the ground. He was actually flying! He kicked wildly in air.
All his body strained to get balance in the air, to control itself, to
keep from falling, of which he now felt the world-old instinctive
horror.

The plane began to tip to one side, apparently irresistibly, like a
sheet of paper turning over in the wind. Carl was sick with fear for a
tenth of a second. Every cell in his body shrank before coming
disaster. He flung his legs in the direction opposite to the tipping
of the plane. With this counter-balancing weight, the glider righted.
It was running on an even keel, twenty-five feet above the sloping
ground, while Carl hung easily by the double bar beneath, like a
circus performer with a trapeze under each arm. He ventured to glance
down. The turf was flowing beneath him, a green and sunny blur. He
exulted. Flying!

The glider dipped forward. Carl leaned back, his arms wide-spread. A
gust struck the plane, head on. Overloaded at the back, it tilted
back, then soared up to thirty-five or forty feet. Slow-seeming,
inevitable, the whole structure turned vertically upward.

Carl dangled there against a flimsy sheet of wood and cotton, which
for part of a second stuck straight up against the wind, like a paper
on a screen-door.

The plane turned turtle, slithered sidewise through the air, and
dropped, horizontal now, but upside down, Carl on top.

Thirty-five, forty feet down.

"I'm up against it," was his only thought while he was falling.

The left tip of the plane smashed against the ground, crashing,
horribly jarring. But it broke the fall. Carl shot forward and landed
on his shoulder.

He got up, rubbing his shoulder, wondering at the suspended life in
the faces of the other two as they ran down-hill toward him.

"Jiminy," he said. "Glad the glider broke the fall. Wish we had time
to make a new glider, with wing-warp. Say, we'll be late on the job.
Better beat it P. D. Q."

The others stood gaping.

CHAPTER VIII

A pile of shoes and nose-guards and bicycle-pumps and broken
hockey-sticks; a wall covered with such stolen signs as "East College
Avenue," and "Pants Presser Ladys Garments Carefully Done," and "Dr.
Sloats Liniment for Young and Old"; a broken-backed couch with a
red-and-green afghan of mangy tassels; an ink-spattered wooden table,
burnt in small black spots along the edges; a plaster bust of Martha
Washington with a mustache added in ink; a few books; an inundation of
sweaters