Chapter Three.
The Brown Deal Box.
Six days had gone by.
The weather having continued bright and fine, with a high and steady barometer, all of us at Hendon, quirks and pilots alike, had been up on many occasions.
In secret, I had placed upon my machine—a Breguet monoplane with a 200 horse-power Salmson—another new invention which, with Teddy’s aid, I had devised, and was testing. We were keeping the affair a profound secret. Nobody knew of the contrivance evolved out of my knowledge of wireless, save we two, Roseye and my mechanic Harry Theed.
Carefully concealed from the eye it was carried in a large locked box, while, as further precaution, after testing it each time, I put it on my car and took it away to my chambers with me, for we were not at all anxious for any of the mixed crowd at the aerodrome to pry into what we were doing, or to ascertain the true direction of our constant experiments.
One afternoon down at Gunnersbury Teddy, in mechanic’s brown overalls, was busily engaged repairing a portion of the apparatus which I had broken that morning owing to an unfortunately bad landing.
To the uninitiated the long shed with its two lathes, its tangle of electric wires across the floor, the great induction coils—some of them capable of giving a fourteen-inch spark—the small dynamo with its petrol engine, and other electrical appliances, would no doubt have been puzzling.