“Well, Bob,” asked Tom, as he shook hands with him, “are you going in for it?”
“I sure am.”
“Balloon or skyplane?”
“Neither, Tom. I’m going by special trains and steamers. I’ll be back on the starting field waiting for the rest of you fellows to come and have lunch with me after I win that hundred thousand. You can boast all you like about fast motors, speed boats, and aeroplanes, but I’m going to go by regular lanes of travel. I’ve chartered five steamers and ten special trains to take me around the world. There won’t be a minute of delay, and I’ll finish as fresh as a daisy.”
“If you finish at all!” laughed Tom. “Who’s that?” he asked, pointing to an eccentric man who was nervously pacing the office while waiting for the newspaper officials to get the papers ready for final signing.
“Some Professor Modby,” was the millionaire sport’s answer. “He’s going in a new dirigible that uses a gas he claims he can make out of burning weeds, rotten potatoes or apples and, on a pinch, from green grass.”
“He must be crazy,” murmured Tom.
“Well, he’s got a queer looking machine,” stated Bob. “He showed me some photographs of it. Looks like a combination of one of your Airline Expresses and the Los Angeles.”
“Guess I haven’t much to fear from him,” thought Tom, for he knew how the big dirigibles suffer in stormy weather.
In a room opening out of the main one where the various contestants were gathered a self-important sounding voice was saying: