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To the other, all the majesty of Mars was incarnate in the person of Monsieur Ducroy, posing valiantly in fur-lined coat and shining top-hat while he chatted with an officer whose trim, athletic figure was well set off by his aviating uniform. As Lanyard drew near, this last brought his heels together smartly, saluted the Minister of War, and strode off toward the flying-machine.
Now I have no desire to come between two such turtle-doves, especially when one of them is one of those German flying-machine Taubes and goes around dropping dynamite-bombs on me through club roofs. "I'm not afraid of your little friend, and as soon as I get well I'll get him; but I want it to be purely an exercise in the fistic art, and not a public fluttering of family linen.
They saw its huge outline and its patrolling black guards. It had not changed position. Even a group of gaping Miami citizens lent reality to the situation, and some of the latter were gazing aloft at the other flying-machine, as our friends had been doing. The stranger above them evidently had no intention of stopping.
There was neither time nor opportunity for taking notes, for that long rope straightened out in the fraction of a second, throwing all prostrate as the flying-machine was jerked upward with awful force. All around them raged and roared the mighty winds, while missiles of almost every description pelted and pounded both machine and inmates during those few seconds of extraordinary peril.
He decided to abandon the shattered flying-machine. He wandered through the trees for some time, and then struck a road that seemed to his urban English eyes to be remarkably wide but not properly "made." Neither hedge nor ditch nor curbed distinctive footpath separated it from the woods, and it went in that long easy curve which distinguishes the tracks of an open continent.
"He stared at me as though I were something unreal. He had taken off his coat and rolled his shirt sleeves up. He had on bright yellow boots and a hateful necktie. You, indeed! I would as soon believe," she concluded, "that you had fallen, to-day from a flying-machine." "Let us believe that," he begged, earnestly. "Why not? Indeed, in a sense it is true.
"It would be suicidal to make the attempt, even if we could; which I doubt." Waldo gave a sudden cry, pointing upward where, far above that destructive storm, could be seen a brace of buzzards floating on motionless wings, wholly undisturbed by the tumult below. "If we were only like that!" the lad cried, longingly. "If a flying-machine could be built like those turkey-buzzards!
Much came from Cleveland. It all gathered here, and whirled about indefinitely, and over it all gathered daily a greater abundance of birds. Bert spent two more days upon Goat Island, and finished all his provisions except the cigarettes and mineral water, before he brought himself to try the Asiatic flying-machine. Even at last he did not so much go off upon it as get carried off.
He was as his State had made him, and the reader must not imagine because he was a little Cockney cad, that he was absolutely incapable of grasping the idea of the Butteridge flying-machine. But he found it stiff and perplexing.
Other versions of the story give a different date, and assign the pretended ascent to 1709. The above engraving, extracted from the "Bibliotheque de la Rue de Richelieu," is an exact copy of Guzman's supposed balloon. In 1678 a mechanician of Salle, in Maine, named Besnier invented a flying-machine.
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