s possible, my foot hurts dreadfully," moaned
poor Jess, "and my head feels as if a thousand dwarfs were hammering away
inside it."

"We'll be back before you expect us," Roy said, cheerily. Jimsy shouted
something, but his words were drowned in the roar of the motor as Roy
clambered into the Golden Butterfly and Peggy started the engine.

The aeroplane dashed forward over the smooth turf and then seemed to take
the air as lightly and easily as a bit of gossamer. Straight up it
soared, high above the tree tops, and was speedily reduced to a fast
diminishing speck in the northwest in which direction lay Doctor Mays'
home. Looking downward from the speeding flyer the boy and girl aviators
could see, spread out below them like a checkerboard, the fertile Long
Island landscape.

Through it ran the railroad, looking like a glittering ribbon of steel.
Off to the north the sea sparkled, a few white sails dotting its surface.
The Black Rock lighthouse, painted in bands of red and white, formed a
conspicuous object.

All at once, on the road beneath them, Roy spied a solitary motor-cyclist
whom, even at the height to which they had now risen, he recognized as
Fanning Harding. He called his sister's attention to the rider.

"He must have passed right by where the accident happened," he remarked;
"that road has no outlet for some distance. Funny that he didn't come to
help us."

"You must remember that the banks and hedge hid the place from the road,"
Peggy reminded him. "Even Fanning Harding wouldn't have willfully passed
by you when you were in such straits."

"I don't think so, either," agreed Roy, "and come to think of it, bending
over his handlebars as he is, he would not be likely to have noticed the
gap we ploughed through."

"Look," cried Peggy suddenly, "he's stopping."

The girl was right. The motor-cycling boy, whose pace had hitherto been
as fast as that of the aeroplane, could now be seen to slacken his
machine and finally stop it. Leaning it against a fence he clambered into
an adjoining field, and with every evidence of extreme caution he crept
toward a patch of woods at no great distance.

"What can he be doing?" exclaimed Peggy.

As she spoke they saw the boy below them take something from his hip
pocket.

"A pistol!" cried Roy.

The next instant Fanning Harding had vanished into the patch of woods
without having noticed the aerial observers, or, at least, so it appeared.

CHAPTER VI.

A