On their last Sunday in the town they assembled the glider, single-surfaced, like a monoplane, twenty-two feet in span, with a tail, and with a double bar beneath the plane, by which the pilot was to hang, his hands holding cords attached to the entering edge of the plane, balancing the glider by movements of his body.
At dawn on Monday they loaded the glider upon a wagon and galloped with it out to a forty-foot hill. They stared down the easy slope, which grew in steepness and length every second, and thought about Lilienthal's death.
"W-w-well," shivered the Turk, "who tries it first?"
All three pretended to be adjusting the lashings, waiting for one another, till Carl snarled, "Oh, all right! I'll do it if I got to."
"Course it breaks my heart to see you swipe the honor," the Turk said, "but I'm unselfish. I'll let you do it. Brrrr! It's as bad as the first jump into the swimming-hole in spring."
Carl was smiling at the comparison as they lifted the glider, with him holding the bars beneath. The plane was instantly buoyed up like a cork on water as the fifteen-mile head-wind poured under it. He stopped smiling. This was a dangerous living thing he was going to guide. It jerked at him as he slipped his arms over the suspended bars. He wanted to stop and think this all over. "Get it done!" he snapped at himself, and began to run down-hill, against the wind.
The wind lifted the plane again. With a shock Carl knew that his feet had left the ground. He was actually flying! He kicked wildly in air. All his body strained to get balance in the air, to control itself, to keep from falling, of which he now felt the world-old instinctive horror.
The plane began to tip to one side, apparently irresistibly, like a sheet of paper turning over in the wind. Carl was sick with fear for a tenth of a second. Every cell in his body shrank before coming disaster. He flung his legs in the direction opposite to the tipping of the plane. With this counter-balancing weight, the glider righted. It was running on an even keel, twenty-five feet above the sloping ground, while Carl hung easily by the double bar beneath, like a circus performer with a trapeze under each arm. He ventured to glance down. The turf was flowing beneath him, a green and sunny blur. He exulted. Flying!
The glider dipped forward. Carl leaned back, his arms wide-spread. A gust struck the plane, head on. Overloaded at the back, it tilted back, then soared up to thirty-five or forty feet. Slow-seeming, inevitable, the whole structure turned vertically upward.
Carl dangled there against a flimsy sheet of wood and cotton, which for part of a second stuck straight up against the wind, like a paper on a screen-door.