Tom Swift and his flying boat;

Tom came around by the slaughter house at the railroad switch, on the far edge of Shopton, on his way home from the Nestor house. He knew several of the men who worked there, and he wanted something that could only be supplied in the vicinity of the town at that place.

“Pigs’ bladders? The land sake! What for, Mister Tom?” demanded Harry M’Connel, the man the young inventor asked. “You ain’t makin’ no contraption for to make pigs fly, are you, now? The price of pork has gone up high enough already.”

“I’m not so sure that the bladders may not help me scheme out something that will aid man to fly,” laughed Tom Swift.

“You shall have the bladders,” declared M’Connel. “But I never mean to go up in one of them flying machines myself. Still and all, there’s some folks I’d just as lief would go scootin’ skyward as not, and I hope if they do they never come down again,” added the slaughter-house man, grumblingly.

He went outside, selected a pair of good-sized pigs’ bladders, washed them, and brought them back to the young inventor. Tom thanked him and went home with the bladders. When a little boy he used to get these bladders for balloons. He blew them up now in the same way, tied them, and hung them out of his bedroom window to dry, warning Rad and Koku to let them alone.

“Master make great medicine with them,” the giant declared to Rad Sampson. “Make wonder! Whoo!”

“Yo’ make me sick—whoo!” muttered old Rad. “What kind of med’cine you think can be made out o’ a pig’s bladder, big man? You is sho’-nuff crazy.”

But Koku remembered what the magicians and medicine men did with such receptacles in his own country and shook his head. He held Tom Swift quite as able to make black magic as any medicine man who ran half naked in the wilds.

“You see!” he declared earnestly. “Master make big noise. Do wunnerful thing. Mighty smart.”

“Which you isn’t,” declared Eradicate with scorn. “I dunno what Mist’ Swift and Mars’ Tom wants yo’ round yere for, anyway. Yo’ ain’t a smitch o’ good, as I can see. Yo’ ain’t even to be trusted to peel spuds. I haf to peel de peels after you.”

“Koku great chief. He cannot do woman’s work.”

“Hey!” cried old Rad. “Since you got dat checkered suit out West dere, whar Mars’ Tom took his electric engine, dere ain’t been any holdin’ yo’. Makes yo’ too uppity to wear good clo’es. A breech-clout an’ a string of beads is de best yo’ knowed about dressin’ ’fore yo’ come here.”

Koku showed his teeth at that, and stalked away. He liked to exercise authority about the house and the shops; but Rad had been here long before Koku, and he would not endure any usurpation in the control of even small things.

When there was no subject of controversy between them, however, the two were very good friends. The giant often shouldered burdens for Rad and said nothing about it. And he never took one of his wild jaunts through the countryside about Shopton that he did not bring back to Rad some treasure, or present—often of a laughter-provoking nature.

Both Rad and Koku loved to go fishing at Lake Carlopa, and two mornings later they stole away after breakfast with tackle and bait for the near shore of the lake. They went to a favorite strip of low bank, hidden by hazel brush from observation except from the open lake, and cast for white perch which were known to be plentiful at this spot.

At first the perch were shy and Koku began to mutter charms to entice them.

“Hey! Yo’ call dat Voodoo talk?” grumbled Rad, who was religious himself and did not approve of “no heathen jabber.” “Yo’ stop dat, Koku! De good Lawd’ll send some kind of a big fish—a eel, mebbe—an’ tangle you all up an’ swaller yo’ alibe. Huh! I got a bite. See dere, big man. I’s got it! Not you, you ole——-Woof!”

For what he jerked ashore when he thought the fish was well hooked was a rotten snag. Koku was busy himself with a nibble just then or he might have angered his old friend by laughing. He might also have driven all the fish away, for when Koku laughed he could be heard for half a mile at least!

“What yo’ got, boy?” asked the disgruntled Rad Sampson. “A rubber boot?”

But Koku had caught a fine, shining perch and he began dancing around the tiny enclosed lawn in great delight.

“Stop dat ghost-dancing!” exclaimed Rad. “String dat fish on dat withe. Dat’s only de fust one. Mars’ Tom hisself can eat a dozen ob dem for his supper.”

“Sh!” hissed Koku suddenly, putting up a great hand in warning.

He had landed on one splay foot and he stood there, with the other one raised, bent forward and listening. He had heard something beyond the hazel hedge. As Rad often said, Koku ought to possess the most wonderful hearing—his ears were big enough!

In a moment he crept toward the repeated sound, his movements as soundless as those of a hunting cat. Rad came close behind him, trying to suppress a rather asthmatic breath and stepping as though he were walking on eggs. The sound was repeated—a little splashing.

