When he heard the thunder of the motors, Pant could scarcely have been more thankful about anything. True, there were not another such pair of engines in the world, but there had been a strain put upon every bolt, rod, feed-pipe and screw such as had been endured by no other engines. If there had been a single break, then all was lost.
When they did respond to his touch, he at once tilted his right plane in such a manner as to square her up. The wind was blowing steadily, and, he thought, less violently, though this was hard to concede, since it seemed to him that a more madly violent gale than even now was blowing would be hard to imagine.
The plane righted herself gracefully. Truly, this was a marvelous bit of machinery, made by master builders. She had been designed for dependability rather than speed, yet she presented a rather rakish appearance, her upper planes jutting out over the lower ones by a full five feet. Her fuselage was built like the body of a wasp, in two parts. In the forward part was the driver’s seat, fully exposed to the open air. In the rear portion was a closed cabin fitted with two seats. These seats in fair weather might be made to collapse in such a manner as to form a bed. Thus it was possible for one aviator to rest while the other was at the wheel.
But the distinctive part of the whole equipment was the engines. If Pant had felt any misgivings about the type of engine their plane was fitted with, the next few minutes made him doubly thankful that they were just what they were.
Hardly had they begun a mad rush straight away with the wind, the nose of the plane tilted twenty-five degrees upward, than there began to play about him vivid sparks of fire.
“Picking up lightning,” he muttered.
Like lights twinkling on the deck of a steamer the sparks leaped from plane to plane. They flashed down the guy-wires and braces, leaped to the motors. Setting her firing irregularly for a second, they raced for the tail, only to flash back to the wheel and give Pant’s arm such a sudden twist that for the second he was paralyzed.
The next moment his lips were at the tube.
“Mighty bad,” he shouted. “Dangerous—I—I—say.”
“Better—stop—her,” came back from Johnny.