“All right!  Let go!”

Forward, like a hound from the leash, sprang the little monoplane.  It ran perhaps for five hundred feet, and then, with a tilting of the wings, to set the air currents against them, it sprang into the air.

“We’re off!” cried Mr. Damon, waving his hand to those on the ground below.

“Yes, we’re off,” murmured Tom.  “Now for the Quaker City!”

He had mapped out a route for himself the night before, and now, picking out the land-marks, he laid as straight a course as possible for Philadelphia.

The sensation of flying along, two thousand feet high, in a machine almost as frail as a canoe, was not new to Tom.  It was, in a degree, to Mr. Damon, for, though the latter had made frequent trips in the large airship, this mode of locomotion, as if he was on the back of some bird, was much different.  Still, after the first surprise, he got used to it.

“Bless my finger ring!” he exclaimed, “I like it!”

“I thought you would,” said Tom, in a shout, and he adjusted the oil feed to send more lubricant into the cylinders.

The earth stretched out below them, like some vari-colored relief map, but they could not stop to admire any particular spot long, for they were flying fast, and were beyond a scene almost as quickly as they had a glimpse of it.

“How long will it take us?” yelled Mr. Damon into Tom’s ear.

“I hope to do it in three hours,” shouted back the young inventor.

“What!  Why it takes the train over five hours.”

“Yes, I know, but we’re going direct, and it’s only about two hundred and fifty miles.  That’s only about eighty an hour.  We’re doing seventy-five now, and I haven’t let her out yet.”

“She goes faster than the Red cloud,” cried Mr. Damon.

Tom nodded.  It was hard work to talk in that rush of air.  For an hour they shot along, their speed gradually increasing.  Tom called out the names of the larger places they passed over.  He was now doing better than eighty an hour as the gage showed.  The trip was a glorious one, and the eyes of the young inventor and his friend sparkled in delight as they rushed forward.  Two hours passed.

“Going to make it?” fairly howled Mr. Damon.

Tom nodded again.

“Be there in time for dinner,” he announced in a shout.

It lacked forty minutes of the three hours when Tom, pointing with one hand down below, while with the other he gripped the lever of the rudder, called: 

“North Philadelphia!”

“So soon?” gasped Mr. Damon.  “Well, we certainly made speed!  Where are you going to land?”

“I don’t know,” answered the young inventor, “I’ll have to pick out the best place I see.  It’s no fun landing in a city.  No room to run along, after you’re down.”

“What’s the matter with Franklin Field?” cried Mr. Damon.  “Out where they play football.”