Then he said:
“Looky here, it can be done, sure; and I’ll tell you
how. You set your compass and sail west as straight
as a dart, till you find the United States. It ain’t any
trouble, because it’s the first land you’ll strike the other
side of the Atlantic. If it’s daytime when you strike it,
bulge right on, straight west from the upper part of the
Florida coast, and in an hour and three quarters you’ll
hit the mouth of the Mississippi — at the speed that
I’m going to send you. You’ll be so high up in the
air that the earth will be curved considerable — sorter
like a washbowl turned upside down — and you’ll see a
raft of rivers crawling around every which way, long
before you get there, and you can pick out the Miss-
issippi without any trouble. Then you can follow the
river north nearly, an hour and three quarters, till you
see the Ohio come in; then you want to look sharp,
because you’re getting near. Away up to your left
you’ll see another thread coming in — that’s the
Missouri and is a little above St. Louis. You’ll come
down low then, so as you can examine the villages as
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
that they travel west in these latitudes; and they travel
low, too.”
Then he ciphered on the time, and says —
“Seven thousand miles, three hundred miles an
hour — you can make the trip in a day — twenty-four
hours. This is Thursday; you’ll be back here Sat-
urday afternoon. Come, now, hustle out some blankets
and food and books and things for me and Huck, and
you can start right along. There ain’t no occasion to
fool around — I want a smoke, and the quicker you
fetch that pipe the better.”
All hands jumped for the things, and in eight min-
utes our things was out and the balloon was ready for
America. So we shook hands good-bye, and Tom
gave his last orders:
“It’s 1O minutes to 2 P.M. now, Mount Sinai time.
In 24 hours you’ll be home, and it’ll be 6 to-mor-
row morning, village time. When you strike the
village, land a little back of the top of the hill, in the
woods, out of sight; then you rush down, Jim, and
shove these letters in the post-office, and if you see
anybody stirring, pull your slouch down over your face
so they won’t know you. Then you go and slip in the
back way to the kitchen and git the pipe, and lay this
piece of paper on the kitchen table, and put something