The Airship Boys' Ocean Flyer; Or, New York to London in Twelve Hours

The Airship Boys’ Ocean Flyer

Or

New York to London in Twelve Hours

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The Aeroplane Boys Series By ASHTON LAMAR

I. IN THE CLOUDS FOR UNCLE SAM Or, Morey Marshall of the Signal Corps. II. THE STOLEN AEROPLANE Or, How Bud Wilson Made Good III. THE AEROPLANE EXPRESS Or, The Boy Aeronaut’s Grit. IV. THE BOY AERONAUTS’ CLUB Or, Flying For Fun. V. A CRUISE IN THE SKY Or, The Legend of the Great Pink Pearl. VI. BATTLING THE BIG HORN Or, The Aeroplane in the Rockies.

Other Titles To Follow

These stories are the newest and most up-to-date. All Aeroplane details are correct. Fully illustrated. Colored frontispiece. Cloth, 12mos.

Price, 60 cents each.

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The Airship Boys Series By H. L. SAYLER

I. THE AIRSHIP BOYS Or, The Quest of the Aztec Treasure. II. THE AIRSHIP BOYS ADRIFT Or, Saved by an Aeroplane. III. THE AIRSHIP BOYS DUE NORTH Or, By Balloon to the Pole. IV. THE AIRSHIP BOYS IN THE BARREN LANDS Or, The Secret of the White Eskimos. V. THE AIRSHIP BOYS IN FINANCE Or, The Flight of the Flying Cow. VI. THE AIRSHIP BOYS’ OCEAN FLYER Or, New York to London in Twelve Hours.

These thrilling stories deal with the wonderful new science of aerial navigation. Every boy will be interested and instructed by reading them. Illustrated. Cloth binding. Price, $1.00 each.

The above books are sold everywhere or will be sent postpaid on receipt of price.

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[Illustration: IN THE PILOT ROOM OF THE _FLYER_.]

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The Airship Boys’ Ocean Flyer

or, New York to London in Twelve Hours

By H. L. Sayler

[Illustration]

Illustrated by S. H. Riesenberg

Chicago The Reilly & Britton Co. Publishers

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COPYRIGHT, 1911, by THE REILLY & BRITTON CO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Airship Boys’ Ocean Flyer

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Contents

Chapter Page

I The Making Of A Newspaper Story 9

II What A Reporter Saw In The Dark 23

III The Veteran Takes Off His Hat To The Cub 36

IV The Airship Boys Make Their Appearance 51

V A Bewildering Proposition 67

VI An Old Home And A Modern Business 83

VII Ned Napier Advances Some Theories 97

VIII THE _Ocean Flyer_ CREW IS COMPLETED 113

IX DUTIES OF THE _Ocean Flyer_ CREW 127

X Buck Stewart Receives New Orders 141

XI Shaping A New Course 156

XII How The Flight Was To Be Made 168

XIII Roy Osborne’S “Pick-Up Crane” 182

XIV Captain Napier’S Nerve In MID-Air Saves The 196 Cargo

XV In Which Ned’S Life Is Saved 210

XVI An Unexpected Tribute 224

XVII What Happened At Three Forty-Three P. M. 237

XVIII The Racing Pigs Of Fundy 252

XIX A Change Of Plans By Wireless 269

XX The First Sight Of London 284

XXI The Marble Arch Gate, Hyde Park 298

XXII EXTRACTS FROM THE LOG OF THE _Ocean Flyer_ 312

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List Of Illustrations

In the pilot room of the _Flyer_ _Frontispiece_

In the “local room” of the New York 45 Herald

Picking up the matrices 206

The end of the flight, London 305

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The Airship Boys’ Ocean Flyer OR, New York to London in Twelve Hours

Chapter I

The Making Of A Newspaper Story

It was a few minutes of eleven o’clock at night. One of the many editions of the great New York _Herald_ had just gone to press. But in the big, half-lit room where editors, copy readers, reporters and telegraph operators were busy on the later editions to follow, there was no let-up in the work of making a world-known newspaper.

There was the noise of many persons working swiftly; the staccato of typewriters, the drone of telegraph sounders and now and then the sharp inquiry of some bent-over copy reader as he struggled to turn reportorial inexperience into a finished story. But there was no confusion and none of the wild rush and clatter that fiction uses in describing newspaper offices; copy boys were not dashing in all directions and the floor was not knee deep with newspapers and print paper.

Calmest of all was the night city editor. With a mind full of the work already done and in progress, he was as alert mentally as if he had just reached his desk. Five hours yet remained in which New York had to be watched; five hours, in any one minute of which the biggest news on hand might fade into nothing in the face of the one big story that every editor waits for night after night. And the night city editor, knowing this, dropped his half-lit pipe when his desk telephone buzzed.

“Stewart? Yes! Yes!” he answered quickly in a voice so low that not even his busy assistants heard him. “Where are you? What are you doing?”

“In Newark,” came the quick response, “and we landed it. It’s a peach. That aeroplane tip you know. It panned out all right.”

The night city editor had seemed perplexed for a few moments but at this his face cleared.

“How big? What’s new?”

“Biggest airship ever made; biggest planes; biggest engines—cabin and staterooms; two hundred miles an hour—”

“See it yourself?”

“Been workin’ in the factory three days; American Aeroplane Works; got story cinched. Machine flew to-night first time. It’s a beat.”

“Got talks?”

“Not straight, but I’ve heard ’em talkin’.”

“What’s the idea? Is it a war ship?”

“Got everything but that. Will some one take it by phone? I can get to the office quarter after twelve; got some stuff ready.”

“Who’s back of it? Whose machine is it?”

“Aerial Utilities Company; those Chicago boys, Napier and Hope and their friends.”

The editor thought a moment, glanced at the clock on the wall where the hands pointed to eleven and then said:

“If you can be here by a quarter after twelve, hurry in. If you can’t make it, phone. Get up all the stuff you can. Are Napier and Hope at the factory?”

“They made a test to-night. I know where they went. I was outside the yard. They were gone from ten o’clock till ten twenty-five; were all over New York and forty miles to sea. It—”

“Grab the eleven fifty express and hustle in,” interrupted the man at the telephone. “It’s good stuff and’ll stand a couple o’ columns.”

Hanging up the receiver, the night city editor settled back in his chair, finished lighting his pipe and then, his head leaning in his clasped hands, seemed to be in a reverie. But this did not last long. While he had talked to “Stewart in Newark” three young men had hurried to his desk and laid on it stories or parts of stories on which they had been working. These reporters were now standing a few feet away awaiting further orders or dismissal for the night.

“Dick,” exclaimed the editor as he suddenly unclasped his hands, leaned forward over his desk again and shuffled the copy on it into a little bundle, “we’ll want about two and a half columns in the last edition.” As he spoke, a middle-aged man in his shirt sleeves—for the night was mid-June—leaned backward from a near-by big table at which a dozen men were busy cutting, rewriting and pasting copy, and took the little bundle of manuscript from his superior’s hands.

The waiting reporters groaned inwardly. They knew that this was probably the death warrant for their own evening’s work. Dick, the man addressed, asked nothing and made no inquiry. He knew that something big had turned up. As head copy reader the securing of this “something” was no business of his. Nor did the nature of it stir his calloused curiosity. His orders were to save two and a half columns of space and this he would do. When the story came, he and his assistants would see that it was two and a half columns long and no more.

But this was not the attitude of the three reporters yet waiting near the editor’s desk. This man was no longer in a reverie. In those few minutes he had “blocked out” his big story; he already saw it in print and, unlike Dick, he was now ready to go after it.

“Anything more, Mr. Latimer?” asked one of the reporters eagerly, for each of them had now scented a “beat” and all, forgetting the probable fate of their earlier evening’s work, were eager to be in on it.

Mr. Latimer arose and without reply hurried away in the direction of the night editor’s desk. When he returned, his pipe now sputtering viciously, he called: “Dick, make that two columns.” Then he turned toward the still lingering reporters. They moved to his desk, each trying to attract special attention.

“Chambers,” said Mr. Latimer to the youngest of the trio, “get Governor’s island on the phone and see if they’ll put you on Colonel Fred Grant’s wire. If you can’t raise him by phone go down to the Ship News office and have the boys take you over in the boat. We want a good talk with him on this idea: What military prestige will it give the country that is the first to perfect an airship that can travel two hundred miles an hour—an aeroplane that can actually carry men and bombs? Point out that this means across the Atlantic in fifteen hours. Make him talk new stuff, practical, and cut out the Jules Verne patter.”

Chambers, young and inexperienced, hurried away without a question, knowing well enough that this interview was to fit into another story and that it was his business to get it, and the earlier the better.

“Glidden,” said the night city editor, turning to the oldest reporter of the three, “didn’t you write a Sunday story a few weeks ago on ‘The Limit of the Automobile’?”

“Yes, sir,” was the prompt reply of the pleased young journalist.

“Have you some ideas on the possibilities of the aeroplane?”

“I have,” was the prompt reply. If Glidden had gone further he would have added, “I’m getting up another story on that line now.”

“That’s good,” broke in Mr. Latimer. “We’re going to print a big aeroplane story in the morning. I want a ‘lead.’ The man on the story can’t write it. I can’t tell you anything except that this story concerns the first real airship. Give me half a column of what a real aeroplane ought to do—”

“It ought to go ten miles up in the air,” broke in Glidden impulsively as if anxious to demonstrate that he really had some ideas, “and the time will come when the flying machine will stay in the air more than five days. It will carry fifty people, cross the Atlantic or Pacific and sail two hundred miles an hour—”

“That’s enough,” laughed the editor. “Our machine does two hundred miles. Go to it.”

Glidden, who should have had Stewart’s assignment on the aeroplane story, wanted to ask more but he was too wise to do so. A few minutes later he was back at his typewriter, nervous and excited over the part he was to take in the making of the next morning’s “beat.”

The work of the third man was better known to Mr. Latimer.

“Winton,” he began as if sure that his orders would be carried out to the letter, “you’ve heard of the Airship Boys—those Chicago youngsters who have been starring in aeronautics for several years?”

“I know Bob Russell personally,” answered Winton. “He’s the newspaper man from Kansas City who has been with the boys in all their stunts.”

“Did he ever work in New York?” inquired Mr. Latimer.

“I think not. I believe he’s in business with the Airship Boys. Used to work on the Kansas City _Comet_.”

“Couldn’t get hold of him?”

“If it’s about some new project of these boys,” laughed Winton, “it’s not worth while. They’re all clams concerning their own affairs.”

“But is this the outfit that interested Mr. Morgan in the Universal Transportation Company last summer?”

“I never worked on the story except once when I tried to get Russell to talk and couldn’t. They had a suite of offices in the Waldorf last July.”

“Call the Waldorf and see what you can find.”

Five minutes later Winton was back at Mr. Latimer’s desk.

“Five or six persons connected with the Aerial Utilities Company had apartments and offices in the hotel until the middle of last August. Then the offices were moved to Chicago. There seems to be a group of these people, all interested in aeroplanes on a big scale and their headquarters I think are in Chicago.”

Mr. Latimer touched a button and hastily wrote a note.

“Hand this to the telegraph editor,” he said to the messenger as he gave him this message:

“_Craig, Tribune, Chicago. Rush anything on Aerial Utilities Company, organization and business. Also matter concerning Airship Boys, Napier, Hope and Russell._”

Then he turned to Winton again.

“Story in to-night about those boys and a big aeroplane. Napier and Hope and maybe Russell are not in Chicago, but somewhere in Newark. Their newest idea was manufactured by the American Aeroplane Company in Newark. Call the works on a chance; like as not you won’t find any one there. Look up the head of the company. Raise him on the phone. If he won’t talk about the new airship make him tell you where the Airship Boys are. Try the hotels by phone. Must have something about these young men. The man on the story missed a talk with ’em.”

Winton rushed to the telephone room and Mr. Latimer, with another glance at the clock, put the Newark “beat” aside for a moment while he gave his attention to the accumulating copy received from the local news bureau and late evening assignment men. With instructions for each, he had “covered” an East Side tenement fire by rushing four men to the scene and had personally called up and talked to a leading financier on a financial story when Winton returned.

“J. W. Atkinson is president of the Aeroplane Company,” Winton reported. “No one at works. Got Atkinson on phone. He won’t talk but acknowledges Airship Boys are in Newark. Won’t say where. Can’t find ’em at hotels.”

Without answering, the night city editor turned to his telephone.

“Get me the Newark office,” he ordered. “Nathan, if he’s there. Go to the library,” he added, speaking to Winton, “and dig up a story on these kids. There’s plenty there. Get half a column. See if we have any pictures.”

While Winton hurried away on his new task, the telephone rang.

“Newark?” asked Mr. Latimer. “Is that Nathan?”

“Mr. Nathan’s out eatin’ supper,” replied a juvenile voice.

“Go get him. Tell him this. Ready? Put down J. W. Atkinson. Got it? J. W. Atkinson, president American Aeroplane Company. Tell Nathan to see Mr. Atkinson at his home and find where Ned Napier and Alan Hope can be found. Put the names down: Ned Napier and Alan Hope.”

“I know ’em,” interrupted the youthful voice. “Them’s the Airship Boys.”

“Tell Nathan not to leave Mr. Atkinson until he learns where those boys are stopping: where they are in Newark. Got it?”

These events had taken place within fifteen minutes. At ten minutes after eleven Mr. Latimer again put the Newark story aside temporarily and gave all his time to rounding up his part of the next edition. At eleven thirty o’clock Glidden, who was to provide the material for a general “lead” to the big “beat”—none of the details of which he even knew, turned in five hundred words. Mr. Latimer paused in his other work and glanced hastily at the pages. Then he looked at the clock, leaned back in his chair and read each page.

“Good stuff,” he announced without even a smile as he finished. “That’s the idea; just what I wanted. Stewart is coming in from Newark with the story a quarter after twelve. Get your supper and be back by that time. I want you to help him shape up his stuff. Chambers and Winton will have ‘adds’ to the story.”

A quarter of an hour later Winton reported with his sketch of the Airship Boys. His superior did not read the matter—he was sure enough of Winton—but spiked it with Glidden’s copy.

“No pictures,” explained the reporter, “except one in the _Scientific American_ of last July showing working drawings of a steel monoplane—the one they used in the New York-Chicago flight.”

“Get it and take it to the picture man. Tell him to make a two-column cut of it. No pictures of the young men?”

“Not on file.”

“That’s good,” said Mr. Latimer with his first smile of the evening. “It’ll make a good ‘follow’ to-morrow. By the way, did you get a story of these youngsters right up to date?”

“No,” answered the reporter, somewhat regretfully, “I couldn’t find anything about them after their record flight in a steel monoplane between New York and Chicago last July. I know they were in New York at their Waldorf offices until August. But I can’t find anything about them since that date. If they’ve got a new idea, they’ve had since last August to work on it unmolested by the newspapers.”

Mr. Latimer was shaking his head as he refilled his pipe.

“Get your supper and hurry back. Stewart’ll be here in fifteen or twenty minutes. Then we’ll see what we can all do to find out what they’ve been doing since August. The story is gettin’ to look good.”

Winton was about to hasten away when his interest got the better of his judgment and he violated one of the unwritten rules of the _Herald_ office: he questioned his superior.

“I know it isn’t my business, Mr. Latimer,” he began, hesitatingly, “but didn’t Stewart say they have made a new machine that can fly two hundred miles an hour?”

The night city editor nodded his head.

“And he has the details of the machine?”

