a young
engineer from Boston Tech., who swore every morning at 7.07 (when it
rained boiling water as enthusiastically as though it had never done
such a thing before) that he was going to Chihuahua, mining. There was
Cock-eye Corbett, an ex-sailor, who was immoral and a Lancashireman,
and knew more about blackbirding and copra and Kanakas, and the
rum-holes from Nagasaki to Mombasa, than it is healthy for a civil
servant to know.

Every Sunday a sad-faced man with ash-colored hair and bony fingers,
who had been a lieutenant in the Peruvian navy, a teacher in St.
John's College, China, and a sub-contractor for railroad construction
in Montana, and who was now a minor clerk in the cool, lofty offices
of the Materials and Supplies Department, came over from Colon,
relaxed in a tilted-back chair, and fingered the Masonic charm on his
horsehair watch-guard, while he talked with the P. R. R. conductor and
the others about ruby-hunting and the Relief of Peking, and Where is
Hector Macdonald? and Is John Orth dead? and Shall we try to climb
Chimborazo? and Creussot guns and pig-sticking and Swahili tribal
lore. These were a few of the topics regarding which he had inside
information. The others drawled about various strange things which
make a man discontented and bring him no good.

Carl was full member of the circle because of his tales of the Bowery
and the Great Riley Show, and because he pretended to be rather an
authority on motors for dirigibles, about which he read in
_Aeronautics_ at the Y. M. C. A. reading-room. It is true that at this
time, early 1907, the Wrights were still working in obscurity, unknown
even in their own Dayton, though they had a completely successful
machine stowed away; and as yet Glenn Curtiss had merely developed a
motor for Captain Baldwin's military dirigible. But Langley and Maxim
had endeavored to launch power-driven, heavier-than-air machines;
lively Santos Dumont had flipped about the Eiffel Tower in his
dirigible, and actually raised himself from the ground in a ponderous
aeroplane; and in May, 1907, a sculptor named Delagrange flew over six
hundred feet in France. Various crank inventors were "solving the
problem of flight" every day. Man was fluttering on the edge of his
earthy nest, ready to plunge into the air. Carl was able to make
technical-sounding predictions which caught the imaginations of the
restless children.

* * * * *

The adventurers k