After getting out of the airplane, Mr. Giddings was thoughtful for some minutes. Nor did he speak until the boys had pushed the machine into the hangar. Then he said, with deep earnestness:

"Young men, a great load has been removed from my mind by this recent performance of the Sky-Bird II. I have now not the slightest doubts of her adaptability to make a round-the-world trip, and if she performs then as she did this morning, we are not only going to defeat the Clarion's crew, but we are going to smash all existing records for a journey of the kind. I wish to know if you really think you could operate this machine steadily night and day, say for a couple of weeks, stopping only for fuel and food?"

"By alternating the engines—yes, sir; no doubt of it," declared John Ross without a moment's hesitation, while Tom Meeks nodded his frowsy head energetically.

"Then," said Mr. Giddings, "you may consider that's what the entire four of you will have to do in a few months, as soon as we can pick out a route and get fuel supplies at the different airports or stops for you. John, you and Tom may consider yourselves under salary right on until after this race; there will be enough for you to do, helping me with arrangements and taking care of the airplane."

"Well, but how about Paul and me, dad?" broke in Bob anxiously; "aren't we going to have anything to do?"

"Oh, you two will have enough to do going to school, I think," laughed Mr. Giddings; "but, to satisfy you, I will let you both help John and Tom select a route and make out a schedule. Do this just as soon as you can, so that I may be able to give Mr. Wrenn, the publisher of the Clarion, a copy. He can then make intelligent preparations for his own crew. I am going to give my rival every consideration in this matter, so that he cannot do any howling if we beat him. It must be an out-and-out fair race, do you understand?"

All nodded.

"Have you heard anything about the other crew yet, Mr. Giddings?" inquired Paul. "I mean, do you know what sort of a craft they are going to use, or who is going to fly against us?"

"I am as much in the dark about those points as you young men," was the reply. "I judge that Mr. Wrenn, who is an astute business man, will keep us in ignorance of his personnel until the last minute. The fact is, I am going to treat him to a dose of his own medicine in this respect. So be careful not to let the public get close to this machine, and talk with no one about it."

With that the publisher and Bob drove home, but the latter came back in the afternoon, and all four young men immediately repaired to the Yonkers Public Library with a blank tablet, there to work out the route and schedule.

It was no easy task. In the first place, they wished the route to be as close to the equator at all times as possible, so that their line of travel would approximate in distance the world's estimated circumference of 24,899 miles. In the second place, for stops they must choose cities or towns with either established landing-fields, or with grounds level enough for this purpose. In the third place, these airports must be so divided that they would not have to be visited during the hours of darkness, for few if any of them would be likely to have efficient enough lighting systems to make night landings safe.

Within fifteen minutes the boys had the long table in front of them literally covered with geographies, atlases, loose maps, and encyclopaedias. Paul even brought up a globe as large as a pumpkin, while Bob was not content until he had secured a score of back numbers of travel magazines. Into this divers collection of diagrams and reading matter they dove with an avidity which would have surprised the teachers they had when they were in grammar school, if they could have seen them. It soon became evident that they would not only need a route and schedule to make their journey successful, but also an enormous amount of general information about the countries they would pass over.

"We'll have to study trade winds, oceanic storm conditions, temperatures, inhabitants, topography, and so forth, and so forth," drawled Tom Meeks. "Say, fellows, I feel like kicking myself to think I didn't study my geography more and shoot paper-wads less, when I was a kid at school."

"We'll have to do a lot of cramming, that's sure," averred John; "but we have several months for that. Just now we want to jump into this route and schedule."

They made up several tentative routes, only to discard them. Finally, after several hours' work, they had one which everybody seemed to agree was the best that could be picked out. With the schedule, which was figured on the basis of 120 miles an hour airplane speed, the draft looked like this:

Miles Airport Arrive Leave
—— PANAMA —————— 1:00p 20th
1672 Georgetown 5:30a 21st 7:30a 21st
1154 Para 6:00p 21st 9:00p 21st
2402 Freetown 6:15p 22d 9:15p 22d
1980 Kuka 1:00p 23d 8:00p 23d
2015 Aden 6:00a 24th 9:00a 24th
2116 Colombo 5:30a 25th 8:30a 25th
1612 Singapore 6:00p 25th 9:00p 25th
2218 Port Darwin 5:30p 26th 8:30p 26th
3826 Apia 5:45a *27th 8:45a 27th
2100 Nukahiva 9:00a 28th 12:00n 28th
3154 San Cristobal 6:00p 29th 9:00p 29th
650 PANAMA 5:30a 30th ——————-
——-
24899

* Gain of 1 day by reason of crossing 180th Meridian, or International
Date Line, between Port Darwin and Apia.

Bob Giddings carried home a copy of this schedule, and the following Monday morning all four young men met by appointment in the private office of the publisher of the Daily Independent. After they were seated, Mr. Giddings brought forth the tentative draft, studied it a few moments, and then asked:

"What is your fuel capacity, boys?"

