"Den we are ready to start," declared the darkey, solemnly. "Nottin' will now disturb de continuity ob de ebenin's enj'yment. Forward, march, is our motter!" And he marched away to the flying machine and got aboard with the coop and Buttsy in his arms. The professor had found the last of his possessions he wished to take with him. He followed the negro aboard. The _Snowbird_ was already outside the hangar and on its wheels, ready for the start. This time they dispensed with the professor's catapult, for it would be necessary to have the trucks attached to the aeroplane to enable her to start properly from any point on which they might land. The workshop and plant in general were left in charge of a watchman and caretaker, and only this man was present when Jack took his place in the controller's seat and Mark started the powerful motor and clambered aboard. The craft ran across the field, at first slowly and then more rapidly as Jack increased the speed. The flying machine began to lift almost immediately. "Hurrah!" shouted the irrepressible Jack. "We're off!" "About nor-norwest is the course, Jack," cried Mark Sampson, likewise inspired by the flight of the _Snowbird_. As for Washington White, he gazed down to the dusky earth below them and his eyes rolled. "Gollyation!" he muttered. "If Buttsy should fall down dere, he'd suah jounce himself some; wouldn't he?" CHAPTER IV "WHO GOES THERE?" With the moonlight lying like a benediction over the fields and forests of Maine, the _Snowbird_, her motor humming like a huge bumble-bee, and her propellers and controls working in perfect order, swept on her course into the northwest. The lights of Easton, ten miles from their home, melted into the earth-shadow behind the sky-voyagers within the first hour of the sure-to-be eventful journey. Jack Darrow did not force the pace of the flying machine. They had a long and trying flight before them. The machine as a whole had been tried out only two or three times during the few days that had elapsed since she was completed and this present expedition had been planned. These short flights had served merely to put the parts in good working trim; but the lad knew better than to make the pace that of top-speed from the start. He wanted her to "warm up." He knew that the _Snowbird_ could make one hundred twenty-five miles an hour. But such speed was likely to shake something loose and cripple the mechanism. A flight of seventy or eighty miles an hour would bring them well into Canada by noon of the next day. They would have to there descend at, or near, some town, and report themselves and the nature of their flight to the authorities. This was to be done as a precaution in case they had a breakdown somewhere in crossing British possessions. A passport would then aid them if they were obliged to call upon the authorities in the heart of Canada for aid.