The crew stayed for four weeks in a boom town of nine thousand, installing a complete telephone system. South-east of the town lay rolling hills. As Carl talked with the Turk and the Pharmacy School man on a hilltop, the first evening of their arrival, he told them the scientific magazine's prophecies about aviation, and noted that these hills were of the sort Lilienthal would probably have chosen for his glider-flights.
"Say! by the great Jim Hill, let's make us a glider!" he exulted, sitting up, his eyelids flipping rapidly.
"Sure!" said the Pharmacy man. "How would you make one?"
"Why--uh--I guess you could make a frame out of willow--have to; the willows along the creeks are the only kind of trees near here. You'd cover it with varnished cotton--that's what Lilienthal did, anyway. But darned if I know how you'd make the planes curved--cambered--like he did. You got to have it that way. I suppose you'd use curved stays. Like a quarter barrel-hoop.... I guess it would be better to try to make a Chanute glider--just a plain pair of sup'rimposed planes, instead of one all combobulated like a bat's wings, like Lilienthal's glider was.... Or we could try some experiments with paper models----Oh no! Thunder! Let's make a glider."
They studied with aching heads the dry-looking tables of lift and resistance for which Carl telegraphed to Chicago. Stripped to their undershirts, they worked all through the hot prairie evenings in the oil-smelling, greasy engine-room of the local power-house, in front of the dynamos, which kept evilly throwing out green sparks and rumbling the mystic syllable "Om-m-m-m," to greet their modern magic.
They hunted for three-quarter-inch willow rods, but discarded them for seasoned ash from the lumber-yard. They coated cotton with thin varnish. They stopped to dispute furiously over angles of incidence, bellowing, "Well, look here then, you mutton-head; I'll draw it for you."
On their last Sunday in the town they assembled the glider, single-surfaced, like a monoplane, twenty-two feet in span, with a tail, and with a double bar beneath the plane, by which the pilot was to hang, his hands holding cords attached to the entering edge of the plane, balancing the glider by movements of his body.