Middlesex, with its fields fast diminishing to the size of billiard tables. That patch no bigger than a garden-lawn, with a row of wooden things like dog-kennels and chicken-coops, must be—Bawne knew that it was—the aërodrome. Deafened by the noise and a little sick, for the roaring, striving, hurtling Thing in whose body he sat fastened, stank horribly of castor oil, and seemed to agonise and call on Bawne to suffer with it—he looked up and took courage from the warm, blue, beautiful, cheerful sky.
He was quitting himself like a man. Nobody could say otherwise. How high, how much higher was the Bird going to climb?
CHAPTER XXXII
ADVENTURE IN THE AIR