There was nothing to do but let it go straight ahead. It was slowing up, but four tons which has been going close to sixty miles an hour can’t stop as quick as a motorless Ford going up Pike’s Peak when the brakes are applied. As inevitably as fate itself, I was trundling swiftly toward those trees, with only a frail cockpit between myself and them, and two props to hem me in and keep me from jumping. I cut the switches fifty feet from the trees. Up went my goggles, and off went my belt. I got to my feet on the seat the second before the ship plunged over the embankment. The trees were ten feet ahead. As it crashed over the lip of the field toward them I crouched, and leaped like a kangaroo. And by the seven thousand sweethearts of King Solomon I got my hands around a limb that swayed underneath me, and there I clung, like a monkey by its tail, thirty feet above the base of the tree. Had I gone down with the ship all that would have remained of Slim Evans would have been an over-sized pancake. The four-ton ship crashed against the sturdy trees, and the observer’s cockpit crumpled like an eggshell. The trees swept half through both wings, and at the finish one great oak was the exclusive occupant of the cockpit which had once been mine. I’d have been wrapped around it in loving embrace, never to leave it until they scraped me off. I scrambled on this swaying reed of a limb, and worked my way back toward the trunk of the tree. I had no time for the fainting, screaming, yelling and generally hysterical bunch of nitwits on the field, but safe in a crotch of the tree gazed down upon the river. There was Fernald’s Martin, half-submerged, and on the upflung tail was Mr. Fernald himself, accompanied by Mr. Bailey. I was so relieved I let out a loud yelp. If I could talk as loud as that habitually we wouldn’t have had to wire Washington at all. Fernald, squatting like a frog on a lily pad, waved airily to me, clinging pensively to my perch in a tree. “Don’t mind if I leave this here for a while, do you Slim?” he inquired in his placid way. “Hurt?” “Nope. How about you?” “Bailey’s got a broken rib, or maybe two or three or four,” yelled Fernald. “Otherwise all present and accounted for. Looks to me as though there was dirty work along the river.” “I’ll see about a boat for you,” I told him, and started to climb down the tree toward the surging mob beneath me. I oiled up the mental machinery and had it whirring away at a great rate before I got down. While still ten feet up I gave orders. “Get back on the field and stay there,” I told the crowd. “And I mean it. Beat it--fast! All but Marston! Wait a minute. Who’s got a boat or knows of one?” “I--I got one!” stuttered one red-faced man with a gray mustache of the vintage of 1850. “Get at it quick?” “Y-Yes.” “Get it and get out after the two men on the river--quick! Rest of you back on the field.”