“All of them,” replied the editor. “But he’s missed the main thing—the story. What are they going to do with such a craft? Why should they test it out in secret—under cover of night?”

“And that’s what we are trying to find out?” asked Winton, showing confusion.

“Certainly,” was the response. “The mere account of a new aeroplane isn’t worth two columns in the _Herald_. That’s only half the story. Its purpose and possibility make the real story.”

Winton leaned over the desk, his face flushed.

“I know what those boys have done in the past,” he said in a low voice. “There’s only one thing left for them to do now. If you can’t find them and don’t know what that is I’ll make a guess for you: they’re going to cross the Atlantic.”

“Certainly,” was Mr. Latimer’s response. “My own idea precisely. And that is the story the _Herald_ is going to print in the morning.”

But the night city editor was wrong. The _Herald_ did not print such a story in the morning, as will be set forth in the next chapter.

Chapter II

What A Reporter Saw In The Dark

Stewart, the reporter who had been working in the American Aeroplane Company’s plant for several days and who had telephoned the tip on the first flight of the wonderful new machine, reached the _Herald_ office a few minutes ahead of his schedule. He was hot and excited. As he hurried to Mr. Latimer’s desk he drew from his pocket a wad of copy—a part of his story already prepared. The night city editor looked at the clock—he seemed always watching the clock.

“Twelve ten,” Mr. Latimer began without question or comment and waving back the proffered manuscript. “We want a column. Take an hour and do it right. Tell what you saw—don’t speculate. Tell about the new machine, and don’t be technical. We’ll make the ‘lead’ when we see what you’ve got—”

“This is ready now,” interrupted Stewart, mopping his brow. “I did it on the train.”

“Use it in your story; put it together yourself. It’s for the last edition. By the way, you didn’t find what they’re going to do with the new airship?”

“Everything but that,” confessed Stewart. “No one in the factory seems to know. But it seems to me that they’ll certainly use it first to cut down the time on that New York-Chicago airship line. Four or five hours to Chicago would be quite a card.”

“Why not fifteen hours across the Atlantic?” asked Mr. Latimer with a significant twinkle in his eyes.

“You’re right,” exclaimed Stewart. “I hadn’t thought of that. Say, that’s great; first airship across the ocean. Sure! They can do it. That’s the idea. That’s my ‘lead’—”

The night city editor raised his hand.

“Don’t bother about the ‘lead.’ Do what I told you: write what you saw and a description of the machine. And you might start right away if you like.”

Stewart, coat off and pipe going, was just well into his story when Chambers reported from Governor’s Island. He had seen Colonel Grant.

“But,” explained the reporter to Mr. Latimer over the telephone, “he said it was too late to talk to-night. He’s offered to prepare a statement for me to-morrow.”

“What did he say to-night?” snapped the night city editor.

“Well, he said America ought to be proud of its advance in aeronautics; that there were great possibilities in aerial navigation—”

“Yes,” broke in Mr. Latimer, “but did you think to mention what I told you to ask him? What military prestige it would give a country to own the first aeroplane that could fly two hundred miles an hour?”

“Yes, sir,” was the prompt answer, “but he said he’d rather not be quoted on that.”

“What was it?”

“He said he rather thought it might give prestige to any one of the great nations and that if America had such a ship that it ought to keep it and not let some European government snap it up. He said, as a nation, he thought we were rather behind the other powers in the development of the airship in a military and naval way.”

“Did you promise not to quote him?”

“No, sir. But—”

“Glidden,” called Mr. Latimer to that young man, who had just returned, “here’s Chambers on the wire at Governor’s Island. He’s had a talk with Colonel Grant: hot stuff about neglect of government to develop airships for naval and military purposes: thinks our new aeroplane gives us balance of power among the big nations. Take it and get up a good story on it. Here’s Glidden, Chambers,” he continued, turning to the telephone again, “he’ll take your stuff.”

A moment later Glidden was at a desk and the waiting Chambers had been switched to him. With almost one movement the more experienced Glidden caught up the receiver and, with a piece of paper rescued from the floor and a stub of a pencil borrowed from a man next to him, was ready.

“Shoot it, Chambers,” was his salutation and the interview was under way.

Several pages of Stewart’s story had now reached Mr. Latimer’s desk. Before he gave it his attention, he took up Winton’s matter on the Airship Boys and glanced hurriedly through it. This apparently called for no comment and he passed it at once to Dick, the head copy reader.

“Here’s the first of that two-column story for the last edition. It’s the last ‘add.’ Use all of it. There’ll be a talk with Colonel Fred Grant to follow the main story.”

Dick shuffled the sheets together without a glance at the words on them, spiked the pages on a spindle, readjusted his pipe and raised his green eye shade.

“Who’s writin’ the story?” was his only response.

“Stewart,” said Mr. Latimer.

“A cub?” grunted Dick as he looked at the watch on the blotter before him. Then he jerked his head to show the contempt all old copy readers feel for inexperienced reporters. “It’s twelve thirty,” he added as a part of his groan.

“He may not be a cub after to-night,” was Mr. Latimer’s tart rejoinder as he at last tackled Stewart’s copy.

“At ten twenty o’clock last night,” Stewart’s story began, “an airship that is undoubtedly destined to make the first flight across the Atlantic ocean, was given a secret test from the yards of the American Aeroplane Company’s plant in South Newark.

“That the experimental flight was successful in every way is attested by the fact that this newest and most complete aeroplane was in the air twenty-five minutes and attained a speed of between 180 and 200 miles an hour. The flight was cloaked in mystery and the only spectators were the inventors and owners of the airship, the superintendent and the president of the Aeroplane Company and a reporter for the _Herald_.

“While every effort has been made to keep any intelligence of the new marvel from reaching the public at the present time, the record breaking test made last night was observed and timed. This mechanical, sky-piercing meteor was driven by man thirty or forty miles out to sea and, concealed by the shadows of night, it returned successfully and unseen directly over the skyscrapers of New York.”

Without reading further Mr. Latimer reached for a pad of copy paper, a pencil and his shears. In a few minutes Stewart’s carefully prepared story had been transformed by scissors, paste pot, interlineations and new lines into this:

“This mechanical sky-piercing meteor last night set what may be the ultimate record for man’s aerial flight. Three miles in sixty seconds or one hundred and eighty miles an hour, is the last proof of man’s complete conquest of the air. With London but fifteen hours from New York, the crossing of the Atlantic is assured. And, in the language of Colonel Fred Grant, ‘this assures the superiority of the United States as a naval power.’

“This new marvel was given its initial test last night. At ten twenty o’clock the airship that is destined to revolutionize aeronautics, rose mysteriously from the yards of the American Aeroplane Company’s plant in South Newark. Within the next twenty-five minutes it had darted forty miles straight out to sea and then, concealed by the shadows of night, returned successfully and unseen, directly over the sleeping skyscrapers of lower New York.

“This historic flight, cloaked in darkness, was made with no spectators other than the inventors and owners of the airship, the superintendent and the president of the aeroplane works and a reporter for the _Herald_. While every effort had been made to keep intelligence of the wonderful invention from the public at the present time, an account of the secret test as well as a complete description of the aeroplane itself, is given herewith in detail.”

By the time the copy boy had laid Stewart’s next batch of copy on the night city editor’s desk Mr. Latimer had passed all of the first “take,” marked “lead to come,” over to Dick, the head copy reader, and the big aeroplane “beat” was on its way into print. Few changes were made in the rest of Stewart’s story. Having finished his first few pages and reached the real narrative, he wrote rapidly and easily.

The inexperienced young reporter had done his work well. For several days he had been in the service of the Aeroplane Company as a common workman in the yards. In that time, with his eyes open and by skillful questioning, he had succeeded in striking up an acquaintance with one of the skilled enginemen working on the new car. From this man he had wormed the general details of the aircraft and learned that a test of the completed aeroplane was to be made.

These things were not told in his story but he did describe graphically and in a way that made Mr. Latimer nod his head in approval, everything to be seen by the eye from the time the great tandem-planed sky vehicle was rolled out into the yard and lifted itself cloudward until it sank in the same spot again twenty-five minutes later.

When those pages of his story reached the desk Mr. Latimer rose and hurried to the busy writer’s side.

“How did you know they were going to pull this off to-night?” he asked.

“I didn’t. But I guessed it would be at night. I meant to watch each night—”

“Where were you?”

“On the roof.”

“You’re doing very well. Good stuff,” was his superior’s comment. “Get it in a column.”

There wasn’t a great deal that the young reporter could write of the actual flight. The ship-like structure had been wheeled out of the gloom of the canvas-sided setting-up room into the yellow glare of half a dozen yard torches. It rumbled heavily—more like a heavy truck than the flimsy airships Stewart had seen. Then, for some minutes, several persons had passed back and forth by means of a step ladder into an enclosed part of the great, metallic-glinting structure. From the lights that flared up and died out in the big torches he knew that his first night’s vigil was to be rewarded with something.

“At ten fifteen o’clock,” he described in his story, “only a vast expanse of metal, cables and truss could be seen vaguely as those busy about the towering superstructure moved a torch or climbed into or out of the mammoth enclosed frame. Just before ten twenty o’clock an engine started suddenly somewhere within the ship-like body of the winged wonder. A little later, a brief burst of light within the central enclosure threw into sudden view two rows of flashing portholes. Like the bow of a miniature ocean steamer, the front of the shadowy structure stood, for a moment, clearly defined in the night.

“Halfway up the side of the vessel extended a railing-protected gallery that indicated two decks. Along the lower of these ran a second gallery. The forward part of the upper deck was plainly a pilot house, from the rounded front of which, through two small heavily glassed openings, shot antennaelike feelers of light into the black factory yard. Behind this section the skeletonlike gallery led astern along what were apparently three more rooms. Passing these, the gallery ascended the rounded side of the giant car and disappeared sternward in the form of a protected path or bridge. The front of the lower deck resembled the dark hold of a freight vessel. In the rear, a door opening from this gallery revealed, through a glare of light, an engine room, now the center of much activity.

“Herein two young men hung over a puzzle of levers, wheels and valves while a third was just climbing into the gallery by means of a drop ladder or landing stage.

“‘What’s the use of all this illumination?’ called the young man just mounting the machine. ‘Why not send out cards?’ he added, laughing.

“One of the boys in the engine room stuck his head outside, glanced about and chuckled. As he disappeared within again, there was a snap and the lights outlining the air machine turned black. Then came the renewed sound of feet hurrying back and forth on metal runways; doors opened and closed and, where deck lights had flooded the strange craft, only the thin rays of electric hand torches indicated persons moving about. One of several men on the ground below now made his way up the ladder to the landing stage and by this to the lower deck gallery, where two of the moving lights were suddenly focussed. Words passed in low tones and, in a few moments, the glow of a green-shaded light appeared through the suddenly reopened door of the pilot house.

“Almost at the same time, but from the distant offices of the aeroplane factory, broke out the staccato of a wireless sender in operation. Those on the lower gallery waited in silence until a voice called from the pilot house:

“‘All right, Ned; fine and dandy; the operator says _success and speed_.’

“‘Good,’ was the quick response. ‘Come on down, Bob; we’re off.’

“As the light in the pilot cabin winked out, the same voice continued, ‘Good-bye, Mr. Osborne. We’ll be back in half an hour. Stay by the wireless. We’ll keep in touch with you every few minutes.’ ‘Good-bye,’ called another voice and then the man who had just mounted the landing ladder made his way quickly to the ground.”

When Stewart’s account of the aeroplane test had reached this point, Dick, the copy reader, shuffled the pages of the last “take” like a deck of cards and snorted.

“This is fine,” he said, with a despairing look, addressing Mr. Latimer, “but I thought he was goin’ to tell something. Here’s six hundred words and he hasn’t got anywhere yet—”

“Let it stand,” was Mr. Latimer’s snappy order. “It’s good stuff.”

“Simultaneously,” continued Stewart’s story, “the sound of the engine in operation deepened into an almost inaudible note. Then this was doubled as if a second power had been put in operation. A shaded light shone in the engine room and the pilot house door opened and closed. There was the _tap-tap_ of swift footsteps on the lower gallery, one of those aboard sprang up the steps to the top gallery and then a light flashed at intervals along the ladderlike runway on the rear truss. Some one was inspecting the shadowy bridge.

“Far in the rear the hurrying figure dropped through what seemed a small manhole in the truss frame. Half within the tapering, spiderlike construction the person appeared to press a button. There was a sharp buzz in the pilot cabin. Then the figure with the light ran swiftly forward inside the hollow frame of the tail of the airship and disappeared through a self-closing door into the engine cabin.

“Two powerful engines were apparently in full operation. There was the sound of a quick voice in the engine room as if someone were shouting through a tube.

“‘All ready here and astern, Ned,’ could be distinguished. Then, at the resonant single tap of a gong in reply, powerful clutches must have been instantly applied. The aeroplane’s propellers began their wide sweep. Faster and faster they moved, until, as the closed engine room door opened once more and one of the young men passed out onto the gallery, the wide-reaching metal bird suddenly sprang forward. But it was only for a short distance. Within fifty feet, it lifted in the air and, once off the ground, its bow darted skyward like the beak of a frightened bird.

“‘Don’t forget your lights!’ yelled the figure on the gallery as the airship swept upward, ‘and keep the wireless goin’.’ While he was speaking the swift propellers had already carried the car beyond hearing.”

Chapter III

The Veteran Takes Off His Hat To The Cub

The rest of reporter Stewart’s story of the mysterious airship flight, together with his elaborate account of the construction of the aeroplane as it had been described to him, ran much over a column. Old Dick, the copy reader, groaned and even Mr. Latimer began to wonder how he was to get his “beat” into two columns without “killing” Chamber’s “talk” with Colonel Grant, Winton’s account of the Airship Boys or Glidden’s “lead.”

The latter Mr. Latimer had already thrown out conditionally but he was determined to use the interview and the account of the earlier adventures of the daring boys. There could be only one solution of the difficulty: he must have more space if he had to choke it out of the night editor. Meanwhile, he began to put some pressure on the wordy reporter.

“It’s good stuff, old man,” he said to the perspiring reporter as the latter pounded his typewriter, “but you know this isn’t a magazine and other things have happened to-night.”

Stewart was only a beginner. As yet he knew only a part of a reporter’s trade. He could write but he hadn’t learned how to tell it in a “stick.” The editorial admonition fell on him with little effect. He seemed unable to omit any detail. Page after page came from his machine to tell how for twenty-five minutes the four or five men in the Aeroplane Company yards waited for the return of the flying car.

He told how a movable searchlight was stationed at the landing place and how the watchers then betook themselves to the wireless office of the works. With good judgment he refrained from telling how he concealed himself just without an open window, and one reading his narrative might conclude that the prying reporter was a guest of the watchful group.

Some of the messages from the moving aeroplane he heard and of these he told. Most of them he missed, as his vantage point was somewhat removed. He could tell that the busy wireless operator was in almost constant communication with “Bob” on the airship. But the most important message he did hear, because when it came the excited operator repeated it as if reading a bulletin to anxious thousands.

“_On board Ocean Flyer_,” he read, “_10.24 P. M. Estimate forty miles from Newark at sea. Big steamer beneath. Turning. Better time returning. Look out. Bob Russell._”

It required but a moment’s calculation when he heard this to make Stewart gasp with amazement. At that rate the _Ocean Flyer_ was doing one hundred and eighty miles an hour. Not even this speed had been predicted by his talkative fellow workman. And at this rate he knew that the marvelous airship might be expected in the Aeroplane Company yards again by ten forty-five o’clock.

