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134 Tom Sawyer Abroad
you spin along. You'll pass about twenty-five in the next fifteen minutes, and you'll recognize ours when you see it — and if you don't, you can yell down and ask."
" Ef it's dat easy, Mars Tom, I reckon we kin do it — yassir, I knows we kin."
The guide was sure of it, too, and thought that he could learn to stand his watch in a little while.
"Jim can learn you the whole thing in a half an hour," Tom said. " This balloon's as easy to manage as a canoe."
Tom got out the chart and marked out the course and measured it, and says:
"To go back west is the shortest way, you see. It's only about seven thousand miles. If you went east, and so on around, it's over twice as far." Then he says to the guide, " I want you both to watch the tell-tale all through the watches, and whenever it don't mark three hundred miles an hour, you go higher or drop lower till you find a storm-current that's going your way. There's a hundred miles an hour in this old thing without any wind to help. There's two-hundred-mile gales to be found, any time you want to hunt for them."
"We'll hunt for them, sir."
" See that you do. Sometimes you may have to go up a couple of miles, and it'll be p'ison cold, but most of the time you'll find your storm a good deal lower. If you can only strike a cyclone — that's the ticket for you! You'll see by the professor's books |
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