Through an opening in the brush Rad suddenly caught sight of a moving object. He grabbed Koku’s bare and hairy wrist.

“Hold hard, big man!” he gasped. “Dat’s a bear!”

They were almost within stone’s throw of civilization, and there had not been a bear heard of in that part of the State for fifty years; nevertheless, Rad was convinced of the presence of Bruin.

“A bear?” muttered the giant, not quite sure what the word meant. His knowledge of anything but the commonest English terms was meagre.

The thing beyond the bushes moved. It was down beside the lake itself, and Rad was sure it must be drinking.

“Yo’ look out, giant!” he whispered warningly to the giant.

But there was nothing much that Koku was really afraid of save spirits and magic. Any animal smaller than an elephant or rhinoceros he was not much afraid to attack. He uttered a challenging yell, leaped almost straight up in the air, and went over the hedge of hazel brush as though from a spring-board.

It is fortunate he did not land upon Eradicate Sampson’s “bear.” That individual likewise uttered a yell and leaped away from the giant with much agility.

“Whoo! Ketch him!” shouted Eradicate, charging through the bushes. “Don’t let him git away, boy!”

But the giant remained rooted where he had landed upon the sandy beach. Almost at his feet, floating on the surface of the quiet water, was a polished piece of hollow bamboo to which a pair of inflated bladders was attached—one on either side of the stick.

“Mars’ Tom!” shrieked Eradicate Sampson.

“Master no bear—what you say!” exclaimed Koku angrily. “Koku jump on him, he be all smashed up. Rad old fool!”

“Hey!” cried Tom Swift, with some heat. “You big clown! Don’t be so quick to jump on anything or anybody. Even a bear has some rights that you are bound to respect. And you, Rad, why did you sic him onto me?”

“Nebber did such a thing!” declared Rad warmly. “Nobody but a big fool giant would try to jump right down a bear’s throat widout lookin’ whar he was jumpin’! Huh!”

Koku likewise snorted his disgust. As usual, the two tried to lay the fault on each other. But Tom came back with a grin on his face.

“I certainly did think a flying pterodactyl, or something of the kind, was swooping over those bushes to get me,” he declared.

“He’s sure wuss nor dat,” declared Rad solemnly. “He’s wuss nor a terrydicktil—sure is. He’s wuss dan a locofoco.”

Koku rolled his eyes tremendously at the sound of these big words which he no more understood than Rad himself did. Tom hastened to relieve the giant’s feelings to a degree.

“How many fish did you boys catch?” he asked.

“All lak’ Mist’ Damon cotched when he went to Florida after tarpon. One!” chuckled Rad. “Mist’ Damon said he was two days cotchin’ dat one; an’ when he seen how big it was he thought he ought t’ve spent a week at it. This Koku actin’ like it was de on’y fish ever caught in dis lake,” he added, with scorn.

“Well, go on, you two, with your fishing,” said Tom. “I’ve a problem to think out and I don’t want to be bothered by either pterodactyls or locofocos. Get along now.”

He plumped himself down on the sand again and fixed his gaze upon the bobbing piece of bamboo and the inflated bladders. Tom had known, without his father’s declaration to that effect, that one of the chief problems he had to solve in the matter of building a better flying boat than anybody else was the problem of constructing his invention so that it could settle in a rough sea without being capsized.

The puzzling thought was with him, day and night. It ran in his head like a tune that sometimes seems to fill one’s mind to the expulsion of everything else. Yet, when the young inventor was left alone again and tried to settle himself to his problem in statics, his thought weaved a pattern something like this:

“A shell of some light metal—aluminum, we’ll say—buoyed on the outside by additional air chambers. Humph, it would look extremely awkward. But, as Mr. Nestor says very often, the look of a thing isn’t what counts. Poor Mr. Nestor! What will those two women do if he does not live?

“How about double walls from stem to stern for air chambers? Humph! Bless my blown-up bladders! as Mr. Damon might say,” and he chuckled. “Mr. Damon catching a tarpon so big that he thought he should have spent a week landing it. Humph!

“And he starts in a day or two for Iceland. Br-r-r! That’s one cold country, I bet! Cold! Iceland! Why, if Mr. Nestor went there for a few weeks—Great Scott!” exclaimed Tom Swift, suddenly rising and forgetting all about his bamboo stick and pigs’ bladders floating on the lake.

“What have I been thinking of? Wakefield Damon is just the man for us!”

He started away from the lake at top speed, forgetting for the time all about his plans for a flying boat that would astonish the world.