"Frank, that will get you to Hendon at one-forty-five, and a taxi will do the rest. I'll come as fast as I can in the motor, and if we don't get pinched again I may get to dear old London in time to see the finish." "All ready," sang out Butler. A half dozen attendants clung fast to the trail of the big biplane while another spun the propeller. The engine immediately sprang into noisy life, the roar of the exhaust drowning out all human speech in the neighborhood. Gleason saw the hands of the aviator drop off the steering-wheel in a downward sweeping signal which meant "let go," a signal instantly obeyed by the attendants, who dropped flat on the ground while the great tail of the birdlike monster swept over their heads with an ever increasing rush. For fifty or sixty feet the running gear of the machine kept on the ground, but, as the velocity increased and Butler elevated his plane, the machine gradually cleared the earth and soared aloft. The Codfish watched it as it rose and followed it in the vastness of the sky vault until there was but a mere dot against the fluffy clouds in the northern sky. CHAPTER XIV. PROGRESS AND A WRECK. We will leave Frank Armstrong shooting Londonward in the largest passenger-carrying biplane in the Burtside School for Aviators, seated on a mere chip of a seat, holding on with a death grip to the slender upright of seasoned spruce, and turn our attention back to the morning at Brighton. Contrary to what Gleason and Frank imagined as they sat in their disabled motor on the highway some miles outside of Brighton at the hour their train was scheduled to leave, they were not missed at first. In the hurry of leaving their temporary training quarters, the team managers and assistants had so much to do that they left the business of getting from the hotel to the station, a matter of only a few hundred yards, to the individuals themselves. No one happened to notice, as they left the hotel in straggling groups of three and four, that Armstrong was not with them. At the station half a dozen compartments on the London train having been reserved in advance, the athletes tumbled aboard without even a thought of luggage, taking it for granted, with the usual cheerful carelessness of traveling athletes, that everything would be all right. Each was concerned only for himself. It was not to be thought of for a moment that any member of either team would be so foolish as to get himself left behind. The ten-thirty on the London and Brighton was the vestibule and corridor type of train, not like the ordinary single compartment coach in common use on English and Continental railroads. It was therefore possible to pass from car to car and from compartment to compartment on this train much the same as on an American Pullman train, and visiting between team members shortly began. Trainer Black, going the rounds, discovered that Armstrong was missing.