about three
o'clock
`` Here it is . '' He handed the slip to his chief , who ran his eye over the message . The words employed were few , but a journalist of McMurtrie 's experience instinctively covered the bare bones with a respectable integument , and clothed this with a quite picturesque raiment by force of the more ornamental parts of speech . The substance of what he read was as follows : A cable message had reached San Francisco from Honolulu in the afternoon of the previous day , announcing that an aeroplane had alighted there about three o'clock that morning , the owner , a Lieutenant Thistleton -LRB- so it was corrupted -RRB- Smith declaring that he had come from Samoa in sixteen hours , and was proceeding to San Francisco . He had left three hours later , having waited only to take in a stock of petrol . On receipt of this message the editor of every newspaper in the city had arranged for a relay of reporters to be up all night and watch for the arrival of this extraordinary machine . Shortly after midnight the hum of the propellers was heard over Golden Gate , and a light in the sky indicating the course of the aeroplane , a dozen journalists , in motor-cars , rushed after it , but were hopelessly out-distanced .