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Updated: June 6, 2025
Almost reverently they looked over the Sky-Bird. Through every possible climatic rigor the airplane had passed, and practically without any attention. Not once, from the time they had left this very airdrome until they had reached it again, after traversing close to 25,000 miles, had she been under shelter or sulked on them through deficient construction.
So, switching on the little dashboard electric lights to illuminate his instruments, he turned the Sky-Bird upward again. Through the very clouds which were expelling the rain, gathered from the warm Atlantic trade-winds, he guided the machine. At nine thousand feet he was above them, in clear dry air, with a blue, star-studded sky above his head and in the mellow glow of a full moon.
Mother just called upstairs and says she can't see the Sky-Bird any longer. Where are you now?" "Up above the clouds somewhere just north of Yonkers," replied Mr. Giddings laconically. "Oh, goodness! I must run right down and tell mother. Please don't go too high or too far, daddie, will you?" came the clearly agitated tones of the daughter. "Is Robert all right?" "Indeed he is.
To her admiring eyes, he had a look superior to simple strength and grace; the look of a great sky-bird about to mount, a fountain-like energy of stature, delightful to her contemplation. And he had the mouth women put faith in for decision and fixedness. She did, most fully; and reflecting how entirely she did so, the thought assailed her: some one must be loving him!
"Apparently they think the Sky-Bird is some gigantic member of the feathered kingdom about to swoop down and devour them for their sins," added Paul, who was equally amused. "Pete Deveaux and his crowd ought to have landed here some time this morning, though, and you would think the sight of their machine taking on gas would have gotten the blacks used to an airplane."
With three hundred gallons of gasoline in her tanks, and her broken tail-elevator well repaired, the Sky-Bird was ready at eleven o'clock that evening to take off.
It was two hours later that those in the Sky-Bird saw the coastline of Africa jutting out into the sea in a great bulge, and a little afterward they recognized landmarks agreeing with their chart. As they were slightly south of their course, Bob made the proper deviation, and in twenty minutes they were over a muddy field, marked with the looked-for white T, at Freetown, Sierra Leone.
As they now shot along on an even keel, it seemed hard to realize that they had at last started out on the important flight for which they had been planning and working so long; and as Paul watched his instruments and the scudding rival machine ahead, he could not help wondering what the issue of it all might be if the fates would be so kind as to smile enough on the Sky-Bird to bring her in ahead of the Clarion and within schedule time.
They swept up and around it, then settled, and climbed stiffly out of the Sky-Bird not twenty yards from another airplane, about which four men in flying-suits had been working. These fellows looked toward the new arrivals scowlingly. But our flyers, overjoyed to think they had caught the Clarion's crew, only smiled back indulgently.
Paul mounted to a height of about two thousand feet, then let the Sky-Bird straighten out in the direction of their next stop. He opened up the throttle little by little, and the machine rapidly gained momentum. But somehow the young pilot was dissatisfied.
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