The reporter made his plans at once. He knew that it was both futile and inadvisable, if he was to attempt to score his news “beat,” to wait in an attempt to interview either the Airship Boys on the aeroplane or to get more exact particulars from the Aeroplane Company officials. Therefore, making his way out of the yards, he hurried along switch tracks until he was in the vicinity of the street car terminal.

With watch in hand, he waited in the suburban stillness and gloom while he searched the eastern sky. He knew the _Ocean Flyer_ carried no outside signal yet he hoped for a possible glimpse of the shaded green pilot or engine room light. More than once he fancied he could hear the peculiar low note of the big craft’s engines. And all the time he kept an eye on the vertical shaft of the searchlight at the works, for by this beacon he knew the returning craft must guide itself to a safe landing. But neither sound nor returning light could he detect. When it was exactly a quarter of eleven o’clock he began to regret his attempt to save time and was debating the advisability of returning to the plant. In doubt, he was aware suddenly of a new note in the hum of the mosquitoes and other marsh things about him. Was it mosquitoes or was it the hum of the unseen airship? The sound ceased suddenly. Almost immediately the shaft of the warning searchlight swept earthward and disappeared.

Instinctively the nervous reporter glanced at his watch. It was a few seconds of ten forty-six. A trolley car was just starting. With a gulp of exultation the happy Stewart dashed forward and flipped the car. He knew that the _Ocean Flyer_ had made a successful flight and had safely returned. He knew also the distance it had traveled and the time it had taken to do it. His only object was now to call his office by telephone and deliver the story. All these details his rapidly written copy told later, omitting the personal part. When it was complete a column of matter was on Mr. Latimer’s desk.

As Stewart noticed the number of his last page and realized how much he had written, he paused aghast. The bigger part of his story was yet to come—all the details of the ingenious creation remained to be written. Frightened by his failure to obey orders he hastened to Mr. Latimer’s desk. Here, three tired and nervous men, with the marks of a night’s grinding work on their faces and linen—unlit pipes or half consumed, fireless cigars gripped in their set teeth—were gathered in sullen debate.

“There’s two columns of it now and more to come,” the night editor was saying decisively. “We can’t give you another inch.”

Mr. Latimer saw Stewart approaching.

“How much more of that story is there?” he asked appealingly.

“A column, I think.”

The night city editor sighed and the telegraph editor laughed sarcastically.

“Any one who can see three columns in an airship story to-day must have forgotten they’re already back numbers,” exclaimed this executive.

“Lift a column of cable rot,” suggested the night city editor. “This can’t be cut; it’s a big story and it’s a ‘beat’.”

“Give him the paper,” went on the telegraph editor wearily.

“You’ll have to get along with two columns,” answered the night editor, “unless you think the paper is elastic or that we ought to have another page.”

Mr. Latimer slapped the desk with the last “take” of Stewart’s copy.

“You fellows don’t know news when you see it. What does the average reader care about English elections and French champagne riots? Every man and boy in the United States is interested in aeroplanes. And this story tells about the final thing in airships. It’ll be read all over the world to-morrow. It’s big, I tell you, and worth a page—”

“That’s what they all say,” sneered the telegraph editor.

“And I’m goin’ to print it all—every word of it—if I have to take it up to the old man himself.”

“That’s your cue,” broke in the night editor as he excitedly attempted to relight his dead cigar. “That’s where you’ll have to go. You don’t get but two columns from me.”

“It’s twenty minutes after one o’clock,” remarked a sour voice from the near-by copy reader’s desk. “If there’s any more of that Newark stuff you’d better hump it along.”

Without replying, the night city editor tossed old Dick the last of Stewart’s story describing the departure and return of the Airship Boys’ newest wonder and then arose with fire in his eyes.

“Give me all you can write up to two fifteen,” he snapped to Stewart, “and—” Just then his telephone rang.

“Yes,” he answered in a tired voice while the telegraph and night editors yet lingered by his desk. “Nathan? You seem to have taken plenty of time for your supper. Well? Oh, they did. All right. You don’t know where they are stopping? Good-bye.” Then he arose and glared once more at his nightly enemies—the telegraph and night editors. “Winton,” he called sharply to that reporter, who was sitting near by with his feet on a table. “These Airship Boys left Newark on the express just after Stewart. Nathan says they’re in town. Take a flyer through the hotels. Land ’em if possible. Make ’em talk. Phone me if you locate them.”

“’S that mean more of this flyin’ machine stuff?” grunted the head copy reader.

“It means I’m attending to my own business,” retorted Mr. Latimer, and with no further word or look for his office associates, he walked hurriedly toward the door. As the sailor “goes to the mast” or to the captain of the ship in a last appeal against unfairness or injustice, Mr. Latimer was on his way to the “old man” or the managing editor on his customary protest against the machinations of the night editor. Stewart hastened to his typewriter and resumed his tale of the aeroplane.

“The problem of how to build an aeroplane large enough to carry passengers hundreds of miles—possibly across the Atlantic—and at the same time develop speed enough to hold its own against storms, seemed unsolvable until two discoveries were made last winter. Both of these are now well known to scientists and both are unknown as yet to the layman. It was the almost simultaneous discovery of the new metal magnalium (due to the development of the electric converter by the steel works in Chicago) and a final determination of the law of the propeller by Professor Montgomery of California.

“With this new magnalium it is at last possible to make an all-metal car with light but rigid wings or planes. This metal, a magnesium alloy with copper and standard vanadium or chrome steel, at once assumed a new place in metals.” (These facts Stewart had secured from a German metallurgical quarterly in the Newark Public Library.) “Magnalium is not only extremely light but it has a molecular cohesion never before attained. Its peculiar toughness gives it a capacity for being worked slowly that is ideal for aeroplane uses. It turns the edge of the hardest chisel driven against it, yet the same drill, under slow pressure, will cleave it almost as easily as aluminum.”

Marking this much of his new story “more,” to indicate to the copy readers that more was to come, and heading his next page “Add 1 Description Aeroplane,” Stewart rushed the prepared “take” of copy to the city editor’s desk and continued:

“It is from this new metal that the car, planes and truss of the _Ocean Flyer_ are constructed. The aeroplane is modeled in general after the body and wings of a gull in full flight, insuring, by its peculiar construction, not only the greatest speed, but, by an ingenious adaptation of the same gull’s wing, the automatic stability long striven for by aeroplane builders.”

[Illustration:

In The “Local Room” Of The New York Herald. ]

“Three sets of follow or tandem planes project, with slight dihedral angles, for from eighty to forty feet on each side of the body of the craft, a wing width never before attained. Yet, in flight, the enormous craft is readily held aloft, with all its load, by wings that are no more than seven and one-half feet in chord—from front to trailing edge. Although it will be incomprehensible to many how such small lifting surface can elevate such a heavy structure, this becomes apparent when the airship is seen at rest. The moment the air pressure due to rapid flight is lessened to a certain point by descent or cessation of motion, the narrow wing surfaces automatically spread till they are twenty-one feet from front to back.”

Glidden, the only airship man in the office, who covered all the aviation “stunts,” had long since finished his interview and was now lounging on the desk next to Stewart’s.

“Great!” was his comment, as he read this part of the story page by page. “Some one is strong with the Jules Verne stuff. Go to it, kid.”

The busy Stewart scarcely heard him.

“This was accomplished,” went on the young reporter, shouting for a copy boy and hustling to the desk another section of the story that was destined never to be printed, “in a simple manner. Near the leading edge of each wing is installed one of the new German pressure gauges with small openings just under the dipping edge. These small appliances, of compact construction, are easily concealed in the depth of the wing. Ordinarily these powerful gauges operate a needle to record pressure. Those used on the planes of the _Ocean Flyer_ are made on a heavier scale and operate directly on a spring drum. From these, light cables extend to movable sections of the wings.

“These movable sections of the planes, the first unique feature of the new airship, telescope within and without the standard sections of the wings. By means of the gauge and spring drums they are extended automatically when the machine is not in swift flight. When the craft has made an ascent and attained a speed sufficient to create a vacuum under the dipping or front edge of the planes, the suction or reverse pressure on the gauges allows the drums to reel in the extension surfaces. When in full motion, as these come in, speed is naturally increased and all the extensions are housed securely beneath or over the main section of the wing.”

“How about the wing trusses?” broke in the skeptical Glidden.

“Corrugated rigidity,” replied Stewart promptly, remembering the phrase he had heard applied to the long, untrussed wings.

“The first section or extension,” his story continued, “running in its grooves, so closely overlaps the outside of the main section as to appear to be its proper covering. The rear section, with separate leaves, like the feathers of a bird’s wing, likewise disappears, leaving only the long narrow wing which has always been the ideal speed machine.

“To drive this huge craft, whose body consists of two stories or decks with pilot house, staterooms, fuel chambers, engine room, bridges above and protective galleries, a much higher percentage of motor power than ever secured before had to be turned into propulsive energy. The waste, or ‘slip’ of the ordinary propellers not only allowed a great deal of the motor’s power to escape, but it applied the remaining power so far from the shaft of the propeller that the resultant leverage greatly reduced the actual thrust.” (As Stewart finished this sentence, after several pauses and corrections, he turned the page over to Glidden with some pride. Then he paused while the older reporter read it.)

“Is that right?” asked Stewart with a curious smile.

“Absolutely,” answered Glidden. “What’s next?”

Stewart’s typewriter began clicking again.

“The new French ‘moon propeller’ does away with this ‘slip’ and allows the full power of the engine to be applied advantageously. Viewed sidewise this new form of propeller looks exactly like the new moon, its tips bending ahead of its shaft attachment. Its object is to gather the air at the outside of the circle,—”

“Periphery,” suggested Glidden, who was reading over the writer’s shoulder. Stewart made the change and continued: “compress it in accelerating degrees as it is forced toward the shaft and there, at the broad, ugly-looking middle section of the blade, exert the full force of the motor on the compressed air. The result is to increase the efficiency of the engine by two hundred and fifty per cent. The massive, eleven-foot propellers, with a section five feet broad at the center, give opportunity for the application of this great force.”

“How about the engine?” exclaimed Glidden as this paragraph was finished. His smile of skepticism was not as marked now.

“This force,” continued the younger man, “is secured by a chemical engine in which dehydrated sulphuric ether and gasoline or either may be used. Since the experiments with sulphuric ether, made last fall, engine makers have watched the rapid development of this form of engine with the greatest interest. Magnalium cylinders, sustaining the shock of the tremendous explosions as the cylinders revolve past the exploding chamber, have developed a power previously only dreamed of. Each of the two huge engines used on the _Ocean Flyer_ is six feet in diameter with four explosion chambers cooled by fans which feed liquid ammonia to the cylinder walls in a spray and then furnish power for its liquefaction again. In form, each engine is a great wheel or turbine on the rim of which is a succession of conical pockets or cylinders. These are presented to the explosion chambers, receive the impact of the explosion and then, running through an expanding groove, allow the charge to continue expanding and applying power till the groove ends in an open slot which instantly cleanses the cylinders or pockets of the burnt gases. By this arrangement there is only a twentieth part of the engine wheel where no power is being imparted, thus giving practically a continuous torque.”

“How’s ‘torque’?” laughed Stewart as he inserted a fresh sheet of paper in the typewriter.

“Torque,” responded Glidden without even a smile, “is exceedingly good. As to the rest of your mechanical details all I can say is I take off my hat to you and whoever handed you this. It is exceedingly warm.”

“The joke of it all,” commented the other reporter, who was not without his own sense of humor, “is that these absurdities all happen to be practicalities. There’s a little more.”

“Weighing 520 pounds each,” continued Stewart, “and with a speed of 1,500 revolutions a minute, these big turbines generate 972 horsepower, natural brake test, and this may be raised to above a thousand horsepower without danger. Revolving in opposite directions they do away with dangerous gyroscopic action. Power is applied to the propellers by magnalium gearing. These are geared up, instead of down, as has always been the practice, and the new ‘moon propellers’ gain in thrust with high speed instead of losing it. This is because of greater compression of the air and a vacuum set up ahead of the blades by reason of their high speed. The car itself—”

At this moment—now after two o’clock—Mr. Latimer suddenly appeared at Stewart’s side.

“Needn’t write any more,” he said sharply. “The story isn’t going to be printed. The managing editor wants to see you at once.”

Chapter IV

The Airship Boys Make Their Appearance

To be ordered to the office of the managing editor in this summary manner at half-past two o’clock in the morning was enough to set an older reporter than Buck Stewart guessing—Buck because his given name was Buckingham. Buck’s first thought was that he would now be asked to explain why he had persisted in expanding a column story into twice that space. Somewhat to his gratification Mr. Latimer escorted him to the office of the head of the paper.

The young reporter had never even seen his distantly removed superior. He had heard that the august editor looked like a preacher. He knew that the “boss” was one of the greatest journalists in the world. Then, instead of speculating on the cause for his summons, he began to wonder how the “M. E.” happened to be in his office at that late hour. The real reason was that the editor had entertained friends at the theatre and lingered long at the supper after. But in Buck’s mind, it could only be because the books on “How to be a Journalist” all said the real newspaper man is always at the right place in a news crisis.

Without a question to his guide, the young newspaper man deferentially followed Mr. Latimer down the long, half-lit hall, through the ground glass door into the anteroom where, in the day time, a colored Cerebus sat in state, and thence into the not over-large room of the director of the great paper. The managing editor, in evening clothes and a crumpled shirt, was slowly exhaling the smoke of a cigar while he examined a large wall map of America and Europe—tracing with a long, white finger a curved red line that marked some steamer course. On the approach of Mr. Latimer and Stewart, the editor turned, motioned Buck to a chair and seated himself in the one at his own desk. There was no introduction. The night city editor took a leaning position against a big table in silence.

“This is Mr. Stewart, I believe,” the managing editor began with a smile as he leaned forward and nervously tore a strip of paper into bits. The smile rather increased Buck’s alarm. He was sure he was in for nothing but criticism and the smile made him fearful that this was to come in ironical words.

“Yes, sir.”

“You discovered this new aeroplane—wrote the story about it?”

“Mr. Latimer sent me out on it. I tried to write a story but I guess—”

“At least you know all about it?”

“I think so. Yes, sir. There are some things I couldn’t learn, but I found out considerable.”

“And it was made by the young men they call the Airship Boys?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you think any one else knows what took place to-night?”

“I’m sure no one does.”

“Or the details of the new airship; the nature of it and what it can do?”

“They seem to be trying to conceal everything. I think no outsiders knew anything about it.”

“And this machine can travel at the rate of one hundred and eighty miles an hour?”

“It did it to-night and kept it up for twenty-five minutes.”

Buck’s questioner leaned back in his chair and gave Mr. Latimer a peculiar look. He seemed about to speak to his assistant but turned toward young Stewart again, took a long, reflective puff on his cigar and continued:

“Have you any reason to believe this machine could cross the Atlantic?”

“I think it could. I believe its makers think so. They call it the ‘_Ocean Flyer_.’”

What had been a smile on the editor’s face turned into straight, set lips. Again he turned to Mr. Latimer.

“These boys are somewhere in the city you say?”

“Newark says so,” was the night city editor’s prompt response as he slid from the table and took a step toward the desk. “Nathan says they came in from Newark on the midnight express. I’ve got a man out after them now.”

“Haven’t heard from him?”

Mr. Latimer stepped to his superior’s desk and took up the telephone.

“See if Winton is back yet,” he asked sharply.

“Mr. Winton called a few minutes ago,” was the instant response from one of the switchboard operators. “He says them parties is at the Breslin but he ain’t seen ’em yet. He wants as you shall call the Breslin what he shall do.”

