CHAPTER V—The Eagle“Well,” began Bob, “I guess my story isn’t going to be very new to any of you. Gee, I know it almost by heart, and I suppose everybody else does, too.”“Don’t apologize,” said the Captain. “We’ll be only too glad to stop you if we’ve heard it before. I don’t think that we will, though. It’s a story that bears repeating.”Bob’s eyes lighted up. “You bet,” he said. “I never get tired of reading about it.” He plucked at the grass beside him. “Gee, it makes a fellow want to do things. It makes him feel that the older folks don’t know everything—”“A-hem,” interrupted Captain Bill.Bob laughed. “You’re not old folks, old bean. Don’t flatter yourself. Anyway, they told Lindbergh that he couldn’t do it. They told him that his plane was carrying too much, and he’d never be able to make it alone.”“Did he?” said Pat.Bob looked at him disgustedly. “Did he! Don’t make fun of me, you old Irishman!”The old Irishman looked grieved. “Well, I just wanted to know. I’m always willing to learn somethin’ new. And you’d better get started, or we’ll never know. We’ll be leaving the lad up in the air, so to speak.”“Ignore that ape,” said Captain Bill, “and proceed.”“Lindbergh didn’t listen to them. He just went ahead and did what he thought was right, and by golly, he was right. It makes a fellow feel that even if he is young he can do things. He doesn’t just have to sit around and do what everybody else has done before. There’s got to be a first every time. Lindy wasn’t afraid just because nobody had ever flown the Atlantic alone before, and the wiseacres said that it couldn’t be done. He just went ahead and flew it.”“It wasn’t as easy as all that,” quietly remarked Hal.Bob turned to him. “Of course not. Lindy had planned every move that he was going to make. He was prepared for anything. That’s why he’s always so successful. He has his plans all laid before he ever takes off. He’s got all the courage in the world, but he’s not reckless.”“Put that under your hat, my lad. It’s a good lesson to know by heart when you’re going into the flying game.”“You bet,” said Bob. “Gee, it needed a lot of courage for him to make that take-off. I’ve got the date down here. It was May 20, 1927, on a Friday. That must have been an exciting morning down at Roosevelt Field. He made up his mind on Thursday afternoon. They told him that the weather was all right over the North Atlantic, and that it would be best if he started out the next morning.“He didn’t tell anybody about his plans. He never talks very much anyway. Everybody found that out later. It was all sort of secret. He just told his mechanics to get the Spirit of St. Louis ready, and keep their mouths shut. I guess he didn’t want everybody messing around with his plans. But the men who delivered his gasoline weren’t so secret, I guess, and somehow his plans leaked out Thursday night.“That Thursday night was pretty awful. It was raining, and the weather could be cut with a knife. But once people found out that Slim was going to start, they began to come around to Curtiss Field, and at two o’clock in the morning there was a big crowd of them standing around in the rain and mud. Slim wasn’t leaving from Curtiss, though, and they towed his plane by truck over to Roosevelt. They got there just about when it was getting light.“There was a crowd over at Curtiss, too. But Slim didn’t care. Crowds never mean much to him. He saw a whole lot more of them later on, too, but he never was one to strut or show off. He just got into his fur-lined suit, and waited for the men to start his engine. Somebody asked him if he had only five sandwiches and two canteens of water. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘If I get to Paris, I won’t need any more, and if I don’t get there, I won’t need any more, either.’ It was just like him to say that, but the real reason he didn’t take any more was because he had too much weight already. He had over 200 gallons of gas, and the load was heavy. He had to cut down on everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary.“Well, they started his motor for him. The plane was standing on the Roosevelt runway, which is pretty smooth, and five thousand feet long. The weather had cleared up a little. And there was the monoplane looking all silver and slick, roaring away for all it was worth. Lindy said goodbye to his mother, and to Byrd and Chamberlin and Acosta, who were planning their own trips across the Atlantic, and then he stepped into the cockpit, and closed the door.