“This historic flight, cloaked in darkness, was made with no spectators other than the inventors and owners of the airship, the superintendent and the president of the aeroplane works and a reporter for the _Herald_. While every effort had been made to keep intelligence of the wonderful invention from the public at the present time, an account of the secret test as well as a complete description of the aeroplane itself, is given herewith in detail.”
By the time the copy boy had laid Stewart’s next batch of copy on the night city editor’s desk Mr. Latimer had passed all of the first “take,” marked “lead to come,” over to Dick, the head copy reader, and the big aeroplane “beat” was on its way into print. Few changes were made in the rest of Stewart’s story. Having finished his first few pages and reached the real narrative, he wrote rapidly and easily.
The inexperienced young reporter had done his work well. For several days he had been in the service of the Aeroplane Company as a common workman in the yards. In that time, with his eyes open and by skillful questioning, he had succeeded in striking up an acquaintance with one of the skilled enginemen working on the new car. From this man he had wormed the general details of the aircraft and learned that a test of the completed aeroplane was to be made.
These things were not told in his story but he did describe graphically and in a way that made Mr. Latimer nod his head in approval, everything to be seen by the eye from the time the great tandem-planed sky vehicle was rolled out into the yard and lifted itself cloudward until it sank in the same spot again twenty-five minutes later.
When those pages of his story reached the desk Mr. Latimer rose and hurried to the busy writer’s side.
“How did you know they were going to pull this off to-night?” he asked.
“I didn’t. But I guessed it would be at night. I meant to watch each night—”
“You’re doing very well. Good stuff,” was his superior’s comment. “Get it in a column.”
There wasn’t a great deal that the young reporter could write of the actual flight. The ship-like structure had been wheeled out of the gloom of the canvas-sided setting-up room into the yellow glare of half a dozen yard torches. It rumbled heavily—more like a heavy truck than the flimsy airships Stewart had seen. Then, for some minutes, several persons had passed back and forth by means of a step ladder into an enclosed part of the great, metallic-glinting structure. From the lights that flared up and died out in the big torches he knew that his first night’s vigil was to be rewarded with something.