“He sure tried to foul you,” declared Ned when his chum had rejoined him. “He had plenty of room to land clear.”
“More than he needed,” agreed Peltok. “That man will bear watching, Mr. Swift!”
“And we’ll watch him!” replied Tom.
“Here come a couple more of the contestants, I guess,” called Hartman as he pointed upward, where two specks, like big birds, were observed in the sky.
“Either that, or it’s a welcoming delegation of Portuguese airmen,” suggested Tom.
But the first surmise proved correct, and a little later two big hydroplanes, one piloted by Jed Kimball and the other by Harry Walton, whom Tom knew slightly, settled down in Lisbon harbor.
This harbor, while not an official landing, since the race was a go-as-you-please one, was the objective of most of the contestants who flew eastward in aircraft. Some were not able to cross the Atlantic in one hop, and were obliged to stop at the Azores. But the bigger machines, including Tom’s, the Red Arrow, and the two to arrive later, carried fuel enough for the longer journey.
“They’re making almost as good time as you made, Tom,” remarked Ned when informal greetings had been exchanged with the two latest arrivals. “Doesn’t that mean they’ll give you a hard rub?”
“You forget, Ned,” said the inventor, “that we were forced down by a hot bearing and lost a lot of time. Even with that, we beat the other three. If we did that, bucking the hurricane as we did, it shows we are a lot speedier than they are, unless they, too, were delayed. We must find out about that, but we’ll have to be diplomatic. No use letting them know just how speedy we are.”
While oil and gas, together with some more food and other supplies, were being taken aboard all four of the competing craft, Tom signaled a small boat and visited Jed Kimball.