“At my age, too,” began Miss Helen Campbell, leaning back in her seat and folding her hands with an expression of resignation.

“At your age, what, dear cousin?” demanded Wilhelmina Campbell, superintending the strapping on at the back of the car of five extra large suit cases and other paraphernalia for a long trip. “Why should not things happen at your age as well as at ours? But at your age, what?”

“At my age to turn emigrant,” exclaimed the little lady. “At my age to become a gypsy vagabond. Oh, dear, oh, dear! What would grandpapa have said?”

“He would have been delighted, I am certain, Cousin Helen,” answered her young relative, “since he was a soldier and a jolly old gentleman, too, papa has always said.”

“But such an up to date gypsy-vagabond-emigrant, Miss Campbell,” pursued Elinor Butler, “one who rides in a motor car and wears a silk traveling coat and a sky-blue chiffon veil.”

“And has four ladies-in-waiting,” continued Nancy Brown.

“And hotels all along the route to sleep in instead of tents,” finished Mary Price.

“Very true, my dears. I admit all you say; but now at the last moment, when we are about to start on this amazing journey, I cannot help thinking it is a wild adventure. But I shall be over it in a moment, I daresay. Have the machine cranked-up, Billie. Do I use the correct word? and let us be off before my courage fails me altogether.”

With a happy laugh, Billie jumped into her seat behind the wheel. The other girls were already in their accustomed places. One of the attendants from the hotel gave the crank a dexterous twist; there was a throbbing sound of machinery in action, and off shot the Comet like a spirited horse, eager to be on the road.

Miss Campbell’s spirits rose with the sun, for it was still very early when the Motor Maids started on their famous journey across the continent from Chicago to San Francisco. And all the world seemed to be in league to make the start a happy one. It was a glorious morning toward the last of May, the air just frosty enough to make the blood tingle and bring color to the cheeks. Up to the very day before, an icy gale had blown across the windy city of the plains, but through the night it had gradually tempered into a springtime breeze. The red car sped through the sunshine with all the vigor of machinery in perfect order, and the polished plate glass of the wind guard reflected the four happy faces of the Motor Maids off on a lark, which, when all is said and done, and the last page of this volume filled, will have carried them through many an adventure along the way.

Through Chicago they whirled, past fine homes where sleepy maids and butlers were just opening windows and blinds to let in the morning light; through business streets already humming with life, and at last out through the suburbs on a broad level road, due west, they took their course.

Billie knew it all like a book because she had been stopping in Chicago for a week and every day they had taken a spin in the Comet along some fifty miles of the route. Moreover, for a month past, she had been studying maps and guide-books until her mind reflected now only a great bird’s-eye view of the United States through the center of which was drawn a red line; the road the Comet was to take when it bore them to the Pacific Ocean.

There was nothing now, however, in these flat, monotonous wheat fields to promote any particular interest. But there was much to talk about.

“Was it only last week that we were four school girls at West Haven High School slaving over examinations?” cried Elinor Butler.

“Only a little week ago,” exclaimed Mary joyfully, “and now, behold us, free as birds on the wing.”

There was a flush of happiness on her usually pale face. It had been a long, hard spring for her, and she was glad after examinations were over, to hurry away with her friends without waiting for the final exercises.

“School! School!” said Nancy Brown, her face dimpling with happiness. “Don’t mention the hateful word. I am as full of mathematics and history and physics and Latin as a black cake is of plums.”

“Plums!” echoed Billie. “I’m stuffed with another variety of fruit. It’s dates.”

They laughed at the word dates; for, remembering dates, aside from mathematics, was the bÊte noir of Billie’s school days and the teacher of history was very unpopular because she made the pupils of her classes learn six dates a day.

“But the class is even with Miss Hawkes now,” put in Nancy. “She isn’t to come back next year, and we gave her a present besides.”

“Why did you give her a present?” asked Miss Campbell, suddenly becoming curious.

“Well, you see, at the end of school we reckoned we had learned about 800 dates, not that we could remember 100 or even 50. It was Elinor who thought of it and because she has more nerve than any one else in the class——”

“Indeed I have not,” protested Elinor.

“Because she was never afraid even of the terrifying Miss Hawkes, she was chosen to make the speech and give Miss Hawkes a present from the class.”

Miss Campbell smiled. She was never tired of listening to their school-girl talk.

“What did you say and what was the present, my dear?”

“I said,” replied Elinor, “that, representing the class, I wanted to thank her for the splendid mental training she had given us last winter, and we wished to show our appreciation by giving her a little remembrance.”

“‘Remembrance’ was a good word, Elinor,” cried Billie.

“If she hadn’t been so pleased and made that speech of thanks, it wouldn’t have mattered so much,” put in Mary. “But I was ashamed when she untied the ribbons on the box——”

“And what was in it, child?” demanded Miss Campbell.

“Dates,” cried Billie, “dozens of dates packed in as tightly as dates can be packed, just as she had been packing them into our brains for nine months.”

“Oh! oh!” exclaimed Miss Campbell, trying to be shocked and laughing in spite of herself. “The poor soul! How embarrassed she must have felt. Was she very angry?”

“We couldn’t tell whether she was angry or hurt,” answered Elinor. “She drew herself up stiffer and straighter than usual if possible, and marched out of the room without a word.”

“And left us feeling very foolish indeed, cousin,” went on Billie. “But that isn’t all. Because I was the one who never could remember a date from one day to the next, I suppose she suspected me of having been the ring-leader and this morning when we stopped at the desk of the hotel for mail, the clerk handed me this letter. It was forwarded from West Haven.”

