"It is seven places or my training as to what five and two make is all to the bad. I tell you it's a cinch. I'd put up all my spare cash on it, and walk home cheerfully if I lost out. But, pshaw! we can't lose!" Conversation was checked by the appearance of several athletes who had emerged from the Club locker-room doorway, and who were walking across the turfed stretch to the track. They were seen to be Americans, and a ringing shout went up from their supporters which brought smiles to the faces of the young athletes. The English spectators applauded the Americans with hand-clapping. By twos and threes the athletes made their appearance on the track before the hour set for the beginning of the games, for the day was bright and warm and the sun of more advantage to them than the shade and cool of the training quarters. It is not our purpose to narrate in detail the doings of the half hundred athletes who struggled for the honor of their colleges and country that afternoon nor how records fell and predictions of experts were set at naught, how the balance swung this way and that, how the mercurial American cheer-leader ruined the throats of his countrymen for the encouragement of the team striving desperately on field and track. We are more intimately concerned with Frank Armstrong whom we left a thousand feet more or less in the air, taking a last desperate chance to be in at the finish on the Queen's Club track. Frank afterwards said that he experienced no fear of any kind as the flying machine glided upward from the earth. At first there was the sensation of great speed, though the machine was comparatively close to the ground, but as the height increased that sensation diminished. Instead of the machine seeming to rise, the earth seemed to drop away leaving the machine stationary. Below, the country revealed itself like a map, with the highways and lanes standing out sharply. To the south he got the glint of the English Channel, and to the north was a great black smudge which he took to be London with its smoke from tens of thousands of chimneys. "Going higher," shouted Butler. "Bad currents down here." The words came faintly to Frank through the roaring of the wind and the sharp crackle of the engine exhaust. The plane plunged and rocked in an air billow.