[CHAPTER VI.]
A SHOT ACROSS THE BOWS.
The sensation of gliding through the air, entirely cut adrift from solid ground, is as novel as it is pleasant. The body seems suddenly to have acquired an indescribable lightness, and the spirits become equally buoyant. Dizziness, or vertigo, is unheard of among aëronauts. While on the ground a man may not be able to climb a ladder for a distance of ten feet without losing his head and falling, the same man can look downward for thousands of feet from a balloon with his nerves unruffled.
Joe McGlory, now for the first time leaping into the air with a flying machine, was holding his breath and hanging on desperately to keep himself from being shaken off his seat, but, to his astonishment, his fears were rapidly dying away within him.
The cowboy was a lad of pluck and daring; nevertheless, he had viewed his projected flight in a mood akin to panic. Although passionately fond of boats, yet the roll of a launch in a seaway always made him sick; in the same manner, perhaps, he was in love with flying machines, although it had taken a lot of strenuous work to get him to promise to go aloft.
The necessity, on account of wet ground, of juggling for a start, had thrown something of a wet blanket over McGlory's ardor. Once in the air, however, his enthusiasm arose as his fears went down.
Matt sat on the left side of the broad seat, firmly planted with his feet on the footrest and his body bent forward, one hand on the mechanism that expanded or contracted the great wings, and the other manipulating the rudder that gave the craft a vertical course.
On Matt's quickness of judgment and lightning-like celerity in shifting the levers, the lives of all three of the boys depended. Every change in the centre of air pressure—and this was shifting every second—had to be met with an expansion or contraction of the wings in order to make the centre of air pressure and the centre of gravity coincide at all times.
Upon Matt, therefore, fell all the labor and responsibility. He had no time to give to the scenery passing below, and what talking he indulged in was mechanical and of secondary importance to his work. But this is not to say that he missed all the pleasures of flying. A greater delight than that offered by the zest of danger and responsibility in the air would be hard to imagine. Every second his nerves were strung to tightest tension.
Ping sat between Matt and McGlory, his yellow hands clutching the rim of the seat between his knees. He was purring with happiness, like some overgrown cat, while a grin of heavenly joy parted his face as his eyes marked the muddy roads over which they were passing without hindrance.