Wash went to his duties grumblingly; but he was an ingenious and skillful cook and when he got to work he forgot his "feeling of mal-de-merry."
It was now approaching midnight and the flying machine had been steadily traveling northward for some hours. Both Andy Sudds and the professor awoke and offered to relieve the boys in their work. But Mark had taken Jack's place in the controller's seat and neither he nor his chum felt that he wished to give over the guidance of the Snowbird to anybody else.
Now, some distance ahead, the peak of Mt. Katahdin, gloriously mantled in moonlight, rose before them. Their direct course lay over the summit of this eminence, and Mark decided that it would be better to rise to a higher strata and cross the mountain than to swing around it. Therefore Mark raised the bow of the flying machine and she darted upward on a long slant, drawing ever nearer to the shining peak of the great mountain. The night air was chill—it had been cool when they left the earth—and as they rose to the rarer ether it was evident that they would find a degree of temperature far lower than the usual summer heat.
Mark kept the Snowbird scaling swiftly upward, mile after mile; but the long tangent at which he had started to clear the summit of Katahdin did not prove sufficient, and by and by they found themselves within a very few yards of the rocky side of the peak.
Out of a dark glen a spark of light suddenly shot—almost like a rocket in swiftness. Jack saw it first and cried:
"See that! What is it? What do you make of it?"
"A shootin' star, I declare!" said Andy Sudds.
"Nothing of the kind," exclaimed Jack, quickly. "A star could not shoot up from the earth."
"Wot's dat says somebody's a-shootin' at us?" gasped Washington White.
"If dey punctuates our tire, we'll suah go down wid a big ker-smash!"
The professor, however, watched the "shooting star" for some moments without speaking, and then rapidly made his way to Mark's side.