Mr. Latimer turned to the head editor, the telephone yet in his hand:

“Yes, sir; they are at the Breslin. Our man hasn’t seen them. They’ve probably turned him down.”

The managing editor thought a moment, in which interval of silence he relit his cigar and then nodded an approval.

“That’s all,” answered the night city editor to the operator, “no message now.” And he replaced the receiver. Mr. Latimer’s attitude seemed to indicate that he knew something important was about to happen. Buck, himself—only temporarily relieved that the storm had not yet broken on him—also cudgeled his brain to account for his interrogation.

“You’ve stopped the story?” continued the managing editor at last.

“Yes, sir,” answered Mr. Latimer ruefully, “although most of it is in type. It was a beat.”

“I understand,” said the editor instantly and in a consoling tone. “Perhaps we can get a bigger beat.” He began tearing another bit of paper. Then throwing the pieces suddenly from him, he sat upright, grasped the arms of his chair and said to Latimer:

“I must see these boys to-night—at once if possible. Can you bring them to me? To this office?”

“Certainly,” replied the night city editor without a falter or a doubt in his voice. “I’ll go myself.”

“Get them if you can; it is important.”

Without a question Mr. Latimer hastened doorward. Stewart arose to follow him. The managing editor waved Buck to his seat again.

“I want you to tell me the story you wrote to-night: all you know about this new airship.”

Buck now made up his mind that, whatever might be the meaning of the managing editor’s sudden interest in his aeroplane story, it was not directed toward him personally either in the way of commendation or criticism. Something had developed the possibility of a bigger “beat,” the manager had suggested. As the reporter received the order to tell the whole story he reseated himself. He also had a new thought: “This means something good,” he said to himself, “and while I’m talking I’m not goin’ to forget Buck Stewart. If something is to come out of this I want to be in on it.”

Before he could begin his story his chief executive resumed, suddenly:

“These Airship Boys—did you see them?”

“No,” replied the reporter. “I was totin’ lumber in the yards—”

“You are from the south?” interrupted his listener.

“Kentucky,” answered Buck.

“How long have you been with the _Herald_?”

“Six months.”

“You are about twenty-one years old?”

“Twenty in the fall.”

“How did you get your job?”

“I worked on the Paducah _News-Democrat_ until I had money enough to get to New York. Then I came here and asked for work. They put me on.”

“Right away?” went on the managing editor with an incredulous smile.

“No, not at once. I think it was after two weeks.” Buck became a little embarrassed and shifted his position. “At first the city editor told me there wasn’t any chance; that he couldn’t even try me out until I’d had some city experience. I told him news was news, whether it was in the ‘tenderloin’ or in Paducah. But he didn’t seem to hear me. Then I found out when the city editor came to work and I showed up at the same time each day for two weeks. He was pleasant enough for a few days. Then he began to look bored. At last he used to scowl at me.”

“Then what?” laughed the editor softly.

“Well, one day he seemed more out of sorts. He looked as if he had a notion to kick me. Then he groaned and said ‘report to Mr. Latimer to-night and keep out of my sight.’ I haven’t seen him but two or three times since.”

The editor seemed to chuckle but Buck could not be sure. Then the manager returned to the Airship Boys after a few moments of silence.

“What do you know about these young men, the Airship Boys?”

“Only what I’ve read,” was Buck’s answer. “They’ve been in the papers for several years. They are from Chicago.” Then he recalled Winton’s assignment—the sketch this reporter had made of the young aviators to be used in the now abandoned story. “There’s a story of them in proof by this time, I think,” he added. “Mr. Winton wrote it to use in the morning.”

“Get it for me, if you will,” said the editor. “And the proof of any other matter on this story that has been set.”

In a few minutes Buck was back with a handful of Mr. Latimer’s proofs. As he passed through the big local room he noted that it was two thirty-five o’clock. The managing editor was lighting a fresh cigar when he returned and was again on his feet intently examining the big wall map, the principal part of which seemed to be the Atlantic Ocean.

“Ever been abroad, Mr.—Mr.—?” was the editor’s rather irrelevant greeting to Buck as he reentered the room.

“Yes, sir, to England,” was the reporter’s response. Buck did not bother about reminding the great journalist that his name was Stewart. His questioner, whose head was twisted sideways as if he were trying to make out the printed words or figures on the scores of steamer routes, looked up in surprise. “My grandfather lives in London. I’ve been there twice with my mother. When I was fifteen I rode a wheel from Liverpool to London. We spent a summer there.”

The managing editor looked Buck over as if making an inventory of him.

“Is your story in proof?” he asked at last as he returned to his desk and picked up some of the proofs.

Buck, standing by the editor’s side, began nervously to look over the galley slips. Some were yet damp. The more experienced eyes of the older man detected Winton’s story of the Airship Boys. Extracting it from the bundle he passed the other slips back to the reporter and gave his own attention to Winton’s “insert.”

“The Airship Boys,” the story began, “now known everywhere in America, are not unknown in Europe. Ned Napier and Alan Hope, who first attracted attention under this pseudonym, are Chicago products. Robert Russell, who, from constant association with Napier and Hope, is now generally reckoned as the third of the trio who have gained fame under that title, is the oldest of the three and hails from Kansas City, where for some time he was a reporter on the _Comet_.

“The greatest achievement of Napier, Hope and Russell was the creation, elaboration and institution of a system of aerial navigation which resulted in the present Chicago-New York air line.”

“I see that one of these young men, Russell, is a newspaper man,” commented the editor, lifting his tortoise-shell nose glasses inquiringly.

“Yes, sir,” answered Buck, “and a good one, I guess. Winton knows him. Met him in New York last summer when Russell and Napier and Hope were here floating the New York-Chicago airship line—the Universal Transportation Company. You remember the ‘Flying Cow’ mystery, sir?”

“And these are the youngsters?” exclaimed the editor with new illumination, replacing his glasses and resuming his reading.

“Napier,” Winton’s account continued, “is the son of a Chicago lawyer—now dead—who was an amateur aeronaut. The father became interested in dirigible balloons about four years ago and contracted to make one for an amusement park. The father dying before the completion of the contract, his son Ned assumed it, finished the craft and then undertook to operate the balloon. Through a series of adventures he attracted the public eye and his career began.

“Early in the following year Napier and a chum, Alan Hope—a lad of mathematical turn—were employed by an ex-army officer, Major Baldwin Honeywell, to construct a large balloon—one capable of a five-day flight—for the purpose of locating a hidden Aztec temple in Navajo land in Arizona. In this adventure Robert Russell, then representing the Kansas City _Comet_, joined the boys and when the details of this highly interesting, novel and profitable project reached the public the title of the ‘Airship Boys’ was coined by the newspapers.

“It was in this flight over the mountains and desert that liquefied hydrogen was used for inflation purposes, probably for the first time. Although the big balloon used at this time was left in the mountains it was rescued later by a second expedition organized in the same year. At this time young Napier and Hope encountered one of their most marvelous adventures. While they were attempting to ascend from one of the mesas of Navajo land, their balloon was caught in an aerial maelstrom, swept westward to the Pacific Ocean and finally wrecked on a water-logged derelict lumber vessel. On this, within ten days, the young aeronauts turned aviators by constructing an aeroplane out of the remnants of the car of their dirigible balloon.”

Buck had what proofs he could find of his story and stood waiting but the managing editor leaned a little further toward his desk light and continued to read.

“Escaping from the abandoned wreck, the improvised aeroplane made a three hundred mile flight to land and came down in the highlands of Mexico where the daring aviators added further flavor to their novel experiences by rescuing a blind man, long a prisoner among an unknown tribe of Mexican Indians, and preventing his immolation as a human sacrifice on the summit of a prehistoric pyramid.”

The absorbed editor paused and, without lowering the slip he was reading, glanced at Buck over the top of his glasses.

“Are you familiar with the story of how these boys made an aeroplane on a wrecked vessel in the Pacific?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” responded Stewart. “It has been told in the newspapers. There are several books about it and other adventures of these young men.”

“I wish,” continued the editor, “if you know the titles of them, that you would step into some book shop to-morrow and have all of them sent to me.” Then he resumed his reading.

“In the summer of the following year the Airship Boys, including young Russell, the reporter, sailed from San Francisco on a novel Arctic trip. One of the backers of this expedition was Major Honeywell and another was J. W. Osborne, of Boston, a millionaire manufacturer interested in copper mines in North British America. For traveling over the ice a dirigible balloon was carried along. The car of this was a practical aeroplane and ice yacht. This little-heralded dash to the north is said to have reached to within a few miles of the pole. The return was made by way of northern British America where the aeroplane part of the aeronautic outfit was used to discover a marvelous copper mine on an uncharted island in Coronation Gulf.

“Out of their interest in this mine and the profits of their previous flights, the Airship Boys were able to take up the study of scientific aeronautics. This resulted in several marvelous inventions, including the ‘rocket’ engine of ‘Flying Cow’ fame and the subsequent organization last summer of the Universal Transportation Company which was underwritten by J. P. Morgan & Co. Little has been heard of the celebrated aviators since then. That they have not been idle the above story attests.”

When the managing editor finished the galley proof of this brief account of Ned Napier and his chums, he removed his glasses, lighted his cigar once more, reached out his hand for Buck’s story and then laid it on his desk.

“Tell it to me yourself, briefly,” was his order.

“If you ever read what I wrote,” began Stewart attempting to conceal some chagrin, “the ‘lead’ isn’t mine. I guess it was rotten. Some one rewrote it.”

The listener only nodded his head and waited, smoking slowly and swinging his glasses expectantly. Thereupon Buck began and, much better than he had written it, told the story of the new aeroplane: how he had secured work in the plant, ingratiated himself into the confidence of the workmen, used his eyes and ears and finally witnessed the night ascent. In the midst of his rapid narrative the telephone rang. The listening man responded, smiled, replied in approval and then returned to the graphic narrative. Toward the close of the description the editor arose. As Buck finished, the editor laid a hand on his shoulder in silence. Then, as if recalling the written story, he stepped to his desk, picked up the proof and gave it swift inspection. Without reading it all he turned to the young reporter.

“I don’t know what your wages are, my boy,” he said kindly, “but whatever they are, they are now doubled. It is probably the last time any of your copy will have to be rewritten. I am glad you are on the _Herald_. Good night.” He held out his hand. “Don’t think your unprinted story is wasted. I may want to see you to-morrow.”

As Buck, his cheeks aflame, shook hands there was the sound of footsteps in the next room.

“Thank you, sir,” Buck began. But he found no time to say more. The door was thrown open and Mr. Latimer and three young men entered the office. The sudden invasion threw the retiring reporter into the background. And yet, before he closed the door on himself, he paused a moment to observe the managing editor hastening toward his visitors.

“Mr. Napier, Mr. Hope and Mr. Russell,” announced Mr. Latimer in a tone that was not without a little pride.

“Clear the stage for the real stars—the Airship Boys,” said Buck to himself and closing the door, he hurried down the hall.

Chapter V

A Bewildering Proposition

There was no marked sign of cordiality in Ned Napier, Alan Hope and Bob Russell as chairs were brought from the anteroom and the Airship Boys were asked to seat themselves. It was three o’clock in the morning (the giant presses below were just starting on the big last edition of the paper) and the visitors were yet to be given an explanation of why they had been asked to get out of bed after but two hours asleep, and hurry by taxicab to the office of the _Herald_. Even their brief rest had been broken into by reporter Winton’s persistent telephone calls. Not even the just before dawn coolness of the streets had aroused the boys into daytime alertness.

“I am obliged to you, gentlemen,” said the managing editor after the conventional salutations. “I would have come to you myself, but the matter in hand is so new to me and so important that I am just now prepared to talk to you intelligently. What I want to discuss with you I had not heard of at one o’clock. I have been studying it ever since. I hope you will pardon me.”

Napier—just between boyhood and young manhood—spoke for the visitors. The slight frown on his face relaxed.

“We have no idea what this business can be,” he responded with a smile, “but of course it is no foolish errand. If we seem a little stupid please have patience with us. I’m hardly awake now.”

“Thank you,” responded the editor. Then he paused while he carefully scanned each member of the party. As if to gain further time in which to frame his ideas into words, he offered his cigar case. Only Bob Russell and Mr. Latimer accepted a cigar. In the interval of lighting these, Ned and Alan adjusted their disheveled clothing. In age, Alan was slightly older than his chum. Russell had just attained his majority. Each boy was typically Western. All were in comfortable light clothing and soft shirts, the former trim and natty enough originally no doubt but now somewhat sagging in the pockets because of note books, pencils, pens and folded papers.

Ned wore a new straw hat, Alan had thrown off a cap, and Bob’s hat, on the table, was a felt, light and soft after the Western style. A fresh spot of oil on Ned’s light coat seemed to annoy him, probably because of the formal and spotless attire of their host. The main differences between the boys were in their faces. Russell had the imperturbable, frank—even bold stare of the typical reporter, which was only lost when he smiled. Napier’s, boyish and yet intense, wore at times the soft look of a dreamer or poet. Hope, always alert and quizzical, had not even smiled as yet. Alan’s character was well indicated by Ned’s frequent phrase: “the boy wonder who has to be shown.”

The managing editor’s examination of the three young men did not seem to make his coming explanation any easier. “They were just three boys,” he explained later to a friend, “but I knew in a moment they were not ‘kids’ mentally.” While Ned coolly smoothed his hair the editor finally began.

“I may as well be frank as a preliminary. The _Herald_ is in full possession of the facts concerning what has taken place this evening.” Not a boy batted an eye.

“If you don’t mind,” said Ned in the pause that followed, “would you be a little more explicit?”

“I mean that a _Herald_ reporter watched the _Ocean Flyer_ leave the Aeroplane Company’s yards to-night and saw it return twenty-five minutes later. We are advised that it traveled forty miles seaward and returned safely at a rate of one hundred and eighty miles an hour. We have reasonably full details of the construction of your new airship and, I believe, exact accounts of its unique features—the triple tandem planes, their automatic adjustment, the new ‘moon propellers’ and the enormous turbine sulphuric ether engines.”

There was a silence following this speech that was dramatic. As if schooled for such emergencies not one of the three boys looked at the other. When the silence was broken it was by Ned.

“As you say, your information is reasonably correct.”

Another pause followed.

“I assume,” continued the editor, “that you recognize that these facts make a good newspaper story, particularly when they are known to one paper alone.”

The first response to this came from Bob Russell, the reporter. But it was not spoken. Recrossing his legs, he thrust his hands deep in his coat pockets and gazed determinedly toward the ceiling.

“And I assume,” spoke out Alan Hope at last, “that you did not call us here to tell us that.”

“Incidentally,” said the editor at once. “I may add that, despite the excellence of this story as a piece of news, the _Herald_ is not going to print it. Here,” he added picking up the bundle of proofs from his desk, “are the proofs of nearly three columns of matter telling this story. It is in type and ready for the press. The last edition of the _Herald_ is now on the street without a word of it.”

The surprise caused by this statement seemed almost as great as that caused by the editor’s first speech. Still the cautious boys gave no outward signs of deep concern.

“Perhaps I ought to return your frankness,” said Ned at last after it had become doubtful who would speak next. “When we entered your office I suspected just what you have told us. The young man who left it as we came in, I recognized. He is a skillful reporter. We thought we owned our new car and its ideas. At least we paid considerable money to develop them. We also had reasons of our own why the matter was not to be made public. The _Herald_ has been clever enough to get our story. I suppose we are helpless.”

