“Why, no, it didn’t seem to me that they took the time to do great damage; and that’s why I fancy they were scared off, somehow or other.  They went in a hurry, or else they would never have forgotten those things.  And when I looked around I made up my mind that they were just mad because they didn’t find our machine at home, and so tried to let us know that fact.”

“Perhaps it was a second detachment of the same crowd that came out here?” suggested Andy, speculatively.

“Tell me, what would they be doing with electric torches, and black masks?  Now, you can see that these have been pretty well used; they’re not new ones just cut out by pattern at home with mother’s scissors.  These have been made by an experienced operator, and were bought either for a mask ball or some other purpose.”

“Well, perhaps we’ll never know the truth about it,” grumbled Andy, who never liked anything to puzzle him and would lie awake half the night trying to find the answer to a conundrum that had been offered to him by a boy friend.

“Oh! yes, I’ve got a hunch that we will,” chirped his cousin, with a sublime confidence that quite won Andy’s heart; if he could not see any good reason for hope himself, the fact that his chum pinned his faith on it was enough to bolster up his own courage.

Meanwhile they were both as busy as bees, and the work was approaching completion.

“What are you looking up every little while that way for?” Frank asked, after noticing that Andy cocked his eye upward several times, and appeared to be scanning the heavens in an expectant manner; “the day is all right, so far as wind goes, and we ought to get along home without a bit of trouble.”

“Oh!  I wasn’t bothering my head about that part of it,” the other replied, with a scornful smile.  “We’ve been out in all sorts of weather; and now that we have a chance to try this new invention of the Wrights’, that makes it next to impossible to tilt an aeroplane over no matter how you move around when up in the air, we can feel safer than ever.  Even a fool would be kept from meeting with an accident when protected by that wonderful balancing bar that responds to the slightest movement of the human body.”

“Then it was something else you had on your mind, was it, Andy?”

“Well, I was wondering just what took Percy and Sandy out at daybreak this morning, that’s all,” replied the other.

“What’s that?  Did you see them pass over in their biplane this morning?” demanded the other.

“Felix woke me up at dawn to tell me there was a queer chugging overhead, that sort of scared him.  I jumped up, because of course I knew what that must mean.  And sure enough I was just in time to see a biplane pass over at a good height, and head up the lake.  I lost it back of the barn, because a flock of crows came flying along, stretching out for a mile or two; and among the lot I couldn’t make out just what was biplane and which was crow.  It was pretty high up, too, I thought.”