This was, of course, designed to teach the airmen how to make their turns in the air, an operation requiring the greatest accuracy and care. Up to this time Don thought he had enjoyed about all the thrills that it was possible to have, but the first _tour de piste_ undeceived him. All the other experiences faded into insignificance when compared to this. In his splendid isolation from all mankind, he was filled with a certain sense of awe a little unnerving at first. He was in a situation where no power save his own could be of any avail, and on the first two or three occasions involuntary tremors shook his frame as the Bleriot monoplane banked, or swung around at an angle.
Happily, however, there was no tragedy to record. With increasing confidence, Don dared to rise higher, and within a few hours had reached the required altitude. From this elevation he viewed with absorbed attention the wonderful panorama, which, like a colored map, was outspread before him, revealing fields of various forms, shapes and colors, and patches of woods and hills. And dividing the landscape were light lines—the roads—running in all directions.
His first tour was satisfactory to himself and his instructors. The turns held no terror for him.
Following this several days of bad weather put a stop to the work of the school. During the enforced inactivity Bobby Dunlap had his curiosity and interest in Victor Gilbert and Jason Hamlin still further heightened by a violent altercation between the two, although neither he nor any one else was near enough to overhear the conversation. The fact, too, that the young chaps had evidently been just on the point of indulging in a physical encounter made the “Gilbert-Hamlin affair,” as Bobby termed it, decidedly interesting.
“I’m going to find out all about it some day,” he laughed, nodding his head emphatically.
When the period of dull weather was over Don Hale started in with greater zeal than ever. He was doing his best to equal the record of T. Singleton Albert, who had so far recovered his nerve that he had no hesitancy at all in executing the vrille.
By gradual degrees, Don took his machine to greater altitudes, until, at length, he was making the _tour de piste_ at a height of three thousand five hundred feet. Now feeling somewhat like a veteran, he was fully prepared when the order came for him to perform some of the simpler evolutions in the air. One of these consisted in spiraling down to the earth with the engine shut off and landing almost directly beneath the point at which he started. Another was to volplane swiftly downward, and then, while still several hundred feet in the air, bring the machine to a horizontal position and swing around either to the right or left.