The managing editor waved his hand as if this sort of irony was an old story to him.

“You don’t want the story printed?” he said laconically.

“We do not,” replied Ned in the same tone.

“We are _not_ printing it.”

Ned bowed his head as if to say: “Well, why not?”

“Let me be still franker and ask you: ‘Why do you object to the story being printed?’”

“Perhaps,” answered Ned, “if I may be equally candid, that is our business.”

The editor smiled unmoved.

“Are you not curious as to why I suppressed it? Why I did not see fit to print it?”

Not one of the boys, apparently, had taken this view of the situation. All, at once, felt a little abashed.

“I think I’ll have to ask your pardon. Of course you had a reason.”

“Purely selfish,” was the quick response of the manager. “Let me ask you one more question. Your secrecy suggests some particular plan or purpose. Do you care to tell me what that is?”

“It is a long-concealed secret,” explained Ned after a look at Alan and Bob. “I don’t see just why we should talk now!”

The head of the _Herald_ nodded as if in entire approval, leaned back in his chair for a moment and then, much as if it had been under discussion, remarked:

“At the speed you have secured and with the protected car the _Ocean Flyer_ carries, why don’t you cross the Atlantic?”

Ned eyed his questioner a moment and then, with a glance at his two chums, broke out laughing.

“And make good our name?” he asked, apparently glad to get into his usual vein of joviality.

“And make good your name,” repeated the editor.

“Perhaps we may,” went on Ned impulsively. “Now that you’ve betrayed me into that confession, whatever you do with your story of our new machine, I hope you’ll say nothing of this. That is our object.”

“To reassure you,” answered the editor, “I have only to tell you that I hope your secret will be the _Herald’s_.”

“What do you mean?” broke in Alan.

“You _can_ cross the Atlantic, you _ought_ to cross the Atlantic and I hope you _will_ cross the Atlantic—for the New York _Herald_.”

“For the _Herald_?” exclaimed Bob. “For a prize?”

The editor nodded his head.

“Not for a prize,” he replied soberly, “but on a news assignment—the biggest news ‘beat’ ever pulled off by a newspaper.”

The Airship Boys forgot the irritation of their abrupt summons, the chagrin over their stolen secret and all the languor the late hour had been working on them. With hurried glances at each other they faced the managing editor wonderingly. In the silence a book dropped from the table with a crash. Night city editor Latimer had fallen against it and stood with bulging eyes and mouth agape. Not until that moment did even he suspect the plans of his chief.

“A news assignment?” mumbled Ned finally.

“I don’t know how much thought you have given the possibilities before you,” answered the editor, “but I have thought very hard on the subject for an hour. As I understand it, your metal airship can maintain a speed of one hundred and eighty miles an hour for a protracted period. It is, in a direct great circle course, a little over three thousand miles from this city to London.”

“Which we could cover in seventeen hours,” boasted Alan.

“Precisely,” went on the editor. “In other words, for our purposes, you can cross over in twenty-two hours and come back in twelve hours or less.”

“Twelve hours or less?” exclaimed Mr. Latimer speaking for the first time.

“Certainly, in a way,” laughed Ned. “There is a difference in time you know of five hours coming west. We gain that. We’d be in the air seventeen hours actual time but by the clock not over twelve hours.”

“For instance,” interpolated the managing editor, “if the _Ocean Flyer_ left London at two o’clock in the afternoon and came to New York at the rate of one hundred and eighty miles an hour it would reach this city in seventeen hours. Allowing five hours for the difference in time, instead of reaching here at seven o’clock the next morning it would arrive when our clock hands were pointing to two o’clock.”

“In the same way,” explained Alan, “we would have to add five hours to our clock time going east. That is,” he added edging forward in his enthusiasm, “if we left New York at two o’clock in the afternoon, instead of reaching London seventeen hours later or at seven in the morning, the clocks would be striking noon when we got there. Oh, we’ve figured all that out many times.”

“That being true,” resumed the managing editor, “and this marvelous annihilation of space and time being at last a possibility, as I conceive it, I have decided that the _Herald_ ought to assist in announcing the fact to the world by giving a practical illustration of what may some day be a commonplace.”

“You mean the _Herald_ wants to share in the glory of our ocean flight if we make it?” asked Ned, his brows knitted.

“I do,” was the response. “You boys have the airship that can do this and I think you have the daring to try it. If you do it with no other purpose than to show that a flight across the Atlantic is a possibility, you will get for it glory and fame—both empty rewards. Cooperate with the _Herald_ and I will see that your success brings you not only fame but substantial pecuniary reward. The _Herald_ is prepared to pay you, not a _reasonable_ sum but an _extravagant_ reward.”

“What if we are satisfied with fame alone?” asked Ned.

“It will not be less because you act for the _Herald_.”

“What is there in it for your paper?” asked practical Alan.

“Let me finish my proposition,” continued the editor drawing his chair forward into the half-circle of alert boys. “By the way, the Ocean _Flyer_ is finished and ready for flight at any time, I take it?”

“Practically so,” answered Alan guardedly.

“This is Thursday, June 17. One week from to-day King George V will be crowned King of England. It will be a ceremony that will attract attention throughout the civilized and savage world. As a news story, it is an event to test the news-gathering ability of the greatest newspaper. The dramatic repetition, on a modern stage, of feudal forms and priestly rites, may never again be repeated. The _Herald’s_ best writers are already in London. Our photographers are now there to graphically illustrate the unique picture of royal pomp and power. It is the aim of the _Herald_ on this occasion, as on all others, to present a better story, a fresher narrative and more perfect pictures of this event than any other newspaper in the world.”

“Not counting the London _Times_?” suggested Bob as the editor paused.

“Not counting the London _Times_!” repeated the great journalist slowly and significantly. “And to-night I have decided that we can do this with the assistance of the Airship Boys and the _Ocean Flyer_.” The speaker now showed his first enthusiasm. As he gripped the arms of his chair he continued with precision. “I want the _Ocean Flyer_ to leave London at two o’clock on Coronation Day, June 22, and bring to the _Herald_ office in New York the best writers covering the coronation and the photograph films made of the royal procession and such other pictures of the actual coronation as our photographers may secure. I want these men and pictures delivered at the _Herald_ office or its vicinity by two o’clock the next morning. If you can and will do this you may name your own price.”

It would have been difficult to tell on whom this astounding proposition fell with the greatest surprise: the Airship Boys or Mr. Latimer, the night city editor. The latter’s immediate wonder seemed to turn almost at once into an envious admiration for the man who could conceive such a bewildering idea. In this, he was apparently joined by Bob Russell upon whose face there was a frank look of exhilarating amazement. Alan, elated but puzzled, turned slowly to Ned. The latter gazed at the author of the daring conception as if partly hypnotized.

“That is the reason I killed to-night’s story,” continued the editor in a low voice. “I could not take the chance that another newspaper might attempt to do the same thing. Only those in this room know what is possible. We can make this effort in secret. What you planned to do you _will_ do. What I propose will only add to the glory of your success.”

“It is not easy to give you an answer,” almost whispered Ned at last as he wetted his lips. “It upsets all our plans and we have had no time to consider it.”

“Do you want time for that?”

“It’s a tremendous thing to decide in a few minutes.”

“Is it the amount of compensation?” asked the elder man.

“I think that will not decide us.”

“What is it that makes you hesitate?”

“I hardly know. Alan,” said Ned turning to his chum, “you haven’t said anything.”

But Alan made no reply. Gazing at the floor, he sat as if lost in thought.

“You could carry these men; two writers and a photographer?” asked the editor.

“Oh, there’d be no trouble about that; that many and enough persons to operate the car. I think we could even give the photographer a dark room,” answered Ned. “What do you say, Bob?”

“I’m on from the start, if you put it up to me,” exclaimed Russell who had now wholly recovered his equanimity. “We could do it without turning a hair.”

Every one smiled, while Ned drew his chair closer to Alan’s.

“Let me add another detail,” resumed the editor. “On the day before the coronation the evening edition of the _Herald_ will print a special coronation edition—American tributes to the King and Queen. Two sets of the stereotype matrices of this edition will be made at two o’clock that day. These are paper and light, as you know. On your eastern flight you will carry these to the office of a London paper and deliver them at noon of Coronation Day. With the London evening papers we will issue the complete New York _Telegram_ of the day before.”

The listening, newly excited boys all arose and stood together. Mr. Latimer walked to the window and raised the shade. The soft gray light of a June dawn flooded the room and paled the yellow electric lights. It was four o’clock. A sleepless night had left its traces on all. The managing editor was again tearing a paper strip into bits. The night city editor turned out the light bulbs and, biting at his short mustache, walked nervously back and forth. Suddenly the editor brushed the torn paper from his lap, arose and went to the big wall map. The three boys followed him.

“We had planned to start from St. John’s in Newfoundland,” Ned began in a tired voice. “The distance from that point to Fastnet Light or Cape Clear in Ireland is less than seventeen hundred miles. That was our plan. It seemed to us to be a big thing to undertake.”

The editor did not argue. Turning to the map, his form straightened. A smile of assurance seemed to blot out the traces of night. With a sweep of his arm he described a wide curve from New York to London. His smile deepened. Dropping his other hand on Ned’s shoulder he exclaimed:

“There is your real course. You are next to one of the greatest achievements ever accomplished by man. Do it or attempt it in good faith and the _Herald_ stands ready to pay you $50,000.”

The figures were staggering but the three boys were now almost beyond fresh sensations. While no one spoke, Mr. Latimer threw up a window. A wave of cool, fresh air that burst into the room seemed to arouse the bewildered boys more than the editor’s last words. It was day and time for clearer thought. As the hesitating boys turned to drink in the refreshing air, on a sudden all was decided. The telepathy of boy comradeship passed the message without spoken words.

“We don’t want the money unless we do what you ask,” said Ned turning to face the managing editor, “but we’ll try to do it.”

“Thank you, gentlemen,” exclaimed the worn editor. “Say that we meet at the Knickerbocker at one o’clock for luncheon and then to business. Good night.”

As the three boys took their departure the editor seated himself at his desk again and reached for a pad of cable blanks.

Chapter VI

An Old Home And A Modern Business

The full significance of this unique proposition did not appear to the Airship Boys until they had cleared their brains with several hours of sleep. In the preceding few days, as the _Ocean Flyer_ came to completion, the three boys had put in long hours at the aeroplane factory. And the final test—the flight in the dark to sea and back—had been a strain that left them exhausted and ready for rest. Losing this by being aroused from bed at two o’clock, put them in a nervous and easily irritated condition. There was little time given that night to a consideration of what was to come.

This was not true of the man who had suggested the daring venture. Long after the boys had left him and while they were soundly asleep in their near-by hotel, he remained at his desk elaborating his plans and taking further steps towards their early execution. Long cablegrams in cipher accumulated on his desk. These were to the London office and mainly devoted to instructions and injunctions to the men already in the field and at work on the coronation program.

Many of his messages asked questions necessary to an intelligent cooperation between the aviators and the London representatives. Not the least important was the one asking for a description of the best landing place and an account of land marks and signals by which this might be easily discerned. Motor cars were to be in readiness to carry the matrices of the special edition to Fleet street, special police permits were to be secured and arrangements made for the printing and circulation of the transported paper in London.

At ten thirty o’clock the next morning Ned was taking his bath. Remembering their luncheon engagement with the managing editor of the _Herald_ he looked over his unpressed clothing with a smile. The oil spot on his coat seemed even bigger than it had the night before. The fact was the boys had come to New York unexpectedly and had meant to return to Newark on the noon train. The new aeroplane having demonstrated the complete success of their latest ideas it had seemed right to report their experience to Major Baldwin Honeywell, the treasurer of the Universal Transportation Company and their closest adviser.

“We’ll have to get a move on us to see Major Honeywell before noon,” exclaimed Alan who soon joined his chum. “What do you suppose he’ll say about it?”

“What do you say yourself?” asked Ned as he manipulated the big bath towel. “It comes to me like a dream.”

“I’m afraid we didn’t give it enough consideration,” answered the other boy. “I’m not so warm in my feet on the subject to-day.”

“That’s all right,” panted Ned. “You’ll work into it. I think we did the right thing. We meant to try to do it anyway. Why not have an object?”

“And $50,000,” added Alan.

“That’ll help some,” replied Ned. “Advertising must really pay,” he continued, “when a newspaper gives up that much money just to make the world talk about it.”

“How can a paper afford it?” mused Alan. “It could transmit by cable all the copy those men can write coming over; and cheaper and quicker too.”

“But the pictures!” suggested Ned. “That’s what it’s really for. That’s the big thing. They’ll stand out like the first telephone or the first electric light. I reckon the stuff the _Herald_ reporters write on the _Flyer_ may seem fresher and better but you can bet the pictures are what the paper is after. They’ll beat the other papers by six days. You know what that means.”

“What’s what mean?” sang out Russell, flouncing into the room. “Mornin’, gents. Hustle along. I’m starved.”

He was told what Ned had been discussing.

“It means that the publication of those pictures the next morning—pictures made at noon one day in London, printed the next morning in New York—will put a crimp in every other sheet in New York. Those are the things that give a newspaper a place in history. It’s the way one newspaper gets to be known above another,” volunteered Bob.

“How about us gettin’ a little place in history?” asked Ned as he got into his clothes. He held up his rumpled trousers. “We may get a place in history,” he went on laughing, “but it won’t be in the ‘History of Fashions.’ We’re a fine bunch to be dining at the Knickerbocker in these togs.”

“Don’t you bother about your clothes,” broke in Alan. “We’re not parading to-day. All you need worry about is that $50,000 contract.”

“And breakfast,” added Bob. “A little coffee and a cool cantaloupe’ll set you up. By the way,” he added with a new laugh, “you can get a new outfit in London—some o’ those swell Piccadilly rags.”

“I suppose you know how long we are to be in London?” interposed Alan. “An hour or less.”

“That’s all right,” persisted Bob, “buy ’em ready made. If they don’t fit that’ll be one proof we’ve been to England.”

“Well,” exclaimed Ned with another look of disgust at his grease-spotted coat, “I’m ready. Now for some breakfast. Then we’ll hurry over and have a talk with the Major. After that, we’ll meet our new friend at the Knickerbocker. Meanwhile, get your heads working. There are a lot of details to be arranged—if the _Herald_ don’t change its mind—and we’ve got just six days in which to get things ready.”

Seated in the Breslin Hotel restaurant—the busy Broadway throng passing just outside the window—while melons, cereals and ham and eggs fell before the attacks of the three boys—each individual head began “working.”

“First and most important,” began Alan, “excepting the details of the contract of course, we’ve got to decide how we are to get away with those matrices; that is, how are we to pick ’em up without losing the time to send ’em over to Jersey or out to the suburbs? We certainly can’t make a landing at the _Herald_ office in the city. And if we can’t do that in New York we can’t do it in London. Where do we land in London within a few minutes motor run of Fleet Street?”

“And we’ve got to have a fourth man,” added Bob. “Are we going to select him or will the _Herald_ want to send one of their own men?”

“Those things’ll work out,” exclaimed Ned. “But they’ll have to _be_ worked out and we haven’t any time to waste. I think we ought to invite the _Herald_ man out to see the machine. He’ll certainly want to meet some of the business men we know.”

“Let’s bring Major Honeywell to luncheon with us. He expects to go over to Newark with us to-day. Then we’ll get a big car and motor out early in the afternoon. With that off our minds we can get down to business,” suggested Alan.

