ejaculated their host, in a great fuss.
"Young men, I was not thinking. Will you ever pardon me for this
transgression of etiquette?"

The flyers smilingly hastened to assure both their friends that they
had not lost their appetites in the least; that they really had enjoyed
every morsel of food and information passed out. They remained to chat
long enough to convince the lady and gentleman of this fact, and then
took their departure. They had actually spent a most entertaining
hour, one which they would not have missed for a good deal.

At eight-fifty local time the Sky-Bird took off for her long hop to
Apia, principal city of Upolu, an island of the Samoan group. It was
the beginning of their long flight across the big Pacific, an ocean so
wide, so fraught with perils, that no aircraft had ever before
attempted to negotiate it. Some eight thousand miles away over those
great waters lay Panama, their goal. Would they reach it ahead of
their rivals? Would they reach it within their schedule of ten days?

To these two queries in their minds, our stout-hearted, young friends
answered doggedly and determinedly, "Yes!" Fortune might frown upon
them, it is true; but if so they would face her smilingly, with
confidence, with that pertinacity for which Americans are famous, and
try to make her look pleasant, too! They felt that they must win; that
they would win. And yet they left Port Darwin handicapped by being
fully three hours behind their rivals.

As they wheeled over the town they waved a last farewell to the
hundreds below, whose forms they could just make out in the
fast-gathering darkness. Then, turning off straight east, they flew
over the dark-green canopy of eucalyptus forests of fertile Arnhem
Land, and crossed the Gulf of Carpentaria in the full darkness of the
night. When they passed over Cape York peninsula, Tom was at the
throttle, and the younger boys had been asleep for a number of hours.
They had now left the whole continent of Australia behind them, and
were facing the broad wastes of the Pacific.

Their perils had begun in earnest. Should anything happen to cause
them to be forced down, there was nothing but a vast basin of water
miles deep to catch them, and there would not be one chance in a
thousand that they would survive. This, surely, was no place and no
time for engines to fail or steering apparatus to go wrong. Yet each
flyer was ready for such a mishap--attested by the mute e