We will leave Frank Armstrong shooting Londonward in the largest passenger-carrying biplane in the Burtside School for Aviators, seated on a mere chip of a seat, holding on with a death grip to the slender upright of seasoned spruce, and turn our attention back to the morning at Brighton.

Contrary to what Gleason and Frank imagined as they sat in their disabled motor on the highway some miles outside of Brighton at the hour their train was scheduled to leave, they were not missed at first. In the hurry of leaving their temporary training quarters, the team managers and assistants had so much to do that they left the business of getting from the hotel to the station, a matter of only a few hundred yards, to the individuals themselves. No one happened to notice, as they left the hotel in straggling groups of three and four, that Armstrong was not with them. At the station half a dozen compartments on the London train having been reserved in advance, the athletes tumbled aboard without even a thought of luggage, taking it for granted, with the usual cheerful carelessness of traveling athletes, that everything would be all right. Each was concerned only for himself. It was not to be thought of for a moment that any member of either team would be so foolish as to get himself left behind.

The ten-thirty on the London and Brighton was the vestibule and corridor type of train, not like the ordinary single compartment coach in common use on English and Continental railroads. It was therefore possible to pass from car to car and from compartment to compartment on this train much the same as on an American Pullman train, and visiting between team members shortly began. Trainer Black, going the rounds, discovered that Armstrong was missing.

At first it was thought that he, with his companion Gleason, had accidentally gotten into a wrong compartment, but a hasty search from end to end of the train disclosed the fact that he was not aboard at all.

"I don't remember having seen him after breakfast," said the Yale captain. "Could he have gone up to London on the train ahead of us by any chance?"

"No," returned McGregor, "Armstrong is very conscientious and would not disobey orders which were explicit enough about this train."

"I'll bet a hat," said Halloby, "that his rattle-headed friend, Codfish Gleason, took him out for a ride this morning, and that something went wrong with the power-plant, and they are sitting on the road somewhere waiting for someone to tow them home."

And, as it proved, Hurdler Halloby wasn't so far out of the way, excepting that, instead of sitting on the road, they were at that moment falling with a loud report into the hands of the law. So, perhaps, it was well that no one on the American team knew their exact location.

"Come to think of it," said another, "I saw the chap they call Codfish swing around to the hotel this morning in a red runabout and a little later saw the runabout going off up the street, but didn't notice who was in it. But I do know that all three seats were full."

"That's enough," said Black. "Gleason thinks he is the sole and special guard of Armstrong's health and happiness, and hired that automobile for the purpose of keeping the jumper's mind occupied with something besides jumping. I agreed to it myself. Now we lose a man on account of it."

"Thank goodness," broke in the captain, "we didn't have to depend on him for an event or we'd have been in a bad way. If he should get to the grounds in time after all, I'd feel like punishing him by not allowing him to jump," snapped the captain.

"He's punished already," said Black. "Probably eating his heart out somewhere. He's the most conscientious fellow I ever saw. It's his fool friend, the Codfish, who got him into any trouble that he's in."

"I'll telegraph him to come on the next train," said the captain.

"Will not do much good, I guess, the next train wouldn't get him there in time. But don't worry, he'll be there at those games if he hasn't met with a serious accident, or I miss my guess badly, but as for his doing any good, it's another matter."

"It's too bad," growled Captain Harrington. "The papers will throw the hot shot into us for being careless. It makes us all look like dummies, confound the luck!"

"Don't worry about it, Captain. You have enough on your hands, and Vare is a certain winner anyway in Armstrong's event. You have your own troubles this afternoon in the quarter. So take it easy, and quit worrying about something that really doesn't matter a great deal as far as actual results go."

"I'm going to telegraph, just the same," returned the captain, "to the Grand. They would probably go there when they found we had gone, eh?"

"Go ahead, it will do no harm," admitted Black.

So Harrington sent off a telegram from a station fifteen miles or so from London. A bit peremptory the telegram was, but it relieved the captain's feelings. This was the telegram:

"Frank Armstrong, The Grand, Brighton. Come to London on next train, take taxi to Queen's Club immediately afterwards. Absolutely no excuse for missing team train."

But this telegram, as we have seen, never reached the man for whom it was intended.

At one o'clock taxicabs dropped the Yale-Harvard athletes, attendants, and trainers at the south gate of Queen's Club. Already several thousand people had gathered in the stands, and a steady stream was pouring in the gates, not with the impetuosity that distinguishes an American crowd, but interested withal in the games they were shortly to see. The majority of the crowd was, of course, English, but the Americans made a brave showing. They gathered together, apparently for mutual support, halfway down the track stretch and at once selected a cheer leader who was now working up enthusiasm by an occasional yell, simply to let the enemy know that young America would be heard from in more ways than one. A surprising number of Americans had come together for the event. Not all were Harvard and Yale men, although members of these two institutions predominated. Students and graduates from universities all over the United States might have been seen in the crowd. It was not a Harvard-Yale affair to them, it was America against England, and everyone from the far side of the Atlantic was there to lend a shout for his countrymen. College lines were forgotten.

Along the track-side and in the grand stand speculation was rife as to the outcome of the games. Experts had figured out just how the various men were to finish, and the figures had been printed in the morning papers and in the noon editions. All admitted, however, that the match would be an extremely close one with the chances slightly in favor of the visitors.

"Well," said one confident young man in the group of Americans, "we'll take the hundred, two-twenty and both the hurdles. I'd bet my last dollar on that. These Englishmen can't get their legs moving in a short distance."

"Ah, yes, but then when it comes to the longer distance we can't keep our wind going. That's where they have us."

"Oh, I don't know, there's Harrington, the Yale captain, who can certainly get away with the quarter. He's been doing under fifty seconds right along. He will give us the fifth event, and all we need to tie is one more, and to win, two more. Why, Dick, old fel, it's a cinch."

"And what are the other two events, please, Sir Prophet?"

"Shot for one, they can't beat old red-top McGinnis. These English chaps never learned how to put a shot anyway, and there's the high jump, certainly ours; it's like taking money from a baby."

"Sounds like seven wins, the way you have it figured out."

"It is seven places or my training as to what five and two make is all to the bad. I tell you it's a cinch. I'd put up all my spare cash on it, and walk home cheerfully if I lost out. But, pshaw! we can't lose!"

Conversation was checked by the appearance of several athletes who had emerged from the Club locker-room doorway, and who were walking across the turfed stretch to the track. They were seen to be Americans, and a ringing shout went up from their supporters which brought smiles to the faces of the young athletes. The English spectators applauded the Americans with hand-clapping. By twos and threes the athletes made their appearance on the track before the hour set for the beginning of the games, for the day was bright and warm and the sun of more advantage to them than the shade and cool of the training quarters.

It is not our purpose to narrate in detail the doings of the half hundred athletes who struggled for the honor of their colleges and country that afternoon nor how records fell and predictions of experts were set at naught, how the balance swung this way and that, how the mercurial American cheer-leader ruined the throats of his countrymen for the encouragement of the team striving desperately on field and track. We are more intimately concerned with Frank Armstrong whom we left a thousand feet more or less in the air, taking a last desperate chance to be in at the finish on the Queen's Club track.

Frank afterwards said that he experienced no fear of any kind as the flying machine glided upward from the earth. At first there was the sensation of great speed, though the machine was comparatively close to the ground, but as the height increased that sensation diminished. Instead of the machine seeming to rise, the earth seemed to drop away leaving the machine stationary. Below, the country revealed itself like a map, with the highways and lanes standing out sharply. To the south he got the glint of the English Channel, and to the north was a great black smudge which he took to be London with its smoke from tens of thousands of chimneys.

"Going higher," shouted Butler. "Bad currents down here." The words came faintly to Frank through the roaring of the wind and the sharp crackle of the engine exhaust. The plane plunged and rocked in an air billow.

"Go ahead as far as you want to," shouted Frank, "but get me there." He had lost all sensation of fear and almost of interest in the flight. His mind was on Queen's Club. Steadily the machine climbed until the green of the trees and the grass all became as one, and the red tiles of the roofs showed only as a splash of color among the vast expanse of green. At the greater height of perhaps two thousand feet, where Butler found better currents, Frank thought the country below seemed more than ever like a map in one of his old school geographies. Twenty towns and cities lay within the range of his vision and, by turning his head slightly, he could distinguish, across the whole width of the Channel, the dim outlines of the shores of France.

The motor of the big biplane, which had been running with the precision of a well-timed clock for the space of half an hour, began to give evidence of something wrong with its internals. It skipped, stuttered in its rhythm for a moment and then went on, only to repeat in a moment. The aviator, helpless in this emergency, merely jiggled his spark lever, but the stuttering of the motor continued, and then with a most disconcerting suddenness the motor stopped entirely.

"We've got to come down," shouted Butler, "but I'll make our fall as long as possible. Hold tight."

Frank needed no urging. He felt the death of the steady forward movement and the grip of gravity as the biplane began to drop with incredible swiftness toward the earth. But it was a drop which was controlled by the cool-headed Butler, and every foot of the drop took them nearer to their destination.

Five hundred feet below, Frank saw a little patch of green field entirely free from trees or shrubbery, and to this he rightly guessed the aviator was heading. It looked like a golf course from that height, and, indeed, proved to be. Now they were directly over the haven which Butler had picked out, and it seemed in a fair way to pass it, when the flyer banked hard to the left, almost pivoted on his left wing, brought the machine around over the golf links again and, with a final swooping spiral came to earth with a shock sufficiently hard to snap off at the hub one of the wheels of the biplane's running gear.