In periods when he was not needed for drafting or supervision work, Hal Dane slipped away aboard an old plane on some mysterious journeyings. If the facts were known, however, one of those journeys was not so mysterious after all, merely a boy dashing home to see his mother before he undertook a dangerous ocean flight. His other secret missions were flights up and down the Pacific coast where he was trying for the altitude that would best speed him off into the great western river of the winds. From the data that he gathered, the boy made for himself strange, wavy-lined maps and charts of the airways. In addition to these, and based on nautical tables and on gnomonic and Mercator's charts, he plotted out a great oceanic circle course that was to lead him northwest from San Francisco, up towards the Aleutian Islands, on across the Pacific, and in a final southwest dip along the Asian coast until he brought the Wind Bird down in Tokio, capital city of Japan.