“Sure I did.”
“How’d you do it?”
The masked look that appeared to hide Pant’s face faded. “I’ll show you, Johnny. Just because you’re such a good pal I’ll show you.”
Detaching from his belt the black leather case, which Johnny had seen twice before, he walked to the plane and, after attaching two wires, started the motor.
“Watch the grass over there a hundred feet.”
Suddenly the ground began to smoke, and a patch of grass turned to brown, then black.
“Fairly rips up the ground, she does,” Pant said with a proud grin. “There’s a piece of gas pipe somebody’s left sticking up in the ground over there about three hundred feet. Watch that!”
Johnny watched with popping eyes while a foot of the pipe turned first red, then intensely white, then toppled over like a weed in a forest fire.
“Pant,” he said breathlessly, “what is it?”
“I don’t quite know myself,” Pant smiled, as he shut off the motor. “There’s been a lot of things like it. X-ray, violet-ray, radium and the like, you know. But this is something I got up myself—sort of a cross between fire and lightning, near’s I can find out. I’m having it patented, though for the life of me I don’t know what you’d use it for. You can’t go around the world setting autos and planes on fire when they come up behind you.”