“Say,” exclaimed Bob, “I don’t see any need to bother about picking up that bundle of matrices. That’s easy.” To the looks of inquiry he responded, “You know the postal crane that young Roy Osborne planned for use on ocean steamers? Well, the model is finished. He figures on installing it on liners so that passing ocean aeroplanes can swoop alongside, toss off the latest London or New York papers with the mail bag, and pick up the ship’s mail as the express trains do on land.”

“That’ll be all right when the time comes,” laughed Alan, “but I don’t know any liner that needs to spend money now on such an equipment. It’s a little previous isn’t it?”

“Just in time,” exclaimed Bob. “We need it now. At two o’clock when these sheets are ready, they can be tossed into a fast motor, whirled to the Battery, thrown on the _Herald_ motor boat, rushed out into the sound and delivered to our ocean tug in fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe less.”

“And then?” asked Ned.

“And then?” repeated Bob contemptuously. “Why, there is Osborne’s postal crane rigged up on the tug and waitin’ for our ‘pick up arm.’”

“Simplest thing in the world,” Ned chuckled. “Great! Check off that problem.”

“And meanwhile the _Flyer_ loses twenty minutes soaring around over the bay,” suggested Alan. “You ought to allow for that in the contract.”

“Lose nothing,” went on Bob. “We won’t lose a second. We can come from Newark to the Sound in eight or nine minutes. We’ll be all set and ready to start at two o’clock. When the matrix bundle is hustled into the automobile, the _Herald_ will notify us—”

“Wireless!” suggested Ned.

“Sure,” exclaimed Bob. “Ten minutes after the auto leaves _Herald Square_, they’ll give us the signal by wireless. Then we’re off. Eight minutes later, we ought to grab the bag off the tug and drop our ‘good-bye.’”

“How about London?” asked Alan.

“I pass that up,” replied Bob. “What I don’t know about London is a whole lot. That’s up to some wiser head than mine.”

“That suggests something,” said Ned after a period of thinking. “We’ve generally planned to make Roy Osborne our companion and fourth operator.”

“He’s the best young man at the works,” Alan condescended to admit.

“But,” went on Ned shaking his head, “I can now see that our other man ought to be an Englishman or at least some one who knows London inside and out. Remember, we never planned flying into London. Now, we’ve got to do that and go as far as we can toward the center of the city. Maps and charts won’t help much if we are going high or at anything like full speed.”

“We’ve got six days to find an Englishman,” argued Alan.

“And even if we have one who puts us just where we ought to go it’s a cinch we’ll be pinched,” suggested Bob. “I reckon they’d do just that thing here in New York if we tried to use Central Park as an aviation field.”

“That’ll be up to the _Herald_,” announced Ned, “and we’ll have to talk it over. I have an idea that the newspaper can arrange for some special permit. If it can’t there’ll have to be some figuring.”

“We can’t chance that,” urged Alan. “There’ll be trouble enough without fighting the London police. Two or three hours conversation in some police station would upset everything.”

“Well,” announced Ned as he paid the check—he was usually the banker for the three boys—“we can’t settle anything sitting here. Let’s hurry down to the office.”

Calling a taxicab, the trio hastened down Broadway to Fifth Avenue and south on that street to an old fashioned brick residence yet standing almost within the shadow of the Flatiron building. There was nothing on the windows to indicate the nature of the business of the house. Hurrying inside, the boys paused for a few moments in a large room at the right, the front windows of which looked out on the avenue. They were apparently familiar with the place, the contents of which no longer left a doubt as to the kind of business transacted in the house.

Framed photographs, wash-drawings and scale plans of aeroplanes hung on all walls. On the old-fashioned marble mantle was a confusion of odds and ends: samples of balloon cloth, rubberized silk, gossamerlike aeroplane covering; thin bars and blocks of steel; a bundle of strips of wood that had apparently been scientifically tested. Above these, tacked to the wall, was a small white flag or burgee on which, in faded red, appeared the word “Cibola.” This was the flag carried on the first aerial craft made by Ned and Alan, the dirigible balloon with which the Aztec temple was discovered on the hidden mesa in Navajo land.

On one side of the room two desks, their tops down and locked and covered with dust, bore end plates marked “Mr. Napier” and “Mr. Hope.” On the other side of the room was a flat desk. The top was a special map of the United States, Canada and Mexico covered with a sheet of beveled glass the exact size of the desk. On an adjoining small desk stood a covered typewriter. While Ned and Alan opened their desks, Bob left the room and made a tour of three rooms in the rear. In the two middle rooms a half dozen elderly and sedate men were busy on books. All showed deference to Bob above his years. But, beyond shaking hands as if he had been some days absent, there was little conversation.

In a rear room it was different. A square shouldered man was in charge. Between the windows was a breast-high, glass-encased, recording instrument ticking off the seconds of Washington Naval Observatory time. Over this, the second hand of a large clock jerked forward monotonously. At one side, on a table, reposed several compasses. On two desks were small engineering instruments, books, nautical almanacs and drawing tools.

“Well, Lieutenant,” exclaimed Bob, “how’s the ‘old calculator’?”

“Oh, the major seems to get a new idea each day,” responded the man, shaking hands. “How’s the _Flyer_?”

The details of the previous night’s test were described.

“I suppose you boys will be back now on commoner things for a while. Pretty lonesome here. I haven’t seen one of you in ten days.”

“You worked out that great circle from St. Johns, Newfoundland, to Cape Clear in Ireland, I suppose?” went on Bob throwing a leg over a desk. When the man nodded, the boy added, “Well, that’s all changed. We’re goin’ to start from Newark and head straight for London. You’ll get a request to route us on that line.”

“It won’t make much difference,” answered the calculator as he opened a portfolio and selected an outline sheet covering the Atlantic ocean. “As I remember it, a great circle course connecting Fastnet Light off Cape Clear and St. John’s harbor, if you continue it west, will pass just south of New York harbor.”

“Then St. Johns wouldn’t be much out of our way?”

“Almost on your path.”

“There’s a new deal on,” explained Bob. “Get busy and project the new course. And you might as well get down to all deviations; we’ll be goin’ in a few days.”

When Bob came back down the hall both Ned and Alan were busy at their desks, in which all sorts of mail had accumulated.

“Hey,” called Ned as Bob passed the door on his way upstairs. “Here’s an idea. There isn’t one of us really fit to go up there and have luncheon with the _Herald_ man. Let’s ask him down here. This is the place to talk it over; we’ll cut out the eatin’.”

“It may happen to be just our host’s time for eatin’,” laughed Bob.

“I’ll chance it,” answered Ned, “on the theory that newspaper men can always go without food. If I can catch him, I’ll try to call it off and have him come down here.”

A little later all three boys met in a sunny front room on the second floor, the comfortable office of Major Baldwin Honeywell, treasurer of the Universal Company. The white haired, military looking, elder man tried to absorb and digest three lines of talk; the result of the previous evening’s experiment, the prospects of the new airship; matters in abeyance in relation to the Universal Transportation Company; the experience in the _Herald_ office, the unique proposal, its acceptance and the coming contract.

“We were goin’ to carry you up to the Knickerbocker,” explained Ned. “Now our man is comin’ here at one o’clock. It’s up to you, Major, to see that every thing is all right.”

Again Bob was off and up on the third floor. One following him would have known at once that in the back room that overlooked a grass plot in the rear, telegraph instruments were busy. A chief operator and two assistants were recording reports. One of the assistants sat at a wireless desk.

“Get the works at Newark,” exclaimed Bob with a good-natured salutation for all. “I want to hold some conversation with Tom.” A moment later he was busy with the key of the wireless.

Chapter VII

Ned Napier Advances Some Theories

Neither J. W. Osborne, president of the Universal Transportation Company, nor Major Baldwin Honeywell, its treasurer, had any financial interest in the new airship. This had been planned and manufactured under the supervision of and paid for by young Napier, Hope and Russell. The cost, approximately $25,000, did not include any pay for the services or ideas of the projectors.

After a trial of the novel airship it was understood that the machine was to be sold to the Aerial Utilities Company in which the Airship Boys and the underwriter of the Universal Transportation Company were the sole stockholders. In the few minutes that Ned and Alan were together in their office on the first floor they decided that the sale of the new _Ocean Flyer_ to the Aerial Utilities Company should not be consummated until the transatlantic flight had been made.

In the progress of their hasty talk, however, Ned managed to read several personal letters. One, in a feminine hand and postmarked Chicago, he did not throw back on the desk for his files. This one he carefully put in his pocket. It was signed by Alan’s sister, Mary Hope.

“Your letter is here,” it read, “but I do not share in your enthusiasm over the near completion of the new aeroplane. We are not happy to know that Alan and you are to risk your lives again in a new experiment. While you do not say so, Alan has written to father that it is your intention to make a long water flight in the _Ocean Flyer_ if it proves a success. I know what that means. I remember the speech you made at your birthday party last summer about crossing the Atlantic! Don’t you think that you and my brother have enough fame and reward to stop these risks? I suppose it is presumption for me to attempt to interfere in any way with what you and Alan look on as your ‘profession,’ but don’t you believe your families ought to receive some consideration? And I’m sure it would make us all very happy to hear that you are not going to try to cross the ocean in an airship even if you did make the machine yourself. Please send me word that you are not going to do it.”

Ned neither showed the letter to Alan nor referred to it. In fact, he had recently reached a point in his acquaintance with Mary Hope that did not inspire conversation in relation to her—least of all with his chum, her brother. When the three boys met in Major Honeywell’s office a busy hour followed. There was not only much talk concerning the new airship but the temporarily postponed business of the Universal Transportation Company demanded consideration. When the matter of the _Herald_ project came up for analysis Major Honeywell and the boys discussed it in all its phases.

When the _Herald_ manager arrived, a little after noon, the visitor was first escorted through the various offices. Although he was acquainted in general with the importance and magnitude of this newly organized company, the details of its operating machinery astounded the journalist. For some time after the _Herald_ manager reached Major Honeywell’s office, he insisted on additional information on this astounding aeroplane transportation service. The route maps, latitude and longitude tables for all cities, magnetic variation and compass deviation tables for aviators, photographs of the newly completed metal monoplanes and the air-line hangars on the 750 mile route to Chicago almost drove the proposed ocean flight out of the newspaper man’s mind.

“At least,” he said, “what you’ve shown, proves to me that we can’t fail in what we’re about to attempt. I’m mighty glad I missed my luncheon. I’ll not be satisfied now till I’ve seen your latest aeroplane.”

“This afternoon!” responded Ned with enthusiasm. “Mr. Russell has just been in wireless communication with the factory. Daylight didn’t show a scratch on the _Ocean Flyer_. We’d like to have you and Major Honeywell go out with us this afternoon.”

“Delighted,” responded the managing editor. “We’ll pick up a bite on the way. And as that is to be pleasure, let’s get down to business. Of course you’ll want a contract.”

“Only a memorandum,” answered Ned. “Not so much a _contract_ as a record of what we are to undertake.”

Thereupon Ned reviewed the talk he and his friends had had at breakfast, the journalist making brief notes. The plan for picking up the matrices at the start was received with enthusiastic approval. The boys were to deliver the Osborne postal crane to a sea tug to be furnished by the _Herald_, which was to install the device under young Osborne’s supervision. The question of a landing in London was a harder nut to crack. On this there was prolonged debate. The boys felt forced to put the arrangement of this up to the newspaper.

“I have had but one idea on that,” explained the manager. “It may not be wholly feasible but it is all I have in mind. Hyde Park is the biggest open place near the ‘city.’ It is only about two miles from Fleet Street or ‘newspaper row.’ There is plenty of room in this park to make a landing and a new start just north of the Serpentine—that’s a long, irregular bit of water you know.”

“Will the police permit it?” asked Alan.

“They can’t prevent the landing,” laughed Bob, “but we may all be in the police station when it’s time to start back.”

“I’ll have to undertake to arrange that,” volunteered the manager. “Our men in London ought to have enough influence to get a special permit.”

“That’s a point that’ll have to be covered in the contract or memorandum,” suggested Major Honeywell. “The boys being strangers to London can not undertake to guarantee this privilege to themselves. If detained by some power beyond their control, the project might fail through no fault of theirs. This contingency should be anticipated.”

“I concede that,” said the _Herald_ representative. “And yet, naturally, an accident of that kind would defeat the main purpose of the project. We might be paying our money for a practical failure.”

“Why not arrange a sliding scale of compensation?” suggested Major Honeywell.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” continued the editor smiling. “The mere crossing of the Atlantic on a mission for the _Herald_ is valuable advertising. But, since so much depends on the time of the return trip, I’d like to make an extra incentive, if possible, for its exact fulfillment.”

“In other words,” exclaimed Ned, “you feel that part of the responsibility of successfully getting away on the return trip ought to be on us.”

“Perhaps that is the plain way of putting it,” announced the editor.

“I don’t know but what that’s fair,” responded Ned. “It’ll make us stir our stumps at least. Let’s make it a sliding scale.”

“On that basis,” said the journalist quickly, “I’ll make a better offer than I submitted last night—I’ll add $10,000 if the scale covers both the east and west voyages. What do you suggest?”

Major Honeywell was already figuring. In a few moments he read the following: “For picking up _Telegram_ matrices from _Herald_ sea tug on East River between 2 P. M. and 2:20 P. M. Thursday, June 21, and carrying them by aeroplane for the _Herald_ directly to European soil within not more than eighteen hours, the sum of $25,000; for delivering the same, within the same period, in England, $10,000 in addition; for delivering the same within the same period into the hands of the _Herald_ representatives in Hyde Park, London, $5,000 in addition. For conveying from London, between the hours of 1:30 P. M. (London time) June 22 and 2 A. M. (New York time) June 23, three representatives of the _Herald_ and delivering the same within ten miles of the _Herald_ office, the further sum of $25,000. In case of a failure to carry out the conditions of the last clause, the party of the second part is to receive a bonus of $5,000 if the representatives of the _Herald_ are delivered on American soil within twenty-four hours.”

“In other words,” explained Major Honeywell, “if the _Ocean Flyer_, carrying your matrices, reaches any European point within eighteen hours, the boys get twenty-five thousand dollars. If they reach London successfully they are to be paid ten thousand dollars more or thirty-five thousand dollars. If they make the trip back in the same time, carrying your three people, they get another twenty-five thousand dollars or sixty thousand dollars altogether.”

“That is the idea.”

“And if they fail to get back on time they get only five thousand dollars for the return trip.”

“I’ll do better than that,” added the editor. “I have with me our cashier’s check for $10,000 payable to the Airship Boys. The above terms are agreeable to me. If they are satisfactory to the young men, I’ll pay over the check now, unconditionally. It will have been earned if a start is made in good faith.”

Ned at once waved the check aside.

“We’ll sign the contract and we’ll start not only in good faith but in good hope. But we’ll call for our money on the morning of June 23, and,” he added, his eyes twinkling, “when you may as well have a check for sixty thousand dollars ready. We’ll earn it.”

While Major Honeywell’s secretary prepared a duplicate copy of the memorandum contract Alan raised another point:

“Has any one figured where and how we are to deliver your reporters, their copy, the photographer and his pictures? Remember, it will be about two o’clock in the morning.”

“Can’t you drop the manuscript and the pictures somewhere out in the bay near the _Herald_ boat if it shows prearranged signals?” asked the editor.

“Why not show the same signals on the _Herald_ building?” asked Bob. “Our customary green diamond?”

“But we can’t drop the reporters,” laughed Ned.

“If you can land our stories and our pictures on the _Herald_ roof,” exclaimed the editor with new interest, “you may dump the reporters in the Jersey flats and let ’em swim.”

