Felix apparently had seen nothing, heard nothing. He had gone plodding stolidly on into the gathering darkness; was at this moment all but lost from sight.
With a little cry of consternation, Johnny sprang after him.
By the time he caught up to him they were at the spot where the balloon was kept.
“We just release this clutch when we are ready to go up,” Felix explained, “then up we go. There is a time arrangement that will set the electrically operated drum, winding us back down again in two hours. We only go up about three hundred feet. Cable holds us. Quite safe tonight, no wind to speak of.”
Johnny thought this a rather strange arrangement. “No guard here?” he asked.
“No need. No one’s allowed in the grounds unless they have a pass. Climb in. All set.”
Johnny did climb in, and up they went.
Johnny had been in the air many times. For all that, he experienced a strange sense of insecurity as they rose a hundred, two hundred, three hundred feet into the murky air of night. “Pooh!” he exclaimed in a low breath. “It is nothing!”
That he might throw off this feeling of dread, he busied himself with other thoughts. His gaze swept the city where lights were gleaming. “Where,” he thought, “are Drew and Tom? Hunting pickpockets perhaps. And where is Captain Burns? I’m going to like him, I’m sure. He is so solid and real; but jovial for all that. He said he’d take me places. What places? I wonder. Dangerous places? He said—”
His thoughts were broken in upon by Felix’s voice: