ore
him, the dream of his life had been the conquest of the air by means of
vessels which flew as a bird flew, that is to say by their own inherent
strength, and without the aid of gas-bags or buoyancy chambers, which
he, like all the disciples of Nadar, Jules Verne, Maxim and Langley, had
looked upon as mere devices of quackery, or at the best, playthings of
rich people, who usually paid for their amusement with their lives.

His father died soon after he left college, and left him a comfortable
little estate on the north-western slopes of the Alleghanies, and a
fortune in cash and securities of a million dollars. The estate gave him
plenty to live upon comfortably, so he devoted his million to the
realisation of his ideal. Ratliffe Parmenter, who only had a few hundred
thousand dollars to begin with, laughed at him, but one day, after a
long argument, just as a sort of sporting bet, he signed a bond to pay
two million dollars for the first airship built by his friend that
should fly in any direction, independently of the wind, and carry a dead
weight of a ton in addition to a crew of four men.

Newson Hingeston registered the bond with all gravity, and deposited it
at his bank, and then their life-ways parted. Parmenter plunged into the
vortex of speculation, went under sometimes, but always came to the top
again with a few more millions in his insatiable grasp, and these
millions, after the manner of their kind, had made more millions, and
these still more, until he gave up the task of measuring the gigantic
pile and let it grow.

Meanwhile, his friend had spent the best twenty-five years of his life,
all his fortune, and every dollar he could raise on his estate, in
pursuit of the ideal which he had reached a few minutes later than the
eleventh hour. Then he had sent that cable. Of course, he wanted the two
millions, but what had so suddenly happened in England had instantly
convinced him that he was now the possessor of an invention which many
millions would not buy, and which might decide the fate of the world.

Within twelve hours of his arrival at his friend's house, Ratliffe
Parmenter was entirely convinced that Newson Hingeston had been
perfectly justified in calling him across the Atlantic, for the very
good reason that he spent the greater part of the night taking flying
leaps over the Alleghanies, nerve-shuddering dives through valleys and
gorges, and vast, skimming flights over dim, half-visible plains