"We're off!" bellowed the Major, jamming his hat down on his head and clenching his teeth tightly. "Away she goes!" called Joe, his face set, his eyes glued on the deck before him. Those two propellers hissed and roared as they rotated, the biplane resting so tranquilly a moment earlier beneath the transparent roof of her shed leaped into the open, her wheels already engaged with the rails placed there to guide them. In a moment or two she was speeding along them at forty miles an hour, so fast, indeed, that Dick could feel her lifting already. He sat down hard, bit his lip, and tried to look as if the trip before him was of little moment. But the gallant Dick's heart was fluttering in the most uncomfortable manner. Indeed, we must report the fact that Mr. Midshipman Hamshaw was almost reduced to the condition of abject funk. For the machine lifted of a sudden. The deck of the airship, that deck which only a few hours before had seemed to the midshipman so insecure, so frail, so wanting in stability, and now--so curious is the change of opinion brought by altered circumstances--which offered such a firm standing, that deck flashed from beneath the biplane. One second there was the familiar, transparent mass of the airship beneath them; the next they were perhaps a hundred feet from her, out in the open, suspended on thin air, supported by the atmosphere upon a machine which relied on no gas to sustain it, but merely upon the upward push of the ether into which she had rushed. No wonder that the usually dashing Dick clutched firmly to the side of the cab and uttered a breathless "Jingo!" CHAPTER XII Carl Aboard the Biplane There is a very old and no doubt true saying that everything comes to those who wait, and Mr. Carl Reitberg may be said to have been one of these fortunate individuals. For all that he desired seemed to be about to be consummated. "At last! A brilliant inspiration, really," he was telling himself almost at the identical moment when Joe Gresson set out from the great airship with the Major, the Colonel, and Dick, and swooped into space upon his wonderful biplane. "A really brilliant inspiration. Here have I been thinking and bothering and cudgelling my brains for a means to--to--er--well, to put a stop to what might well be an astounding triumph for that Andrew Provost and his conceited nephew, when a sudden thought strikes me, all difficulties are cleared away, and the future becomes rosy."