The Gay Triangle: The Romance of the First Air Adventurers

From a derelict shed adjoining a lonely road which stretched for miles across the Norfolk fens, a strange shape slid silently into the night mist. It was a motor-car of an unfamiliar design. The body, of gleaming aluminium, was of unusual width, and was lifted high above the delicate chassis and spidery bicycle wheels that seemed almost too fragile to bear the weight of an engine. Noiselessly the strange car backed out of the shed. There was no familiar teuf-teuf of the motor-engine; so silent was the car that it might have been driven by electricity, save that the air was filled with the reek of petrol. Swinging round on the grass of the meadow, the car headed for the gateway, turned into the road, and sped along silently for a few miles. It halted at length at a point where the narrow roadway widened somewhat and ran along an elevated embankment evidently constructed to raise the road above flood-level. As the car came to rest, two leather-helmeted figures descended from the tiny cockpit in the body of it. One was a slim young fellow of twenty-five or twenty-six; the other, despite the clinging motor costume, showed feminine grace in every movement. It was a young girl, evidently in the early twenties. The two set busily to work, and in a few minutes their strange car had undergone a wonderful transformation. From each side shot out long twin telescopic rods. These, swiftly joined together by rapidly unrolled strips of fabric, soon resolved themselves into the wings of a tiny monoplane. From a cleverly hidden trap-door in the front of the car, appeared an extending shaft bearing a small propeller, whose twin blades, hinged so as to fold alongside the shaft when not in use, were quickly spread out and locked into position. A network of wire stays running from the wings to the fuselage of the car were speedily hooked up and drawn taut. Then the two mysterious figures climbed again into the transformed car.