“You mean they were secretive about the fact that they were flying over an open field?” “I guess,” said Kumler, grinning, after a moment’s reflection, “the truth is that we were just plain dumb.” James M. Cox, owner of the _Daily News_, has likewise confessed that “none of us believed the reports” of flights. One fact that kept the earlier flights relatively inconspicuous was that much of the time the plane was within 10 or 15 feet of the ground. Only occasionally was it up as high as 50 feet. There were no flights beyond the field itself, because if necessary to make a forced landing elsewhere, dragging the machine back to its shed might not have been easy. The Wrights had aimed at first to avoid being in the air when an interurban car was passing. But that precaution soon proved to be unnecessary. Few people ever paid any attention to the flights. One day, though, the general manager of the interurban line was on a passing car when the plane was in the air and he ordered the car stopped. He and the chief engineer of the line, who was with him, got off and stayed a while to look at the incredible sight. Across the Springfield pike from the field lived the Beard family, tenants on the Torrence Huffman farm. Whenever the plane landed abruptly Mrs. Beard was likely to dash across the road with a bottle of arnica, feeling sure it would be needed, as sometimes it was. But there were few other visitors. Two somewhat mysterious visitors did come, however. The Wrights saw two men wandering about near-by fields during most of one day and thought they must be hunters, though there was not much game thereabouts. Again the next day the two strangers were seen, and finally they came across the field to where the Wrights were adjusting their machine. One of them carried a camera. They asked if visitors were permitted. “Yes, only we’d rather you didn’t take any pictures,” one of the brothers courteously replied. The man with the camera set it down off to one side, twenty feet away, as if to make it plain that he was not trying to sneak any shots. Then he inquired if it was all right to look into the shed. The brothers told him to make himself right at home. Was he a newspaperman? No, he said, he was not a newspaperman, though he sometimes did writing for publication. That was as near as he came to introducing himself. After the callers had gone, Charlie Taylor, the Wrights’ mechanic, said: “That fellow’s no writer. At least he’s no ordinary writer. When he looked at the different parts of the machine he called them all by their right names.” Later the Wrights learned the identity of the visitor. Orville chanced to see a picture of him in a New York newspaper. His identity was confirmed some time afterward when he and Orville were formally introduced to each other--though neither referred to their previous meeting. The man had been chief engineer for Professor Langley of the Smithsonian Institution.