ry new aeroplanes,
drawing on the margins of the magazine with a tooth-mark-pitted pencil
stub.

Gertie was miles back, concealed behind piles of triplanes and
helicopters and following-surface monoplanes which the wizard
inventor, C. Ericson, was creating and ruthlessly destroying.... A
small boy was squalling in the seat opposite, and Carl took him from
his tired mother and lured him into a game of tit-tat-toe.

He joined the Turk and the wire-stringers at a prairie
hamlet--straggly rows of unpainted frame shanties, the stores with
tin-corniced false fronts that pretended to be two stories high. There
were pig-pens in the dooryards, and the single church had a square,
low, white steeple like the paper cap which Labor wears in the
posters. Farm-wagons were hitched before a gloomy saloon. Carl was
exceeding glum. But the Turk introduced him to a University of
Minnesota Pharmacy School student who was with the crew during
vacation, and the three went tramping across breezy, flowered
prairies. So began for Carl a galloping summer.

The crew strung telephone wire from pole to pole all day, playing the
jokes of hardy men, and on Sunday loafed in haystacks, recalling
experiences from Winnipeg to El Paso. Carl resolved to come back to
this life of the open, with Gertie, after graduation. He would buy a
ranch "on time." Or the Turk and Carl would go exploring in Alaska or
the Orient. "Law?" he would ask himself in monologues, "law? Me in a
stuffy office? Not a chance!"

The crew stayed for four weeks in a boom town of nine thousand,
installing a complete telephone system. South-east of the town lay
rolling hills. As Carl talked with the Turk and the Pharmacy School
man on a hilltop, the first evening of their arrival, he told them the
scientific magazine's prophecies about aviation, and noted that these
hills were of the sort Lilienthal would probably have chosen for his
glider-flights.

"Say! by the great Jim Hill, let's make us a glider!" he exulted,
sitting up, his eyelids flipping rapidly.

"Sure!" said the Pharmacy man. "How would you make one?"

"Why--uh--I guess you could make a frame out of willow--have to; the
willows along the creeks are the only kind of trees near here. You'd
cover it with varnished cotton--that's what Lilienthal did, anyway.
But darned if I know how you'd make the planes curved--cambered--like
he did. You got to have it that way. I suppose you'd use curved stays.
Like a quarter barrel-hoo