“We’ll come over and look at the roof,” exclaimed Ned smiling. “The men can take a chance with us.”

“Now,” began the editor in a new tone, “with these business details out of the way, I want to ask something. I wish you’d explain to me how you are going to travel one hundred and eighty miles an hour.”

“To confess the truth,” answered Ned promptly, “it’ll be two hundred miles an hour. One hundred and eighty is our minimum.”

The editor’s face wore a puzzled look.

“This rate of two hundred miles an hour,” explained Ned, “involves no new ideas. That is the natural evolution from the sixty mile an hour rate due to a better built machine and more powerful engines. All aeroplanes will reach that speed in time just as railway trains go faster with more powerful engines, heavier road beds, better tracks and more daring engineers. But the _Ocean Flyer_ has possibilities far beyond two hundred miles an hour—theoretically at least.”

“More than two hundred miles an hour?” gasped the journalist.

“Mathematically,” answered Ned. “I can hardly say how near practice will coincide with theory.”

“And how fast mathematically?” asked the _Herald_ manager quizzically.

“Anything up to eight hundred miles an hour. Possibly one thousand.”

Even Major Honeywell started with astonishment. The newspaper man shook his head.

“Beyond sixty miles an hour,” he replied in a puzzled tone, “speed doesn’t mean much to me. I can’t realize what it means to travel one thousand miles an hour.”

“Here’s an illustration,” volunteered Alan. “At one thousand miles an hour, an aeroplane could circumnavigate the globe, in the latitude of Paris, in seventeen hours.”

“And beat the sun?” exclaimed the newspaper man.

“Mathematically,” repeated Ned, his smile broadening.

“I don’t believe you could travel at the rate of two hundred miles an hour and live,” argued the editor.

“Oh yes you can,” retorted Alan. “How do you suppose birds cross the ocean without food or water? Don’t you know that there are birds that migrate the length of the Pacific ocean? There are Arctic birds that winter in the tropics and fly to the polar regions in the summer—birds that are never seen on land between those zones.” The newspaper manager and the major were listening intently. “German scholars have discovered that many migrating birds fly at such a high altitude that they can be seen only by means of a powerful telescope. The flight of some of these birds has been measured. Four miles a minute or two hundred and forty miles an hour is not uncommon.”

The surprised manager made no comment.

“The mathematical possibilities of airship speed,” resumed Ned, “are based on height or altitude. The maximum of speed at or near sea level is no indication of what may be accomplished miles in the air. Let me explain. Say we have an airship such as the _Ocean Flyer_ that can fly two hundred miles an hour near sea level where the air pressure is greatest.”

“Yes.”

“Then imagine the same airship seven miles in the air.”

“You’d freeze. Or if you didn’t you’d die from lack of oxygen.”

“Balloonists have gone that high. They were cold enough but they carried oxygen with them and didn’t die.”

“Well!”

“At seven miles in the air the air pressure is reduced one half. The forward speed of your airship, assuming that it is flying on the same angle, ought to be doubled. You’d be advancing at the rate of four hundred miles an hour.”

“I thought the buoyancy decreased with the pressure,” broke in Major Honeywell who had absorbed more or less of the terms of aeronautics.

“So it does,” explained Ned, “but the buoyancy of an aeroplane is due wholly to its rapid flight. If we are going at the rate of two hundred miles an hour and are then able to double this, we have compensation for the loss of half our buoyancy. So, all other things being equal, we have a theory that like a migrating bird, the higher we ascend, the faster our flight. And, one other thing. The faster you rise from the earth the less the force of gravity. At eight miles altitude, where the air pressure is one fourth that at the sea level, and where, mathematically,” he looked at the astonished editor mischievously, “the two hundred mile an hour aeroplane would be traveling at the rate of eight hundred miles an hour, it has already been calculated that the specific gravity of the airship would be two per cent less than at sea level. Do you understand what that means?”

“That the force of gravity would be less,” answered the editor.

“And that the centrifugal tendency would be greater,” continued Ned. “In other words there would be an appreciable inclination of the airship to fly away from the earth.”

“Oh, I see,” exclaimed the journalist. “We have at last come around to Jules Verne’s cannon ball that was fired at the moon.”

“Only that in this instance,” replied Ned soberly, “we have a guidable, continuously propelled cannon ball.”

“Didn’t an aeroplane man go up eleven thousand feet?” queried the _Herald_ manager suddenly. “Did he fly faster?”

“On the contrary,” explained Ned, “he had great trouble in maintaining his position and in controlling his machine. But that wasn’t because the mathematics of it was wrong,” and again he laughed. “All other conditions changing at that enormous height, your mechanical appliances must also change. Propellers made alone for the heavy air of the lower altitudes are not adapted to use in the rarefied atmosphere seven or eight miles up. The _Ocean Flyer_ has propellers that compress the thin air of the upper levels. Gasoline engines doing their best work when ordinary air is used in the explosion chambers are far less efficient when air at one-half or one-fourth pressure is used. The _Ocean Flyer_ has an arrangement for compressing air. Its liberated, exploded gas expands even better in thin air. Present-day aeroplanes and their engines and propellers are made for sea level work. Hoxie, who did that eleven thousand elevation feat skyward had no excuse for such a flight.”

“And you think you can live at that altitude?”

“We’ll carry oxygen, of course,” went on Ned, “but we won’t even need that. The _Ocean Flyer_ has the first enclosed car or cabin used on an aeroplane. The compartments of its two decks connect with each other but all can be made one airtight whole. Even the engines are within an airtight compartment. Attached to the point or bow of the car is a large, metal funnel with a wide flange. Tubes leading from the small end of this pass into each room. Flying at sixty miles an hour causes the air to rush into this funnel with such force that all or any one of the compartments are soon full of compressed air. At a speed of two hundred miles this would be so great that, instead of having too little air, we would have too much unless the pressure gauges were watched and the flow shut off from time to time.”

The great editor looked on the young aviator as if the latter possessed some of the mysterious power of a wizard.

“That does seem reasonable,” was his comment at last.

“At least _mathematically_,” went on Ned with the same smile. “This will not only give us breathing air but the pressure ought to give us sufficient heat to prevent frost bite. It will certainly do another thing. If we are driven to use our engine at such a height, we can draw the air for mixing with its gas directly from the engine room where it can be regulated to sea level pressure.”

“Major,” suddenly exclaimed the puzzled and not unexcited editor, “send me those contracts when they are ready. I’m going over to Newark and have a look at this _Ocean Flyer_. I think I’ve made the best bargain of my business life.”

Chapter VIII

THE _Ocean Flyer_ CREW IS COMPLETED

Before the arrival of the big automobile, Ned and Alan had a conference with the man in the rear room on the first floor. In all their aeronautical experience, one constant annoyance had been their inability to estimate exactly the speed at which they were traveling. Advancing either with or against the wind—which is always in motion a few hundred feet above the ground—they always had to take the readings of the anemometer with allowances. With the airship speeding into the wind, the pressure set up by the aeroplane itself was increased by the force of the encountered wind. The flight of a balloon directly upward is accurately determined by the barometer. But the drift of a dirigible is largely a matter of judgment or deduction from the anemometer readings.

Because of this the boys had been utilizing the reserve monoplanes of the Universal Transportation Company and some of the lighter, standard aeroplanes of the manufacturing company, to make experiments in flight speed and how to determine this speed with exactness. Alan, the mathematician of the young partners, had made deductions based on their accumulated data and these he had recently submitted to the engineering department of the company. In the light of the new project this phase of their work had an added importance.

At times, when there was no appreciable breeze (and the boys were always on the lookout for these infrequent occasions) quick flights had been made and the speed of the aeroplane in relation to propeller revolutions had been exactly timed by land marks. Records were also made of the anemometer register on these trips, the latter giving, in the absence of wind, the real pressure on the instrument due to the rush of the aeroplane through the air. At other times, flights were made in the wind, both with and against it. The movement of the atmosphere was carefully measured before these flights and from these figures, compared with the wind gauge readings recorded when the aeroplane was under power—at all speeds of the propeller—tables were made of pressure due wholly to the wind and that caused by the flight of the air craft. Different forms of propellers were used and out of this mass of statistics the engineer of the company and Alan had worked out formulas for speed computation.

“We’ve got to know the wind, Lieutenant,” exclaimed Alan as the boys looked over the engineer’s neatly recorded calculations. “If we don’t know and can’t measure that, we’re as helpless as the old sea dog who navigates ‘by guess and by God.’ We may guess right on its velocity when we start a flight, but in a little while the whizzing sound dulls your sense of speed. You may make a bad mistake in rising or ‘banking’ and you won’t know where you are—especially at sea.”

“‘Bird sense’ is all right for race track stunts,” added Ned, “but it won’t do when you’re out of sight of land. We’ve got to have something that is automatic; something, at least, that we can use as a guide for figures.”

Upon his desk and at other places in the engineer’s room were aneroid barometers, a new pocket device in shape like a watch especially interesting the young aviators. A barograph for automatically recording air pressure and indicating height in the air, not only received attention but was at once repacked in its case to be taken to Newark. A new aerometer was also wrapped up for the same purpose.

“This barograph looks like a good thing,” the engineer explained. “It has a recording cylinder that revolves by clockwork and the indicator needle bears on a series of levers which communicate their displacements to a pen arm. Each movement of the mercury is then recorded on the cylinder. On that you have a graphic story of your up and down journey.”

Compensated and gyroscopic compasses, statoscopes for measuring equilibrium, thermometers and shaft speed indicators were also to be seen. But with the new barograph and the new aerometer, Ned and Alan seemed to content themselves for the time.

“Mr. Russell tells me the new ‘Flyer’ did all you expected of it,” said the engineer.

“It’ll do two hundred miles at sea level when it’s tuned up,” answered Ned proudly.

“Then you’ll certainly make your ocean flight?” suggested the engineer.

The boys immediately explained in brief the new program. The engineer heard them soberly.

“In that event,” he said at once, “you’d better take several days for experimenting with the wind and speed pressure of the new car. I can’t guarantee that the figures made for the other machines will apply to this one. I’ll come to the works in the morning and make the kite and ground records while you young gentlemen get me the flight pressures of the ‘Flyer’ under all conditions.”

“Fine,” exclaimed Alan. “You know you’ll have to project a new ocean course for us with all the variations, sailing rhumbs and course alterations.”

“From New York to London?” asked the engineer nodding his head. “I wish you could have counted on the stops at St. Johns and Cape Clear in Ireland. I’d have felt better about it,” he continued turning to his desk and opening a large portfolio. “That chart is ready.”

“Let’s have a look,” exclaimed Ned.

On a United States Hydrographic Office “Pilot Chart of the North Atlantic Ocean,” the boys traced a slightly circular line reaching from St. Johns in Newfoundland to Brow Head and Cape Clear, in Ireland just below which appeared the little dot indicating Fastnet Light, the first old world signal to passengers from America. Far north of any steamer route, the seeming curve of the lieutenant’s projected line of flight was seen to be really a succession of straight lines—the sailing variations and compass courses from hour to hour.

In neat engineering letters, in a vacant place on the map, was this memorandum: “From St. Johns, Newfoundland, to Fastnet Rock, Ireland, by great circle is 1666 miles. Initial course is N. 66 E. true. Final course is S. 81 E. Therefore you port one-eighth of a point every seventy-five miles easting.”

Alan made a few figures with his pencil on a corner of the chart. “A point,” he said aloud, “is eleven degrees and fifteen minutes. One-eighth of that is one degree and twenty-four minutes. Every seventy-five miles we port one degree and twenty-four minutes.”

“Exactly,” replied the lieutenant, “and that’s why you’ve got to be right on your speed measurement. Then, knowing the distance covered, you can navigate by compass.”

“The machine is out here eatin’ her head off,” shouted Bob at this juncture. “Get a move on, youse ducks, I’ve wired the works to have lunch ready for us.”

“In a minute,” answered Ned. He turned to the engineer again. “Did you work out those distances and the time from St. Johns to New York by rail and steamer?”

In some of the preliminary talk on the possibilities of a transoceanic aeroplane service it had been suggested that the actual air flights be between Brow Head or Cape Clear in Ireland and St. Johns in Newfoundland. But the boys had been so busy on the new sky-craft that they had not gone into the shore ends of this suggestion.

“I’m afraid the company would beat itself by doing that,” answered the engineer. “However fast you flew from Cape Clear to St. Johns, you’d lose so much time by finishing the trip on land that the big liners would almost beat you in. It’s eighteen hundred and forty-five miles from St. Johns by rail through Nova Scotia up to Montreal and down to New York and the present train schedule calls for seventy-four hours to cover it.”

“How about rail to Halifax and then by steamer to Boston and New York?”

“Worse,” laughed the lieutenant. “That would take nearly eighty hours.”

“That settles it,” announced Ned picking up the barograph case. “It will be New York to London direct. We can’t afford to hustle over the Atlantic at two hundred miles an hour to lose one hundred and fifty miles an hour on a slow fifty mile an hour express train. Lieutenant,” he added affectionately, patting their skilled assistant on the shoulder, “we’ll be glad to see you to-morrow and we’ll do all the experimenting you suggest. But, sometime in the next six days, just piece out that ocean course and hook London and New York on the ends of it.”

“That’s almost what I’ll do in reality,” was the prompt answer of the engineer. “Until you figure it, you’d hardly believe that a direct east or true great circle sailing course between London and New York would pass over St. Johns. But it’ll come mighty close to it. The route I’ve projected,” he explained pointing to the sweeping curve on the chart, “if extended on the same lines, will pass just south of New York bay.”

Alan had the new aerometer under his arm but at this suggestion he laughed, put it down and opened an atlas of the world. Turning to the map of Ireland with his finger he followed the southern shore line until it came to Cape Clear. Nearby he made out a small town from which he traced the Cork, Bandon and Southern Railway, connecting through Cork with Dublin on the east coast. Then he slammed the book shut and exclaimed:

“All aboard, in Aeroplane Number One, for St. Johns, Newfoundland, Skibbereen, Ireland, and London. First stop St. Johns. All aboard. _Ocean Flyer_ leaves in one minute.”

Major Honeywell and their guest now appeared and Ned and Alan hurried with them to the automobile. In the trip to the ferry and across the Hudson river Ned entertained the _Herald_ manager with an account of what a flight across the ocean meant.

“Ordinarily,” said the journalist at one time, “all I have seen to-day and what you are telling me would make very good newspaper reading—to say nothing of what we threw away last night.”

“And I’ve been livin’ in that kind of stuff for over three years,” volunteered Bob, “without writing a tenth of what I knew.”

“I’m afraid your reportorial instincts are a little dulled,” laughed the editor.

“No, sir, not by a jugful,” retorted Bob. “When I do break out it’ll be good and proper. They’ve had me for three years just where they had the _Herald_ last night.” Evidently Bob was a little touched by the comment of the editor. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll make a guess you’ve found out considerable to-day that _you_ ain’t goin’ to print.”

“You’re right,” laughed the editor heartily. “I’ll withdraw what I said. Your friends seem wonderfully successful in keeping their business to themselves. You’re quite right. The _Herald_ is going to print nothing that will detract from the spectacular finish of what we shall try to do.”

“We’ve been counting on that, of course,” broke in Ned. “And even after we make the trip,” he went on, “I hope the _Herald_ will never print anything more than we tell its reporters. There are some ideas that we can only protect by secrecy.”

“You mean that what I have personally seen and been told to-day is confidential? Of course. Feel perfectly free, while I am with you, to say what you like. All editors must be able to distinguish between conversation that carries news and the free talk of friends.”