Billie drew an envelope from the pocket of her motor coat and gave it to the others.

“Read it,” she said. “I didn’t mention it before because I was so much interested in getting away and I had really forgotten it until the subject came up. I suppose Miss Hawkes is just a little queer in her upper story.”

The letter read:

“I understand you are going West in your automobile. If, on your journey, you should by chance hear the name of ‘Hawkes,’ do not treat it as lightly as you did in West Haven. Somewhere in the West that name is powerful.

“Anna Hawkes.”

“How absurd!” exclaimed Elinor. “She is queer. I am certain of it.”

“Anyhow,” pursued Billie, “I am ashamed of what we did now. I suppose it must have hurt her awfully.”

“Not more than she hurt us when she scolded us for forgetting those awful dates,” said Nancy relentlessly.

“Oh, well,” put in Miss Campbell, “she is just an angry old spinster who got obsessed with dates and then had a rude awakening. I don’t think it was exactly respectful to have given the lady a box of dried dates. But she brought it on herself, as you say. Tear up the letter and forget all about it. I have no doubt she is a perfectly harmless old person.”

Miss Campbell always had a secret contempt for other spinsters.

“But she isn’t old, you know, cousin. She’s just out of college.”

“Oh, indeed. I imagined she was a crusty old maid.”

“Perhaps she has reference to the powerful family of chicken hawks,” observed Nancy.

“Or the illustrious fish-hawk family, only they are mostly centered around New Haven,” added Mary.

“How about the tomahawk family?” suggested Billie.

How, indeed? But there was no answer to this strangely pertinent question because of a timely incident which now occurred.

With the picture still in their minds of a great fish hawk skimming through the air, as they had often seen him do at home, there now came a sound of whirring far above them.

Nancy leaned out of the automobile and looked up.

“Oh! oh!” she exclaimed in great excitement “Oh, stop—look! What is it?”

Billie stopped the car and they jumped out into the road, craning their necks as they scanned the heavens.

Flying westward, but still some distance away, came what resembled at first a gigantic bird with wings outspread, soaring even as the fish hawk soars, as he skims through the air.

“It’s an aeroplane,” whispered Billie, almost speechless with excitement.

They seemed to be alone in the great flat world of green fields. To the right and left of them stretched level fields now cultivated and yielding great crops of corn and wheat. Less than a hundred years ago what would those travelers in lumbering wagons across the prairies have thought if they had seen such a bird flying overhead?

On sailed the flying machine, like a huge dragon fly above them. In the clear atmosphere which is peculiar to this prairie region they could plainly see a human being riding it. Then, the birdman, as if he were not already high enough to see the whole world stretched out beneath him, began slowly to rise in the blue ether like a skylark at dawn. Up, up he went, until he was merely a black speck in the heavens.

Miss Campbell sat flat down at the side of the road.

“I can’t endure it,” she cried. “Suppose he should never come back.”

“What goes up must come down,” observed Mary in a low voice much too excited to speak naturally.

Immediately fulfilling her prophetic remark, the flying machine sailed back into view. It was some distance beyond them now, but even so far they could hear the clicking noise which was all the more accentuated because no other sound followed. The motor had ceased to whir. They saw the aeroplanist fumble frantically with the machinery, then suddenly, with a twist of its body that was almost swifter than the eye, the flying machine turned its nose earthward and shot straight down.

“Is that the way he lands?” demanded Miss Campbell.

“No, no,” answered Billie excitedly as she hastened to crank the machine. “Get in quickly—everybody! Something must be broken. He may be hurt.”

Another moment they were tearing down the road toward the field where they had seen the flying machine drop.

“There he is,” cried Nancy, already on the step of the Comet as Billie drew up at the side of the road.

Now, unfortunately, a wire fence separated the field from the road to prevent idle wandering people from trampling down the young wheat. It was no easy matter to crawl through the interstices of barbed wire, and Billie, in her haste, tore a great gaping hole in her automobile coat.

But she pulled off the wrap with the recklessness of a young person who has something far more interesting on hand than pongee coats, and flung it in the road where it was rescued by Miss Campbell.

In the middle of the field lay the flying machine, looking very much like an enormous kite at close range. But where was the human being who so lately had been mounting high into the air?

A man’s foot sticking out from the midst of the debris revealed him at last lying huddled up under the machine.

It was no simple matter to untangle him from the ruins, and it took all their strength and courage, too, with that face so white and still turned upward, but, by the grace of Providence, which watches over the lives of some rash beings, the young man was not even hurt. He was only stunned, and presently Miss Campbell, who had managed somehow to crawl through the fence, brought him back to life with her smelling salts.

“If I can only keep from sneezing,” he began, opening his eyes and blinking them in amazement when he beheld the faces of five ladies leaning over him in states of more or less extreme excitement.

The aeroplanist was really almost a boy and rather small. He had reddish brown hair and reddish brown eyes to match. His features were regular. His mouth firm and well modeled, and he had a square, determined-looking jaw.

“Oh,” he exclaimed. “Then it wasn’t a dream. I did sneeze.”

The girls privately thought his mind was wandering.

“You tumbled down out of the sky,” said Nancy.

“Are you better now?” asked Miss Campbell, applying her smelling salts to his nose.

“I’m all right,” he answered, bewildered, and began slowly to pull himself together and get up. He staggered a little as he rose and stood looking ruefully down at the demolished aeroplane. They noticed that he was not dressed like a messenger from Mars, as they had seen aeroplanists attired in pictures. He wore brown clothes and a brown tie the same shade as his hair, and a brown cap with a vizor which had fallen on the ground.

“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.