contented. And, after all, what
else matters? That is the Ecuadorean point of view, and who shall say
it is a bad one?

It was difficult for the boys to remind themselves that here they were
precisely on the equator, so positively chilly was it. And yet they
were. It was the third time which they had touched that imaginary
girdle of the earth in the past week or so; and it was to be their last
crossing. How inspiring the thought that they were now within one hop
of their goal; that sometime on the morrow they would probably reach
Panama well within their time limit of ten days!

The fact is, they had only 650 miles ahead of them--a distance which
could easily be covered, barring accidents, inside of five hours, and
they had until one o'clock the following day in which to reach their
destination. When they realized this, and were pressed most
insistently by the owner of the island to spend the night, under the
shelter of his roof, where there were two spare beds, the tired,
bed-hungry flyers decided to remain over, Oliver Torrey going to the
house of the police "chief." Torrey was really in no physical
condition, as it was, to continue the flight immediately, for he had
suffered a chill as the result of his exposure, and felt very weak.

Next morning they were up at the break of day, and at once began the
task of refilling the tanks of the Sky-Bird and giving her machinery a
general overhauling. Torrey felt much better, and assisted in these
operations. His gratitude to the boys for deciding not to divulge the
duplicity of the unfortunate crew with whom he had been connected was
very great, and he spared no effort to help them on toward
success--which goes to show that this fellow was not at all bad at
heart but had simply gotten in with a bad crowd.

It was a good thing that the flyers went over their engines. John
found a loose coupling in one, and a stretched fan belt in the other.
Had they gone on in this condition trouble would have been sure to
visit them. It was small wonder, however, that something should not be
out of good working order, for these faithful pieces of mechanism had
been given the hardest kind of usage day in and day out, each in its
turn, and sometimes working together, in this long flight around the
earth. Their final test had been the storm. More than once the boys
had marveled at the remarkable efficiency of their motive power. What
a tribute to the mechanical genius of modern