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.  The Silver Cobweb was among them.

Fanning was in the driver’s seat.  As a passenger he carried Regina Mortlake.  She looked very stunning in her lurid aviation costume, and her handsome face was as calm as chiseled marble.  Her nervousness only displayed itself by a constant tapping of her gauntleted fingers.

Fanning finished oiling the motor and adjusting grease cups and timers, and straightening up, glanced nervously about him.  Still no sign of the Nameless.

“I guess they’ve got scared off by the wind,” he grinned to Mortlake, who, with the elder Harding and several machinists, stood by the side of the Cobweb.

“I doubt it,” rejoined Mortlake; “it would take more than that to alarm those girls.  And just to think that all our trouble to out-maneuver them has gone for nothing.”

“You did a bad thing when you let Eccles and that other chap get away,” commented Fanning; “I don’t like their disappearance at all.”

“Why?”

“Well, for one thing, they know a good deal that would make it very awkward for us if they fell into the hands of anyone who disliked us.  And again——­”

“Pshaw!  You are alarming yourself over nothing.  They were well paid and they wouldn’t dare to make trouble.  If they told about us they’d implicate themselves.”

“Just the same I don’t feel easy.  Hullo! there goes the second bomb.  That fellow’s just going to touch it off, and——­”

At the same instant the doors of the Nameless’s shed were flung open.  From them emerged the glistening form of the golden-winged Butterfly.  Half a dozen men whom Jimsy had hired pushed the aerial craft rapidly across the field to the starting line.  So engrossed was the crowd in watching the other machines that they hardly noticed the arrival of the added starter.

But not so Mortlake and his companions.  They watched, with jaundiced eyes, the forthcoming of their dreaded rival, and if wishes could have disabled her, the Golden Butterfly would never have flown on that day.