And during all the time that Don and Dan were wrestling with the new problems, T. Singleton Albert, the former drugstore clerk of Syracuse, was making the most astonishing progress. Many in the beginning had been accustomed to laugh at the thought of the pale, anemic-looking chap ever attaining his ambition of becoming an airman, but, as Peur Jamais put it, he was “leaving every one of them far behind.”
One evening, when the sun had long disappeared beneath the horizon and the advance-guards of approaching dusk were drawing a veil over the distance and little by little driving the color from objects near at hand, a crowd of boys of the first and second classes journeyed to the third flying field to watch the machines circling around in the sky.
“Won’t I be glad when I get to the real work!” sighed Don.
Dave Cornwells, who was standing by, remarked:
“Boys, do you see that highest machine? Well, the pilot is a certain daring young aviator named T. Singleton Albert.”
“Goodness gracious!” exclaimed Dan Hagen. “Why, that chap is certainly a bird!”
“You’ve said something,” drawled Roy Mittengale. “And he’ll never be satisfied until he gets so high that the earth looks like a rubber ball to him.”
As the shadows slowly deepened over the earth the flyers, one by one, returned to the grande piste.
There still remained one airplane high aloft—so insignificant in the vast field of graying sky that it seemed to lose all resemblance to a flying machine and become but a tiny, shapeless speck, so faint at times that the naked eye could no longer follow its varied evolutions. And every one on the grande piste seemed to know to whom that machine belonged—it was Albert’s.
“My, shan’t I be glad when I get into his class!” commented Don Hale, whose face was turned toward the sky.