"There's a little story connected with this, and now that we're right on the eve of the race and there's nothing to be gained by further secrecy, I'll tell it to you.  You see, about a year and a half ago, possibly two years, a young man came to me for a job as sporting reporter; said he had been a flyer in France and that the Government wanted him as an Air Mail pilot, but he would rather take up the newspaper game.  I put him to work, and he proved very good in gathering news of sports, especially aviation stuff.  A week or so after you challenged me to this race--which I would have liked to back out of, but couldn't and save my honor--this chap showed me some blue-prints of a novel kind of airplane which he claimed to have co-devised with a flyer friend who, he said, was helping to make you a machine of the same type for this contest.  He--"