and cooking certain simple viands in their stores.

Wash went to his duties grumblingly; but he was an ingenious and
skillful cook and when he got to work he forgot his "feeling of
mal-de-merry."

It was now approaching midnight and the flying machine had been steadily
traveling northward for some hours. Both Andy Sudds and the professor
awoke and offered to relieve the boys in their work. But Mark had taken
Jack's place in the controller's seat and neither he nor his chum felt
that he wished to give over the guidance of the _Snowbird_ to anybody
else.

Now, some distance ahead, the peak of Mt. Katahdin, gloriously mantled
in moonlight, rose before them. Their direct course lay over the summit
of this eminence, and Mark decided that it would be better to rise to
a higher strata and cross the mountain than to swing around it.
Therefore Mark raised the bow of the flying machine and she darted
upward on a long slant, drawing ever nearer to the shining peak of the
great mountain. The night air was chill--it had been cool when they
left the earth--and as they rose to the rarer ether it was evident
that they would find a degree of temperature far lower than the usual
summer heat.

Mark kept the _Snowbird_ scaling swiftly upward, mile after mile; but
the long tangent at which he had started to clear the summit of Katahdin
did not prove sufficient, and by and by they found themselves within a
very few yards of the rocky side of the peak.

Out of a dark glen a spark of light suddenly shot--almost like a rocket