“He raced his motor a little bit. She must have sounded pretty sweet to him, because he gave her the gun, and off he went. That start must have been one of the hardest parts of the whole trip. The Spirit of St. Louis bumped along that muddy runway, and the people watching thought she’d go over on her nose any moment. She was over-loaded. Her motor was pulling for all she was worth, but it didn’t seem as though they’d ever make it. She went off the ground a few feet, and bounced down again. But then the crowd held its breath. She was leaving the ground. They were up about fifteen feet. And there were telegraph wires in their path. If they hit those, the trip to Paris was over right then. But they didn’t. The landing gear cleared by a few inches. That crowd simply roared. But Slim didn’t hear them. He was on his way to Paris.”Bob paused for breath. He had been talking very fast, carried away by his story. The others did not speak, but sat waiting for him to go on. They had all heard the story before, but as the Captain had said, it bore repeating, and they could hear it again and again. There was something agelessly appealing in the tale of that young man’s feat.Bob was talking again. “I’m not much at poetry,” he said.“You bet you’re not,” said Captain Bill. “I’ve read some of yours.”Bob glared at him. “I never wrote a poem!” he said defensively.The Captain looked contrite. “It must have been Hal,” he said. “I beg your pardon. Go on with your story. Where does the poetry come in?”“I was going to tell you, before you interrupted, so rudely, that there’s somebody who’s written a poem—a lot of poetry, to music—a cantata I think they call it. It’s about Lindy’s flight, and it tells the story of the flight across the Atlantic. I guess it’s pretty thrilling. Maybe that’s the only way the story can be told—in poetry and music, because it always sounds pretty flat when you just say Lindy flew across the Atlantic in a monoplane. It needs music, with a lot of trumpets—”“Go on, go on, my lad. More words, less music.” Pat seemed to be getting impatient. The sun was pretty high over their heads now, and bees were buzzing drowsily in the tall grass all around them. Hal had stretched out on his stomach, facing the little group, which was seated now in a semi-circle. “I’ll be falling asleep if you don’t get on.”Bob laughed embarrassedly. “All right, you just stop me if I get to rambling. You keep me straight, Irish.”Captain Bill leaned back on a hummock of earth, his arms folded behind his head. “I’m so comfortable, I could listen to anything, even to Bob telling a story. Go on, Bob.”“One more crack, and you don’t hear anything,” said Bob. “Remember the rules, no interruptions from the gallery.”“We stand corrected. Go on.”Bob settled himself once again into the grass. “Well, we’ve got Lindy into the air. No sooner had he set out when people began reporting that they’d seen him. Some of them had. A lot of them were just excited individuals who’d heard a motorcycle back-firing. But somebody actually did see him flying over Rhode Island, and about two hours, nearly, after he had set out, they flashed back that he’d been seen at Halifax, Massachusetts. Then he dropped out of sight. Nobody reported seeing him. That was because he took an over-water route, and was out some distance, flying along the coast of New England.“They saw him next over Nova Scotia, running along nicely, and then Springfield, Nova Scotia saw him. It was about one o’clock, and he was going strong. But he was getting into a dangerous region, cold and foggy. They had watchers looking for him everywhere. Lindy left Nova Scotia at Cape Breton, headed for Newfoundland. It was pretty stiff going, about 200 miles without sight of land, and over a pretty treacherous sea. But at 7:15 they saw him flying low over St. John’s, in Newfoundland. They could see the number on the wings, and sent back word to the world that he had passed there. And that was the last word that anybody received that Friday.“The going had been pretty good until then. The weather was clear, and the ceiling pretty high. But as soon as it got dark, Lindy and his plane hit some pretty bad weather. It grew mighty cold, and a thick swirling fog came up and swallowed up the plane. This was mighty tough, because if he flew low, he was bound to run into one of the icebergs that were floating in the icy sea. So he climbed up to about 10,000 feet, and stayed there. Flying high was all right, but it added another danger. Ice was forming on the wings of the Spirit of St. Louis, and if it got thick enough, it would break off a wing of the plane, and send the plane and Lindy into the sea.“Lindy could have turned back, but he didn’t. He kept right on, through fog and sleet and rain. His motor never missed. It was a good pal, and no wonder he included it in his feat, and said later that ‘we crossed the Atlantic.’“When morning came, a whole flock of cables came, too. It seems a whole lot of ships had sighted Lindy’s plane, or somebody’s plane, anywhere from 500 to 100 miles off the coast of Ireland, where he was headed. Nobody knew who to believe, but at 10:00 o’clock came the real news, that he was over a place called Valencia, Ireland.“Lindy wondered where he was, himself. Flying blind as he had, he didn’t know just where he had come out. So he decided to ask the first person he met. Now you can imagine the air roads weren’t full of planes flying to Ireland, and Lindy had to wait until he sighted a fishing schooner. He swooped low and shouted out, ‘Am I headed for Ireland?’ The fishermen were so astounded that they couldn’t answer, so Lindy flew on his course, depending as he had all night, on his compass. Pretty soon he came in sight of land, and knew that it was Ireland.”