“Hulloo! Going to make it a monoplane, are you?” said he. “When I was here before you hadn’t decided.”
Poke coughed, and glanced a bit nervously at the Shark. “Ahem! Why—why, Sam, I guess the monoplane will work better, seeing the kind of motor we’ve got—high speed kind, you know. And the Shark—he says——”
The Shark emitted a sound. It was not a groan, nor a grunt, nor yet a chuckle; but, somehow, it suggested all three. Sam turned to him.
“The other day I guessed you knew something about this, though you kept your own counsel—that day we were looking over the open field near the lake.”
“Umph! Then you guessed right.”
“What do you think of the scheme?”
“Crazy!” snapped the Shark.
There Poke intervened. “Let me explain, Sam! I’m not crazy, and the scheme isn’t crazy. There’s a lot of mathematics in flying. That’s why I called in the Shark to figure out things for me. If anybody can do it, he can. Now, you see, flying is just lifting a load in the air and moving ahead. To do that you’ve got to apply power to a propeller. I’ve told the Shark to calculate how many revolutions a minute the propeller has got to make to do the business for us, and what the plane space should be, and a few other little things like that.”
“Yes, that’s all he wants me to tell him!” jeered the Shark.
“Well, that’s why brains like yours are put in anybody’s head,” quoth Poke, philosophically.