In three minutes she had fallen below the wind, and was shooting swiftly on the downward swoop.

The financier was staring at him with a frenzied eye.
Tinker closed the valve, and said with a joyous brightness, "She was quite out of control for a good five minutes!" [Illustration: "She was quite out of control for a good five minutes!"] The financier frankly gave it up; with a rending gasp he fell back in a dead faint.
Tinker shrugged his shoulders, regulated the pace of the machine by letting gas flow from the cylinder into the balloon till it was of the proper buoyancy, then roped the senseless financier to the bottom of the car, and came back to the helm.
The wind they had risen into had been blowing towards the east, so they had not lost ground during their tossing, but they had been driven south of their course, and he did not know exactly how to get back to it.

On the dark earth beneath he could see towns as blurs of light on all sides of him, but no one of them was big enough to be Paris.

He let the machine swoop on down to five hundred feet, and up again.

On the upward course, from fifteen hundred feet he saw a great blur of light on the northern horizon: it was Paris, and he was swooping past it.