The boys hurried to finish the repairs. It was some time after midnight when they pronounced the Snowbird again ready for flight.
The professor had to be urged more than once to leave his telescope, however; and then he insisted upon setting it up on the deck of the flying machine. He would not discuss the situation at all; but his serious visage and his anxious manner betrayed to them all that he was disturbed indeed by the strange, pale planet he had so closely examined.
Mr. Roebach turned loose his dogs again and climbed gingerly aboard the flying machine.
"I've never been up in the air," he said, "and I must admit that I am somewhat more afraid of a flying machine than I am of an earthquake."
"No more earthquakes in mine, thank you!" cried Jack. "I'd rather sail on a kite than go through what we did yesterday."
They had studied the chart and laid the course for Aleukan without any difficulty. Now Jack strapped himself into the operator's seat and the others took their places, Washington White stowing his rooster carefully amidships as he had before.
Jack started the motor and the Snowbird began to quiver throughout her frame. He touched the lever by which the propellers were started. With a whir and a bound the flying machine left the earth.
Never had it sprung into the air so quickly before. It shot up at a sharp incline and was over the tree-tops in a breath. The indicator registered eighty miles an hour before the plateau was behind them. Then the pointer whirled to ninety—to a hundred—to a hundred fifteen miles an hour, and both Jack, in the pilot's seat, and the others gasped for breath.
Faster than when shot out of Professor Henderson's catapult the Snowbird winged her way into the northwest. Jack managed to keep her on an even keel. But he had the same feeling that he would have had, had he been hanging to the bit of a runaway horse.
Indeed, the Snowbird was practically out of his control.