"
"Why?"
"The wind's freshening. Not more than a half dozen of these aeroplanes
will venture up. Bother the luck, if it wasn't for the _Golden Butterfly_,
we'd have a clean sweep."
"This is only the first day," counseled Regina; "the points scored to-day
will not count for so very much. There's plenty of time."
"Humph," grumbled Fanning, and as this conversation had brought them up to
the _Silver Cobweb_, he broke it off to communicate his intelligence
concerning the Prescott aeroplane to Mortlake, who heard it with a
lowering brow.
Bang!
A bomb shot upward and exploded, in a cloud of thick yellow smoke, in
mid-air.
"The half-hour signal," cried Jimsy; "everything ready?"
"As ready as it ever will be," rejoined Peggy nervously fingering a stay
wire.
The navigators of the Nameless were still inside the shed. The doors were
still closed. Peggy had decided not to risk having the machine damaged by
the crowd by bringing it out before the very last moment. As the bomb
sounded Jimsy drew out his watch. He kept it in his hand awaiting the
elapse of the preliminary half-hour.
Outside, as Fanning had prophesied, there had been a great and sweeping
reduction in the number of aeroplanes that were to start. The puffy wind
had scared most of the entrants of the freak types and only five of the
more conventional kind of aircraft were on the starting line.
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