Tom Swift did not answer, but began frantically manipulating the controls. The plane was acting in a peculiar manner—even Mary with her inexperience realized that.
“Is anything wrong?” she asked.
“I’m afraid there is,” Tom answered with a grim tightening of his jaws. “We seem to be going into a nose dive!”
Hardly had he spoken than the plane tilted forward and plunged toward the earth at frightful speed.
CHAPTER IV
JUST IN TIME
Tom Swift had been in dangerous situations before with aeroplanes and other machines of his invention. He had more than once been close to death, and he knew that the only way to get out of a tight corner was to keep his head. Now he did not so much fear for himself as for Mary.
“Is there any danger?” asked the girl, who had sense enough to sit quietly in her seat and not grab Tom’s arms or interfere in any way.
“Yes, there is danger,” the aviator answered quietly, as he kept at his task of trying to straighten out the plane. “If I can’t bring her up we’re likely to crash.”
Beyond a gasp of her breath and a look of terror in her eyes, Mary showed no signs of the fear that was within her. Yet she was terribly frightened, for Tom as much as for herself.
“Come up here!” cried the young inventor, speaking to the plane as he might to a horse. He adjusted the levers, pulled back on the one that tended to raise the forward edges of the plane to tilt her nose, and he tried to get the elevation rudder up. But in the end he had to admit that he was beaten.