“Because it was so beautiful,” said Pat.“No, because it was rocky, and his maps indicated that the land would be rocky,” said Bob.“Oh, no doubt he could tell it was Ireland,” insisted Pat. “His mother was Irish, you know, and it needs mighty little Irish blood to make a man long for the ould sod.”“Well, anyway, there he was over Ireland,” put in Bob, pointedly. “And from Ireland, on to England, and from England, on to France. Along the Seine, and then Paris. They were waiting for him at Le Bourget, and sent up flares and rockets, long before he got there. Maybe they weren’t excited when he flew into range! It was about 8:30, that is, French time, but about 5:30 New York time, when Lindy and the Spirit of St. Louis circled around the landing field at Le Bourget and landed. Golly, I wish I’d been there. The first man in the world to fly the Atlantic, landing before my very eyes! He’d gone 3,640 miles, and had made it in 33½ hours. Some going!“Well, he was there. And he got out of the plane. And you all know what he said when he got out. I—”“I am Charles Lindbergh,” said Captain Bill and Pat, not quite in unison.“Yup,” said Bob, “‘I am Charles Lindbergh.’ He thought that they wouldn’t know who he was. He’d been flying pretty low over Ireland and England, and so far as he could see, nobody had paid much attention to him. So he introduced himself, just as though every man, woman and child in every civilized country wasn’t saying that very name all through the day. Remember when we heard the news over the radio, Hal? We were so excited we nearly upset the furniture. Golly, that was a day.“Well, that was Slim Lindbergh’s flight, and now about Slim himself. He was born in Detroit, Michigan, on February 2, 1902, and that means that he was only twenty-five years old when he made his greatest flight, which is pretty young to become the most famous man in the world.“His dad was Charles A. Lindbergh, and he died in 1924, when he was running for governor of Minnesota on the Farmer-Labor ticket. He’d been a Representative in Congress before. Lindy and he were great pals, and played around together a lot. Lindy’s mother was Irish, and taught school in Detroit.“Lindy went to school in Little Falls, and to Little Falls High School. He graduated from there when he was 16. He was good in Math and in other things he liked, but not in grammar.“Lindy didn’t go right to college. In fact, he didn’t go until three years after he’d graduated from high school, and then he went to the University of Wisconsin, to take up mechanical engineering. He was good at that. He’d always liked to tinker, and he got his chance there. He did at college just what you’d expect him to do. He had some friends and acquaintances, but mostly he kept to himself. He was the same quiet, shy person that everybody got to know later, when he became famous.“Slim didn’t stay at Wisconsin very long, so we don’t know what he would have finally done there. He went over to Lincoln, Nebraska, where they had a flying school, and asked them to teach him to fly. They taught him the beginnings of flying, and from the moment his hands touched the controls, he knew that this was what he was cut out for. He just took naturally to those levers and gadgets, and could handle his plane like a toy.“It seems that Lindy was born to be a pilot. He’s built for one, in the first place. Long and rangy, and slim. No extra weight, but plenty of muscle and endurance. He’s got a lot of nerve and never gets excited He showed that when he got himself elected to the Caterpillar Club. But I’ll get to that later.” Here Bob paused, and looked up at the sun, which was just slipping a little westward. “Say,” he said. “Would you folks mind if I continued my story later? I feel just a little empty. How about the food?”“I’ve been thinking that for a long time,” said the Captain. “But rules are rules. I didn’t want to interrupt you.”Bob snorted. “Say, for food you can interrupt me any time. Let’s go.”He jumped up, stretched himself, and made for the car, to get out the huge hamper of lunch. “Say,” he called back, “Lindy may have been satisfied with five sandwiches all the way to Paris, but darned if I couldn’t eat five right now.” He carried the hamper over to the knoll where the others were. They were all standing now, limbering up, stretching, sniffing the good air, and looking eagerly toward the food.“Here, lend a hand,” said Bob. He plumped down the basket so that they could hear the rattle of forks and tin cups within, and sat down beside it.“You’re the host,” said Hal, seating himself comfortably on the grass and looking on. “It’s your party. We have to listen to your story, so the least you can do is feed us.”Bob had opened the hamper, and was viewing its contents eagerly. He dived into the basket. “Say, anybody who doesn’t help himself, doesn’t eat. Fall to.”They fell to, doing much eating but little talking. Finally Bob sat back, a sandwich in one hand, a cup of steaming coffee out of the thermos bottle in the other. “I have a suspicion,” he said, “that you don’t like my story.”