he angles of his wing-tips, depressed
the front horizontal rudder, and swung over the rear vertical rudder to
meet the tilting thrust of the wind. As the machine came back to an even
keel, and he knew that he was now wholly in the invisible stream, he
readjusted the wing-tips, rapidly away from him during the several
moments of his discomfiture.

The pigeon drove straight on for the Alameda County shore, and it
was near this shore that Winn had another experience. He fell into an
air-hole. He had fallen into air-holes before, in previous flights, but
this was a far larger one than he had ever encountered. With his eyes
strained on the ribbon attached to the pigeon, by that fluttering bit of
color he marked his fall. Down he went, at the pit of his stomach that
old sink sensation which he had known as a boy he first negotiated
quick-starting elevators. But Winn, among other secrets of aviation, had
learned that to go up it was sometimes necessary first to go down.
The air had refused to hold him. Instead of struggling futilely and
perilously against this lack of sustension, he yielded to it. With
steady head and hand, he depressed the forward horizontal rudder--just
recklessly enough and not a fraction more--and the monoplane dived head
foremost and sharply down the void. It was falling with the keenness of
a knife-blade. Every instant the speed accelerated frightfully. Thus
he accumulated the momentum that would save him. But few instants were
required, when, abruptly shifting the double horizontal rudders forward
and astern, he shot upward on the tense and straining plane and out of
the pit.

At an altitude of five hundred feet, the pigeon drove on over the town
of Berkeley and lifted its flight to the Contra Costa hills. Young Winn
noted the campus and buildings of the University of California--his
university--as he rose after the pigeon.

Once more, on these Contra Costa hills, he early came to grief. The
pigeon was now flying low, and where a grove of eucalyptus presented a
solid front to the wind, the bird was suddenly sent fluttering wildly
upward for a distance of a hundred feet. Winn knew what it meant. It had
been caught in an air-surf that beat upward hundreds of feet where
the fresh west wind smote the upstanding wall of the grove. He reefed
hastily to the uttermost, and at the same time depressed the angle of
his flight to meet that upward surge. Nevertheless, the monoplane was
tossed fully three hundred