The car was speeding out of Jersey City on the marsh road westward toward Arlington.

“If every flight we have made over these marshes had left a mark in the air,” remarked Alan, “that sky up there would look like a waffle.”

“Are all three of you equally old in this aviation business?” asked the editor smiling and unconsciously looking skyward as if he really expected to see a maze of aerial paths.

“Bob is what we call an auxiliary,” explained Alan. “He hasn’t flown as often as he wanted to but he’s no tenderfoot. However, his chance is comin’. He’ll have to make a full hand on this ocean trip.”

“Will it require three of you to operate the machine?” the editor asked.

“Four,” answered Ned. “There’s a young man out at the works, Roy Osborne—the son of the chief engineer—who has had experience all over the country. He’ll probably be the fourth member of the crew.”

“Tell me what each one does,” asked the editor straightening up and grasping his Panama to make sure the speeding car did not tear it from his head. “Talk about two hundred miles an hour,” he added with a grimace as he saw forty-five miles indicated on the speedometer, “this is enough for me.”

“Me too,” announced Ned to the editor’s surprise. “There’s more sense of speed right now in this car goin’ forty-five miles an hour—and more real danger too,” he added positively—“than there is in an airship going sixty miles an hour. In the air, our road bed is perfect. Here a rut may pitch the whole machine over the fence. High up in the air you have no objects along your path to measure flight. The ground is so far away that it is no criterion. In the air, at your highest speed, there is almost no sense of motion. It’s like a swiftly ascending balloon in which you can only judge your flight by tossing paper overboard.”

“Tommy rot,” broke in Bob, “you talk as if you were selling aeroplanes. Ruts in the road! There are more ‘ruts,’ ‘holes,’ ‘pockets’ and ‘chasms’ in the air than you’ll find on the worst roads on the ground. And that ain’t all! You can’t see ’em till you’re in ’em. The death record this year tells what they mean too. As for bein’ no danger, give me an automobile and a place to fall even if it is hard.”

“Then you’re not going?” asked the editor wonderingly.

“Sure,” answered Bob. “That’s one reason I’m goin’. And that’s the reason the _Herald_ is goin’ to give us $60,000. You can bet you wouldn’t give us that for drivin’ an automobile to San Francisco—even at top speed. It’s the chances we take of strikin’ one of these ‘gullies’ up in the sky and turnin’ turtle just where the Atlantic is deepest and wettest.”

“He’s all right now,” was Alan’s quiet comment when Bob had finished. “Bob always blows off under pressure.”

“Well,” said the editor in turn, “I had an idea—a suggestion—but Mr. Russell’s speech almost killed it. Still—”

“What is it?” insisted Ned.

“You said you had not definitely made up your crew. For a time I was prompted to ask if all your operators had to be persons of experience with aeroplanes.”

“They should be, on a trip like this,” explained Ned, “but not necessarily so. They must have coolness, however, and nerve and endurance.”

“Would it be out of the way for me to send a representative with you?”

“If you had the sort of man we could use, that is, one that could stand watch with us and who was not merely a passenger,” answered Ned looking at Alan and noting that the latter approved, “it would not only be proper but we’d be glad to make him our fourth man.”

“I’m sure I have such a young man,” continued the editor quickly, “and he is just about your own age. I never saw him until two o’clock this morning.”

“You mean the guy that tipped us off to the _Herald_,” exclaimed Bob impulsively.

The editor nodded his head with a smile.

“The young man we saw leaving your office as we entered it?” asked Ned edging forward.

“Buckingham Stewart, a _Herald_ reporter,” answered the editor. “He seems to me to have all the qualities you name. I don’t know that he’ll care to take the risk. If he does, I offer him as my representative.”

“Don’t you worry about him not goin’ if he gets a chance,” volunteered Bob.

“Alan,” said Ned with a broad smile, “if this fellow was smart enough to find out all he did about the _Flyer_ without a look at it in the daylight or a word from us, it’ll take him about fifteen minutes to understand it when he really sees it. I say, take him.”

“I’m agreeable,” answered Alan and the crew was complete.

Chapter IX

DUTIES OF THE _Ocean Flyer_ CREW

President J. W. Atkinson of the Aeroplane Company, was always ready to offer chance visitors noon-time refreshment. In fact, for over ten days, the Airship Boys had not left the factory in the middle of the day but had devoted the resting hour to a hasty luncheon and talk with Engineer Osborne, his son Roy, an experienced aviator, and other skilled employes. Therefore, at two thirty o’clock, as on their previous busy days, the boys were at luncheon in the same place with their guests. Mr. Atkinson sat with them and kept Major Honeywell and the _Herald_ managing editor company over their cigars.

In spite of the injunction of the engineer of the Universal Transportation Company (which by the way had no business connection with the American-Aeroplane Company although Mr. Atkinson was a heavy stockholder in each) that experiments should be made for several days to ascertain the wind pressure on the new airship in flight, it was at once agreed that these voyages must be made at night.

“The first appearance of such an unusual craft,” the editor argued, “would certainly attract wide attention. Publicity is bound to follow. The car ought never to appear by day until the real flight is made.”

This being conceded, Bob immediately sent a wireless message to New York notifying the engineer to report that night at the factory. The chef at the factory was not an unskilled one. The day was hot and a cooling drink he had invented and served received so many compliments that Chef Jasper was summoned from the kitchen. To be openly and personally congratulated by such a celebrity as the director of the New York _Herald_ disconcerted Jasper. For a time he could not explain the composition of his unique beverage. But at last the pleasant mystery was revealed.

“Mah wife Lindy,” Jasper finally made plain, “she jes’ done git a bucket o’ fine, ripe, sweet churries an’ she pits ’em and biles ’em till de juice is jes lak ’lasses, puttin’ plenty o’ sugar in ’em till de surup is sweet ’nough an’ not too sweet. An’ dats all. When yo’ desiahs to make a churry coolah you done take a big col’ glass an’ fill it plum up full o’ crush ice, dry an’ powdah lak. Den yo’ takes a half a cup o’ de juice and dreen it down trew de white ice. When de ice ’gins to melt yo’ pour de glass full o’ ginger ale an’ let her fizz an’ bile. But not no Jersey City ginger ale. You wants English ginger ale cause Jersey ginger is sweet lak ’lasses.”

“I suppose,” said the delighted editor to the boys, “that you won’t really need one of Jasper’s ‘cherry coolers’ on your ocean voyage.”

“We’ve made several trips in the air,” laughed Ned shaking his head, “in which we had to do a good deal of figuring on the food supply. This time this will give us little trouble. Sandwiches, bread and butter, some tinned beans, meats and made coffee for heating over an alcohol stove will be about our only supplies. It’ll be such a short voyage and such a busy one that eating will be the least of our troubles.”

“Wait till the regular transatlantic service begins,” laughed Bob. “You ought to see the sketch of the passenger car with its dining compartments. No ‘short order’ service; soups, roasts, salads, ice cream. And the sleepin’ car—”

“But that’s to come,” interrupted Alan. “Meanwhile, we have a rather comfortable car out here in the setting-up room. It’s ready for inspection.”

“Just one minute,” suggested Major Honeywell. “Your guest asked you a question on the way out here that has not yet been answered. He wants to know the duties of the four members of the operating crew.”

As they arose from the table Ned volunteered to explain.

“First, we must have a pilot constantly at the wheel. But his duties are not simply to keep a lookout ahead. His chief concern is to watch the control of the machine by counteracting the influence of unexpected air currents and those atmospheric obstructions that Bob calls ‘ruts.’ It can’t be denied that there are unexpected and indistinguishable puffs of air that will bump an aeroplane just as a rock or a piece of wood will bounce an automobile in the air.”

“You are the pilot, I take it?” commented the editor.

“One of ’em,” smiled Ned. “Mr. Hope is the other. We find it good policy to take three-hour tricks. The strain of a longer watch unnerves one. The pilot also controls the engines. But that does not relieve us of the need of a man in the engine room. This engine man, who on this trip will be Mr. Russell, who really knows more about an aeroplane than his conversation suggests, has enough to do. He watches the automatic fuel and lubricator supply feed pipes; the compressed air gauges and pipe valves; the signal and illuminating light motor, the oxygen tanks, the plane valves, and if the rudders go wrong, he is the man who goes out and fixes them. In this instance he is also the wireless operator.”

“When does he sleep?” asked Major Honeywell chuckling.

“When everything is going all right,” answered Ned, “or when one of the pilots spells him off for an hour.”

“And the fourth man?” asked the editor. “Everything seems provided for.”

“The rear of the pilot room,” went on Ned, “resembles a laboratory. It is the observation and record office of the ship. The observer in charge keeps the log of the flight, records the data that gives the pilot his bearings and enables him to find his way through unmarked space, prepared at any minute to sound warnings of perils ahead or behind that the eye can not detect. His record of the pressure of the aerometer gives the speed of the machine as nearly as instruments can show it. These figures, with our own tables of wind and flight pressures under all revolution speeds, give us approximately the exact rate of advance. He must watch and keep in operation the barograph or self-recording altitude gauge which takes the place of the usual barometer; as a check he also notes and records periodical readings of the regular barometer; he keeps constant watch on the car equilibrium by means of the statoscope; he records the compass course, sets down the latitude and longitude by following the compass bearing and the advance in miles; is the pilot’s clerk and keeps a record of the pilot’s changes of course—”

“Is that the job my reporter is booked for?” interrupted the astonished editor.

“That’s the plan. It’s really Mr. Hope’s work; he has the experience and he is personally acquainted with figures,” answered Ned with a smile. “But I’d like to have him to work with me. Of course we give a lot of attention to this work ourselves, as we’re right alongside.”

“Then don’t take him because I asked it,” said the journalist hastily. “If you want him, take him of your own accord. I wouldn’t recommend any one for that job.”

Bob, passing a window on his way to the door, sprang forward suddenly, grasped the open window ledges and then turned as hastily toward those behind him. His face was a study.

“There he is, now,” Bob stuttered. “He’s here again.”

“I saw his face,” shouted Bob pointing toward a young man in new overalls and cheap gloves who was running down a little tramway on which a car carried some castings.

“Was it Stewart?” panted Ned equally excited.

“Sure’s you’re born,” exclaimed Bob. “He certainly has nerve. Hey, you!” yelled Bob out of the open window.

Their older companions having joined them there was a quick explanation.

“A _Herald_ reporter!” almost shouted President Atkinson.

“And he’s been here four or five days trying to get a line on the _Ocean Flyer_,” broke in Alan angrily.

Mr. Atkinson started on a run for the door but a word from the _Herald_ manager halted him.

“The horse is stolen now,” began the editor, smiling. “Any way, I’ll guarantee you against the young man’s causing any trouble. Have some one bring him here. We’ll see what this means. He’s certainly persistent.”

“All of that,” replied Mr. Atkinson coldly. “We don’t care much for spies around here.”

“Nor I, anywhere,” replied the editor in a tone that made the manufacturer turn. “He probably thinks he is doing his duty. At any rate, he has done no harm.”

The party passed out of the dining room into Mr. Atkinson’s office. In a few minutes a clerk ushered the overalled young tram car conductor into the room. His inquisitors were all seated. “Buck” Stewart looked at them wonderingly. His face wore no smile but he did not seem especially alarmed.

“Isn’t your name Stewart?” asked the editor sharply.

“Buckingham Stewart,” was the only answer but, as the young man made a closer inspection of those about him, a look of recognition came into his face. As he met Ned’s glance there was even the ghost of a smile on his lips.

“What are you doing here?” went on the editor.

“Workin’.”

“What for?”

“To increase my fund of information.”

“By sticking your nose into other people’s business,” added President Atkinson warmly.

“I expect that’s true,” answered Stewart as he drew off his gloves and revealed two very white hands. He also made an attempt to clear his wet face of perspiration. “I’m a reporter—or almost was,” he added, his smile broadening into a magnetic grin.

The editor held a whispered talk with Mr. Atkinson which turned the manufacturer’s irritation into a milder mood.

“Were you sent here to-day?” resumed Stewart’s superior brusquely. “I told Mr. Latimer I might want to see you.”

“Then he forgot it,” exclaimed Stewart promptly. “I asked for orders last night and was told there were none.”

“But Mr. Latimer was in my office until after four o’clock,” went on the editor pointedly.

“I waited for him.”

“And he said—?”

“‘Nothing doin’, young man.’ Then I asked if I could come out here to-day and get my things.”

“What things?” asked his questioner.

“My gloves and my new overalls,” answered Buck without a smile.

“Have you been _getting_ these all day?”

“I asked the foreman if I could get off to go to New York,” responded Buck solemnly, “and he laughed at me.”

“And meanwhile—?” began the now almost smiling journalist.

“Meanwhile, I twice just escaped bein’ sent into the shed where the ‘Ocean Flyer’ is.”

Despite his efforts, the straight face of the editor was breaking into a laugh.

“Your story’s dead,” broke in Bob with a professional tone. “What are you hangin’ around here for?”

“I don’t know officially that it’s dead,” responded Buck. “I have an idea it isn’t. Any way, I thought I’d finish the job. But I just missed it.”

“What would ‘finish’ your job?” asked Ned suddenly and with animation.

“One good peek at your new airship.”

“Come with us,” exclaimed Ned laughing outright. “We’re just goin’ to look it over.”

“Stewart,” said the editor recovering himself, “you’d better get your time from the foreman. I am now on this assignment myself. We don’t want to make it a case of too many cooks.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When you’ve cleaned up, follow us. The _Herald_ has another assignment where you and I won’t clash.”

The puzzled Buck watched the editor withdraw, trying to decide just what this meant. Ned and Alan taking charge of the older men, Bob held back a moment.

“You’re Russell, ain’t you?” exclaimed Buck. “My name is Stewart. I’m in the business too.”

“I’ve heard all about you,” answered Bob. “You came near makin’ a mess o’ things by tippin’ our hand.”

“I reckon I ought to say I’m sorry but you know the game. It’s all right now; I’m fired from the job. And I guess it don’t necessarily mean I’m promoted, either. The city editor didn’t tell me to quit. So I stuck another day. Now I’m holdin’ a fine, large empty sack.”

Bob leaned over and caught Buck by the shoulder. The grimy Stewart was instantly alert.

“Say, kid,” said Bob in a half whisper, “there’s something doin’. Wash up and get on our trail.”

“Am I in wrong with the old man?” asked Buck eagerly in the same tone, catching Bob’s hand.

“Not so’s you could notice it,” answered Bob with a significant wink. “Trail us.”

The aeroplane setting-up room of the factory resembled a union depot in floor surface. Its south or yard front was a drop of heavy canvas with roof supports at one hundred feet intervals. Within this far-reaching compartment, and dwarfing all other forms of aircraft, stood the _Ocean Flyer_. A heavy tarpaulin, partly covering the big central car, gave an added air of mystery to the gigantic machine. Its unusual weight was indicated by the fact that the big airship was not resting on its extra size automobile landing wheels but was supported on temporary jacks.

“How do you get it in and out?” was the editor’s instant inquiry as he noticed the one hundred foot wide entrances and the wing spread of one hundred and seventy feet.

“The landing wheels turn to any angle,” responded Ned as he threw off his coat. “We move them sideways, push out one of the wing planes, turn the wheels back to a right angle and then ‘the tail follows the dog.’”

While the three boys sprang on the side galleries of the car and began to draw off the protecting cover, the visitors advanced under the high, wide, spidery planes and gazed in wonder at the metal marvel. One after another, on each side,