“Ready,” announced the helper, getting into position.
“Let her go,” ordered the enthusiastic young airman in a tone like a hurrah, his quivering fingers clutching wheel and control, and thrilling to the tips with animation and delight.
It was a superb day. Air, sky and wind currents were propitious for an easy flight. To Hiram there was nothing in the world equal to that delightful sensation of skimming through the air like a bird. It was almost rapture to realize that the turn of a wrist, or the pressure of his foot sent the airy, graceful fabric of steel and wood far aloft, like a pinion-poised eagle, ascending safely through space as would a speeding swallow arrow-aimed for a long, deep dive.
Hiram struck a course due west, once aloft at a convenient level. Eyes and mind were fixed upon a direct point in view. At the end of an hour he was out of sight of the camp and the air craft practicing in the vicinity of the exhibition grounds.
Between two settlements, some fifteen miles apart, Hiram began to descend. It was where a two mile reach of level pasture land intervened, dotted here and there with underbrush and stunted trees. The Scout landed and its young pilot alighted. Under one arm he carried some sheets of white paper. He halted to place one of these on the ground, holding it flat by stones weighing down its corners. He then proceeded fully half a mile farther, again placed a sheet on the ground, gradually, in like manner, making a circle of fully a mile and a half. Finally he came back to the Scout, and got up into the air again.
“Target practice!” chuckled Hiram, as he circled away from the spot, made a sharp turn and volplaned full speed, as though aiming to land, nose first, directly upon the first white sheet in his course. Hiram made a magnificent dive. He swung over the control so that fifty feet from the ground the machine turned the reverse arc of a circle of nearly two hundred feet. His hand shot down beside him and grasped one of the bags, lifted it, aimed it and practically fired it at the “target” in view.
“Missed,” he grimly observed, but quite pleased all the same, for the bag landed flat and did not roll, and lay not two feet away from its intended mark.
“Hit it!” crowed the excited Hiram as, with a second swoop, he made a direct hit of the second target with a second bag. The third was a miss. The fourth was like the second.
“If I can make it that good, what can’t Dave Dashaway do?” soliloquized the young aeronaut, as he gathered up the bags and replaced them in the Scout. “I’ll spring the scheme on him just as soon as he makes up his mind to go into that International contest, which he’s just got to do!”
Hiram went afloat once more, determined on a swift run west, a turn, and then a course homeward bound.