t in the telling.

Puss did not expect to halt again when the monoplane was brought
down. He could make one flight of it now and reach the home of his
uncle, where doubtless Sandy was mourning him as lost.

Just as Frank had expected, Puss on saying good-bye tried to appear as
though something along the order of gratitude might be striving to gain
a foothold in his crooked nature.

"Say, Frank, I'm sorry now I ever tried to do you dirt," he observed, as
he held out his hand. "Let's forget the past and start all over again."

"Sure," replied Frank, as he readily took the offered hand; but it lay
like a cold toad in his grasp, as Andy afterward expressed it, for Puss
insisted on also bidding him good-bye ere he made a start in his
biplane.

"Well, now, what d'ye think of that?" said Andy, as they stood and
watched the other mount upward and caught the wave of his hand ere he
started down river, being fully five hundred feet high. "Did he mean it,
Frank? Would you really want to go so far as to trust that snake if the
chance ever came again for him to do you a bad turn?"

Frank shrugged his shoulders.

"Say, ask me something easy, won't you?" he remarked. "Because you know
how hard it is for a leopard to change its spots. Perhaps Puss _has_
seen a light; but excuse me if I doubt it. Naturally he felt kind of
cheap, because we got him out of a bad hole and placed him under
obligations. But that will wear off in a short time."

"Right it will," declared Andy. "I give you my word, Frank, that the
next time we see him he'll have a fine story all fixed about how he was
just going to jump on that Spanish revolutionary fellow, and twisting
his gun out of his hand, shoot him down, and then fly away. Oh, don't I
know Puss in Boots, though? He'll hate us both worse than ever just
because he's beholden to us. Rats! him reform? Not much!"

By the middle of the afternoon they had advanced far enough to know that
another lap ought to carry them to town, and of course all of them were
anxious to have the journey completed.

"If it could only be written up and sworn to," said Andy,
enthusiastically, "I reckon it'd go down in the annals of aeroplaning as
the most wonderful stunt carried out up to date. But people won't take
our word for it."

"We've got the evidence of it, though, in the person of your good dad,
and people may believe what Professor Bird says over his own honored
signature, however much they might doubt the ya