“Don’t get ideas like that, Bob, my lad,” said Pat. “We love your story. We just like sandwiches better.”“All right, then I won’t finish,” said Bob. “I’m going to be independent.”Hal looked up. “Not finish? You’ve got finish any story you start.”“One of the rules? There aren’t any rules. You just made that up.”Hal was cajoling now. “Aw, come on, Bob. We want to hear the end. Come on, tell us the rest.”Bob bit into a huge slice of cake. He shook his head. “Nope, no end.”“Well, at least about the Caterpillar Club. At least you’ll tell us how Lindy saved his life by bailing out. We’ve got to hear that.”But Bob was adamant. “I’ve been insulted. I’m not going on. Anyway, Lindy didn’t save his life once by bailing out of a plane.”“He didn’t? You said a little while ago that he did.”“I didn’t say once. He became eligible to the Caterpillar Club four times.”Hal looked at Bob with disgust. “I must say that you’re being very disagreeable.”Captain Bill, who had been looking on in amusement, suddenly laughed very loudly. “Don’t coax him, Hal. He doesn’t need coaxing. He’s going to tell the rest of the story, don’t you worry. Wild horses couldn’t keep him from finishing the tale. Could they, Bob, old man?”Bob looked over at his uncle and grinned. “Why, you old sinner. What a way to talk about your favorite nephew. But now that you mention it, maybe I did intend to finish the story, seeing that I’d started it. Now, where was I?”Pat was clearing up the debris made by four men eating a picnic lunch. “You’ve got Lindbergh at the Nebraska flying school for a long time.”“Oh, not very long,” said Bob. “You see, he stayed there really a short time. In fact, he never did any solo flying there.”“Well, why not?” asked Hal.“They asked for a five-hundred dollar bond from every student before he went up on his first solo flight. This seemed silly to Lindy, and he left the school.“When he left, he did what so many of the flyers were doing then. He went out west, and did stunting, risking his neck at county fairs and air circuses to give the people a thrill. He did, too. He handled his plane like a toy, doing rolls, tail spins, and every kind of stunt imaginable. But the most exciting thing that he did, and it usually isn’t an exciting thing at all, was landing his plane. He could land on a dime, and as lightly as a feather. That’s really piloting, isn’t it, Bill?”“You bet,” said the Captain. He was sprawled out on his back, enjoying his after dinner rest. “A landing will show you your flyer’s ability every time. Provided, of course, that he has a fairly decent landing field. Did I ever tell you the story that Hawks tells in his autobiography? Do you mind if I interrupt for just a minute, Bob?”“Oh, no, go right ahead,” said Bob, witheringly. “Go right ahead. I was just telling a story.”“Thanks,” said Captain Bill with a grin. “I will. Well, it seems that Hawks was stunting down in Mexico, and doing quite a bit of private flying. He got a commission to fly a Congressman and a General, I think it was, back to their home town of Huatemo. Have you ever heard of Huatemo? I thought not. Well, Huatemo had never seen an airplane close up, and the two high muckamucks decided that they’d give the natives a thrill by coming back via plane. Hawks had them wire ahead to have a landing field prepared. The native officials wired that they had a fine field, clear of all obstructions, but dotted with a few small trees. ‘Fine, says Hawks, but have them remove the trees immediately.’ The natives said that this had been done, and the party started out.“After several adventures, Hawks flew over Huatemo, and prepared to spiral down to the landing field. Imagine his chagrin and surprise, my dear boys, when he discovered, that the officials of Huatemo had indeed cut down the Huateman trees, but had left the stumps standing!”“Whew,” said Bob. “What did he do, turn around?”“No, he couldn’t. And anyway, there was no other place to land. The field was surrounded by dense forests. He had to make it. He brought his plane down without hitting a stump, and then zig-zagged wildly from stump to stump like a croquet ball trying to miss wickets. And he missed them all, too, except one. The wheel hit it an awful smack, and collapsed. The plane tilted up on its nose, and came to rest with its propeller in the ground and its tail waving gayly in the air, not at all like a proper plane should.”“And killed them all,” said Pat.“Who, Hawks? Not on your life. He’s a lucky fellow. Not one of them was hurt. They climbed out of the plane, and were greeted by the natives, joyously and with acclaim. And not one of the natives seemed to suspect in the least that this wasn’t the way a plane should land. Or at least the way a crazy American would land a plane.” The Captain finished his story, and paused.