"The Nameless! The Nameless wins!"
Mortlake paled, and caught at a post erected to hold up a telephone line.
He gazed at the oncoming aeroplanes. There were three of them now, but one
was far behind, laboring slowly. But the first was unquestionably the
_Golden Butterfly_. He could catch the yellow glint of her wings. And that
second craft--its silvery sheen betrayed it--was the Mortlake _Cobweb_, as
Roy had called it.
"Come on! Come on!" shouted Mortlake, uselessly as he knew, "what's the
matter with you?"
But alas, the _Cobweb_ didn't "come on." Some three or four minutes after
the _Golden Butterfly_ had alighted and been swallowed up in a surging,
yelling throng of enthusiasm-crazed aero fans, the _Cobweb_ fluttered
wearily to the ground, unnoticed almost amid the excitement over the
_Golden Butterfly's_ feat.
Mortlake raged, old Mr. Harding almost wept, and Fanning sulkily explained
that it wasn't his fault, the cylinders having overheated again. But not
all of this could wipe out those figures that had just been put up on the
board, which proclaimed a victory for the Prescott aeroplane by a margin
of three and twenty-one hundredths minutes!
CHAPTER XXIV.
FRIENDS AND FOES--CONCLUSION.
The winning of the "Sky Cruise," as the newspapers had dubbed it, was the
talk of Hampton that night.
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