“Great! That sounds like old times!”
The Lieutenant telephoned for the Santa Benicia town-hack, and to the Headmaster, and threw a toothbrush and a book into a suit-case, while Hike hurried off to pack his aviation-clothes. In half an hour they were on a train.
They found the Lieutenant’s friend at his home on Pacific Avenue, San Francisco. The three climbed into a motor car, and whirled out to the aerodrome.
By the light of an electric lantern, Hike saw the Paulhan-Tatin monoplane, and gasped, for it looked like a fish, with funny wings, curved up at the ends; curved up; mind you. That, explained Jack Adeler, was for “automatic stability”—the bent wings kept the machine from tipping, without the aviator’s having to warp (that is, bend up the edges of) the wings. The Paulhan was the latest thing in monoplanes, devised for the use of the French army. Its torpedo-shaped body cut through the air with the least head-resistance possible.
It sure was “different from the old Hustle,” mused Hike. It could not even begin to carry so much weight, but it was faster, in comparison, for it made seventy to a hundred miles an hour with a forty horse-power motor, while the Hustle could only go two hundred to two hundred and fifty miles an hour, at the fastest, with two hundred and thirty horse-power.
“Seventy miles—that’ll be fast enough for the fellows, I guess,” laughed Hike.
He was shown just how the machine worked. He studied the new Gnome motor; the elevating planes—which were parts of a flat tail, at the back of the machine, instead of being separate planes in front. He sat in the aviator’s cockpit, forward of the wings a little, and saw how the engine, though in front of him, worked a propeller, way back at the end of the tail.
While the Lieutenant was learnedly explaining that this fish-shaped body was in the “streamline form”—that is, the form best suited to pass through either air or water—Hike was wild to plunge out into the air again.
It didn’t seem quite right to have just two long wings on the machine, instead of a whole nest of little tetrahedral planes all around him, but he liked this hot-headed, fiery little machine.
Half the night they spent in learning just how the machine worked; and next morning, the Lieutenant and the owner of it let him take it out on the aviation field for a little practise in speeding it along the ground, bobbing on its forward wheels, with its tail waggling in the air. Then he tried “grass cutting”—taking it up only a few feet.