“I withdraw my promise now this moment,” said the journalist, climbing carefully into the car. “Everything that you say henceforward will be printed. We shall have quite an exciting trip. We may even get to France. Anyhow, I shall have a clinking column for Monday’s _Herald_. You evidently hadn’t quite appreciated what the new journalism is.” Then there was silence in the mounting balloon. Ilam bent his malevolent eyes longingly upon the disappearing scene below. The glory of the sunshine was nothing to him. He wanted to be in the advertisement department, arranging future contracts for spaces on the programmes. He reflected that it was another of the mad caprices of Carpentaria that had got him into this grotesque scrape. And he was so angry that he forgot even to think of the danger to which he was exposed. “So here we are!” said the journalist. “And you can’t do anything!” CHAPTER III--Inspiration Permit me to say, Mr. Smithers,” Carpentaria remarked at last, “that your knavery is futile. The resources of civilization are not yet exhausted. We are, in fact, already descending.” He held tightly in his hand the end of a rope, which reached up high above them and was lost in the mass of cordage. He had opened the valve to its widest. “Don’t venture to move,” he added, “or Mr. Ilam will break your head for you. This affair will cost us nothing but a few thousand cubic feet of gas at a half-a-crown a thousand. What it will cost you, I shall have to consider.” And without saying anything further for the moment, he unloosed a very thin cable that was wound round a windlass in the car itself, and, tying a white flag at the end of it, he began to lower it rapidly over the edge of the car. Thanks to the perfect calm which reigned, the balloon was still well over the Amusements Park. Soon the voyagers could perceive the excited movements of the crowds below, and then the white flag touched earth, and was seized by the eager hands of the balloonists, and slowly the balloon, in a condition bordering on collapse, subsided to the ground with the gentleness of a fatigued British workman falling asleep. And great cheers, for the second time that day, filled the air. “You might have been sure,” said Carpentaria, when they were ten feet off safety, “that in a show like this due precautions would be taken against accidents and idiots!” Smithers, nearly as limp as the balloon, made no reply. Josephus Ilam glared over him. “It’s nothing, it’s nothing!” cried Carpentaria to the staff, who besieged the party with questions. “Fill her up as quick as you can, attach the rope, and get ready for your public. Don’t bother me!” And he leapt out of the car and was running, literally running, away, when Ilam called out: “Hi! wait a minute. What’s to be done with this maniac here?” And Ilam muttered to himself, “Why does he run away like that? What’s his next caprice going to be?”