It sure was “different from the old _Hustle_,” mused Hike. It could not even begin to carry so much weight, but it was faster, in comparison, for it made seventy to a hundred miles an hour with a forty horse-power motor, while the _Hustle_ could only go two hundred to two hundred and fifty miles an hour, at the fastest, with two hundred and thirty horse-power. “Seventy miles—that’ll be fast enough for the fellows, I guess,” laughed Hike. He was shown just how the machine worked. He studied the new Gnome motor; the elevating planes—which were parts of a flat tail, at the back of the machine, instead of being separate planes in front. He sat in the aviator’s cockpit, forward of the wings a little, and saw how the engine, though in front of him, worked a propeller, way back at the end of the tail. While the Lieutenant was learnedly explaining that this fish-shaped body was in the “streamline form”—that is, the form best suited to pass through either air or water—Hike was wild to plunge out into the air again. It didn’t seem quite right to have just two long wings on the machine, instead of a whole nest of little tetrahedral planes all around him, but he liked this hot-headed, fiery little machine. Half the night they spent in learning just how the machine worked; and next morning, the Lieutenant and the owner of it let him take it out on the aviation field for a little practise in speeding it along the ground, bobbing on its forward wheels, with its tail waggling in the air. Then he tried “grass cutting”—taking it up only a few feet. The motor was of about the same sort as the _Hustle’s_ great Kulnoch, and by noon he felt that he could handle the machine in a respectable, honest wind that would not try to play tag with him. He said as much to Lieutenant Adeler, but that officer was as cautious as he was brave. After lunch, at a country-club near the aerodrome, the three strolled back to the Paulhan-Tatin again. The mechanics wheeled it out of its aerodrome. Hike crawled into it, and sat there, idly. Suddenly there was the buzz of a motor starting, and a Modified Jolls Biplane ran along its course and launched up, headed for the south, disappearing in a few moments, as though it were enjoying itself. The sun flashed on its cloth surfaces. It seemed to be part of the blue sky. It was too much for Hike. “Start the motor—give the propeller a couple of whirls, will you!” Hike muttered to a mechanic, and an instant later he was hurtling down the field, at full speed, then jumping off the ground. He soared up—up—up—then turned, in a graceful circle, passed over the hangars, and headed north—toward Santa Benicia.