“He’s going to crash!” cried Margaret.
“Nothing of the kind,” shouted Tom, who had read widely of planes and pilots and flying maneuvers. “That’s just a power dive—fancy flying.”
Tom was right. When the scarlet biplane seemed headed for certain destruction the pilot pulled its nose up, levelled off, shot over Rolfe at dizzying speed and then climbed his craft back toward the fleecy, lazy white clouds.
“That’s Rand,” announced Tom with a certainty that left no room for argument. “He’s always up to stunts like that.”
“It must be awfully dangerous,” said Helen as she watched the plane, now a mere speck in the sky.
“It is,” agreed Tom. “Everything depends on the motor in a dive like that. If it started to miss some editor would have to write that particular flyer’s obituary.”
The morning of Saturday, the Fourth, dawned clear and bright. Small boys whose idea of fun was to arise at four o’clock and spend the next two hours throwing cannon crackers under windows had their usual good time and Tom and Helen, unable to sleep, were up at six o’clock. Half an hour later Margaret Stevens, also awakened by the almost continuous cannonading of firecrackers, came across the street.
“Jim Preston is going to take us down the lake on his seven-thirty trip before the special trains and the big crowds start coming in,” said Tom.
“But I’d like to see the trains come in,” protested Helen.
“If we wait until then,” explained Tom, “we’ll be caught in the thick of the rush for the boats and we may never get to Sandy Point. We’d better take the seven-thirty boat.”