THE LOST LEGION

"There's a Legion that never was listed,

That carries no colours or crest,

But, split in a thousand detachments,

Is breaking the road for the rest."

Lieutenants Kelly and Macready, who made the first non-stop airplane flight across the United States, are enrolled in that "Legion", although their membership is nowhere to be soon on a roster. They are proving their right to the places their spirit had chosen for them alongside Vasco de Gama, Stanley, Perry and all pioneers.

These men who had already remained in the air louger than any other aviator, on this flight were again "breaking the road for the rest." They traveled for twenty-seven hours, covering a distance farther by almost a thousand miles than any one else has attempted in one flight. The speed of 110 miles an hour which they were forced to maintain put a strain on the motor which accmed suicidal. And it was necessary to travel through darkness, high above the clouds where charts both of land and of air were almost useless. In these strange air lanes they relied on the compass, the guide of every explorer in uncharted regions.

Others of this "wholly unauthorized horde" who have "shaken the clubs and the messes, to go and find out and be damned", are pushing out on their planes to other discoveries. One set out in a blind leap through heavy Atlantic fogs from Newfoundland to Ireland and another flew faster than birds and the wind. Still another ascends until he loses consciousness, higher than any human being had been before.

But these events have followed one another so rapidly that after scarcely a dozen years of airplane development there seems little more to do. In such a short time the Zest of explorations in the air seems to have disappeared.

The pioneer is pursued so closely by commerce, even in the air, that his type seems in danger of extinction. But there is much yet to do. Around-the-world trips are already planned, the speed of flight will be increased, and most important, the machines in time will be operated automatically by power waves sent from operating stations all over the country. The legions of pioneers need not yet go into barracks, nor need they reach out to Mars to find routes still uncharted.