"Our tanks will hold enough gasoline and oil to carry us a little better than five thousand miles, throttled down to an average of one hundred and twenty miles an hour, the basis on which we figured out this schedule, sir," answered John.

"Would it make a difference if you flew faster than that?"

"Oh, yes," said John; "the faster a pilot flies the more fuel he uses per mile. Full out—that is, going at the limit of her speed—the Sky-Bird probably would not cover more than three-thousand miles."

"I am glad to know this," said Mr. Giddings. "I see that your cruising radius is sufficient to cover your longest jumps at any reasonable speed. Let me see; you allow yourselves three hours' stop at each airport; will that be long enough?"

"Plenty, sir," said Tom; "we figure that we can easily refuel in that time, and attend to any local affairs we may have."

"I notice your total mileage is exactly equal to the estimated circumference of the world," remarked the publisher. "That shows great care in the selection of this route to meet my viewpoint; but may I ask how you know your distances between airports, as here recorded, are correct? From whence did you get these mileages?"

"Bob and I figured them out, sir," spoke up Paul.

"How?"

"Why, like this, dad," explained Bob. "We knew there were 360 degrees to the world; we divided the circumference of 24,899 miles by 360, and obtained approximately 69.5 miles to a degree. By taking a map of the world and finding the number of degrees between any two airports it was not difficult to come pretty close to the actual distance in miles between them."

"Very good; very good, indeed," approved his father. "I think I have the right sort of men on this job. But here is another thing which occurs to me: Have you based your time of arrival and leaving at each port upon local time or New York time?"

"Local time," stated Paul. "If we had not done so we could not have arranged the schedule with any accuracy at all, as regards daylight and darkness and the lapping of time. With our watches set to New York time, we might expect to land at a station in broad daylight, only to find that we were really coming in after dark. Another thing: Our figuring showed us that the lappages of time, all added together, exactly totaled one day of twenty-four hours, which we gain by traveling eastward. So, while the schedule on a calendar at home would only show ten days which we would be gone, we would in reality be away one day longer, or eleven."

"Your local times may be wrong," hinted Mr. Giddings.

"I don't think so, sir; we proved them correct," stated Paul, with conviction.

"How?"

"After the same method we used in getting the mileage, sir. You see, we knew that time eastward keeps getting later, and that this rate is four minutes to every degree. We just counted the degrees between places and figured it out on that basis."

"Splendid!" exclaimed Mr. Giddings, who was far from as ignorant of these processes as he led his visitors to suppose. "Boys, I wish to compliment you very highly upon this piece of work. When I first looked at the schedule and saw that an airplane meeting its requirements would make this trip squarely around the world in seven and a half hours less than ten days I could scarcely credit my senses, and I figured it all over to make sure you had made no mistake. I found out you had not. If you can maintain an average speed of one hundred and twenty miles, and can make up any unforeseen delays by greater speed, I must admit it really looks possible for you to be back inside of ten days. That is better than I actually hoped for, young men,—far better! In fact the situation, as I view it, contains wonderful opportunities for both newspapers in the way of sales and advertising. I do not doubt but that I can handle this affair in such a manner that I can afford to give each of you five thousand dollars if you make the journey within these ten days."

"Five thousand dollars!" cried our friends in unison, while Bob exploded: "But, dad, just how do you figure this out?"

"Mr. Wrenn and I will exploit this contest in our newspapers—let the whole universe know that it is coming off; advise the people that the aviators are to be provided with the most modern airplanes, and equipped with wireless by means of which they will keep us informed frequently of their whereabouts; that they will have cameras and send us pictures; that these bulletins shall be issued in extra editions of our newspapers at least three or four times a day; and to cap the climax, we will put up large bulletin boards in front of our buildings, on which there will be painted a chart of the trip, showing every scheduled stop, country, and ocean crossed. This will be electrically lighted at night, and as you boys fly in your machine away off in some distant part of the world, our bulletin board operators will follow your course on their huge charts, and represent you with a miniature airplane. In fact, I plan to get the Clarion to 'phone over reports of their crew as fast as received, I doing likewise with them, and then we can have two dummy airplanes on each of our boards, showing the race in earnest at all stages of the journey. This would cause great excitement to the street onlookers. All in all, it would make our newspapers the most talked about in the whole country, we would gain thousands of new subscribers, millions of extras would be sold, thousands of dollars' worth of new advertising contracts could be made, and our present rates increased on account of our new prestige. Now, you see, it will be up to you young men to keep our office supplied with your whereabouts as often as you can. Do that, and beat our rival crew, and I shall be pretty well satisfied if you don't quite make the trip in ten days."

"We will do our part, sir," responded John, speaking for all.

There was a little further talk; and then they took their leave, well satisfied with the turn of events, and each determined to win his five thousand dollar trophy if it were at all possible.