“No, I’ll stick,” announced Tom. “How about you?” he asked his chum.
“I’m game, of course. I wouldn’t miss it for anything. They ought to reward you publicly in some way, Tom!”
“Reward! What for?”
“For establishing this airline express—crossing the United States in the daylight hours of a single day.”
“Reward nothing! If I can do it, the only reward I want is for Jason Jacks and others who can afford it to invest money in the project and get it firmly established.”
“Oh, they’ll do that all right, Tom. Is that the landing field below us?”
Ned pointed to a green level stretch outside the city of San Francisco. They had approached it rapidly, for the Osprey, as if determining to live up to her name, was fairly zooming toward the Pacific.
“That’s it,” was the answer. “There’s quite a crowd there, too! Hope I don’t muss anybody’s hair as I go down. Confound the people! Why don’t they know enough to keep out of the way when they see an aeroplane coming down right among ’em?”
Well might Tom ask this, for the crowd, which had assembled in anticipation of seeing the landing, was swarming all over the field in spite of the efforts of the police to keep a free place for the machine to come down.
“I’ll give ’em a bit of a scare,” decided Tom. Quickly shifting the rudder of his plane, it appeared for a moment as if he was going to crash down where the crowd was thickest. With yells of alarm the people scattered, and this left a clear space, which was what Tom wanted.