"It is very kind of you ladies to come to my rescue," he said as his senses returned. "I was getting on famously with the thing when I sneezed. I felt it coming on, but it couldn't be stopped, and I lost control and shot down like a piece of lead. Aeroplanists will have to stop sneezing until something more reliable in the way of a flying machine is invented."
"What are you going to do with this?" asked Billie, pointing to the demolished machine.
"Nothing," he answered. "It's all in, as far as I can see."
"Oh, then may we have a souvenir?" demanded Nancy.
"Help yourself," he said, smiling faintly and pressing his hand to his head, which was still buzzing with the shock of the fall.
"You poor boy," exclaimed Miss Campbell, "come right along and let us take you somewhere. You are suffering of course, and these foolish girls are thinking of souvenirs."
While the others assisted him across the field, Nancy lingered beside the flying machine and presently selected a piece of the machinery; you would probably be no wiser if I told you what piece it was, and certainly Nancy herself was as ignorant of its purpose as a cat of a sewing machine. She chose it because it was detached from the rest and after she had climbed gingerly through the wire fence she stored it away in an inner chamber of the automobile and promptly forgot all about it.
But long afterward she was to congratulate herself on obeying first impulses, which are usually the safest.
They put the young man on the back seat between Miss Campbell and Elinor, while Mary climbed in front and shared Nancy's seat beside Chauffeur Billie.
"Where do you want to go?" asked that responsible young woman, waiting to start the car and addressing the aeroplanist over her shoulder.
"If you put me down at any convenient place along the way, I'll be very much obliged. I'm going all the way to San Francisco."
"But so are we," cried the girls in one voice. "We're going across the continent."
The young man smiled for the second time, a charming smile which radiated his entire face and seemed to kindle two warm fires in his steady brown eyes.
"Why not?" Elinor was saying, somewhat on her mettle, when a motor cycle shot past them, stopped abruptly and a man jumped off and waited beside the road, signalling to them to stop the car.