“Well,” said Bob grudgingly, “that was a good story, too. But, as I was saying, Lindy was a good stunter, and a good flyer. He decided that he wanted a plane of his own. He heard that there was going to be a sale of army planes down in Georgia, and he went down and bought a Curtiss Jenny with the money that he had saved from his stunting work. He fixed it up, and was soon off barnstorming again. But I guess the Jenny was too clumsy a boat for Lindy. He wanted to fly the newer, better planes that the army had. So he joined the army’s training school at Brook Field, San Antonio. This was when he was 22 years old.“I guess he got along pretty fine at San Antonio, and he was sent down to the pursuit school at Kelly Field. He joined the Caterpillar Club there. It was the first time that he had to jump from a moving plane and get down with his parachute. I guess it was a pretty close shave.”“Gee, how did it happen?” said Hal, his eyes wide.“Wait a second, I’m coming to it,” said Bob. “He and another officer were to go up and attack another plane that they called the enemy. It was a sort of problem they had to work out. Well, Slim dove at the enemy from the left, and the other fellow from the right. The enemy plane pulled up, but Lindy and the other officer kept on going, dead toward each other. There was an awful crack, and their wings locked. The two planes began to spin around and drop through the air. Lindy did the only thing there was to do. He kept his head, stepped out on one of the damaged wings, and stepped off backwards. He didn’t pull the rip-cord until he had fallen quite a way, because he didn’t want the ships to fall on him. When he’d gone far enough, he pulled the cord, and floated gently down. That was the first.”“And the second?” said Hal.“The second,” went on Bob, “happened in 1927, just about a year before Lindy flew the Atlantic. He took a new type of plane up to test her. He put her through all the stunts that he could think of, and she stood them all right. It seemed as though she was going to come through the test O.K., when Lindy put her into a tail spin. They spiraled down for a while, and Lindy tried to pull her out of it. She wouldn’t respond and went completely out of control. Lindy tugged and yanked at the controls, but he couldn’t get that bus to go into a dive. He did his best to save the ship, but it was no use. He didn’t give up until they were about 300 feet from the ground, which is a mighty short distance to make a jump, if you ask me. But Lindy made it, and landed in somebody’s back yard, the wind knocked out of him, but otherwise all right. That was the second.”“And the third?” asked Hal.“We’re getting ahead of the story. In fact, we’re ahead of the story already. Before he made his second jump, Lindy had joined the Missouri National Guard, and was promoted to a Captaincy in the Reserve and Flight Commander of the 110th Observation Squadron. That’s how he got to be a Captain, you know how he got to be a Colonel.“Then Lindy joined the Robertson Aircraft Corporation, at St. Louis. While he was with them, he helped map out the first mail route from St. Louis to Chicago, and was the first pilot to carry mail along this route. Slim had a habit of starting things off. He was the first to do a lot of things. No sitting back and waiting for others to start things. It was first or nothing for him. Maybe it was his Viking ancestors, I don’t know.“It was while he was flying this route that Lindy had his third initiation into the Caterpillars. He took off one September afternoon from Lambert Field, in St. Louis, on his way to Maywood. Just outside of Peoria a fog rolled in, so thick you could cut it with a knife, Lindy could climb up over it for flying, but he couldn’t land blind. He dropped a flare, but it only lit up a cloud bank. He saw lights, then, through the fog, and knew that he was around Maywood, but couldn’t get the exact location of the field. He’d circled around for two hours, when his engine sputtered and died. The tank was dry. Lindy quickly turned on the reserve gravity tank. There was twenty minutes of flying in that tank, and Lindy had to think fast.“He tried flares again, but it was no use. When he had just a few minutes of gas left, he saw the glow of a town. He didn’t want to take a chance on landing in a town and killing somebody, so he headed for open country. In a few minutes his engine died. Lindy stepped out into the blind fog and jumped. After falling a hundred feet, he pulled the rip-cord, and left the rest to chance. Every once in a while his ship appeared, twirling away in spirals, the outside of the circle about 300 yards away from Lindy. He counted five spirals, and then lost sight of the bus. He landed in a corn field, shaken, of course, but all right. He found his way to the farm house, and told the farmer who he was. The farmer, who had heard the crash of the plane as it smashed to earth wouldn’t believe that this safe and sound man was the pilot of it. Finally Lindy convinced him, and they went in search of the plane, which the farmer was sure had landed close to his house. They found it two miles away, looking not much like a plane, but a heap of rubbish. The mail wasn’t hurt. They got it to a train for Chicago, and the mail went through. It always does, you know.”“Yup, it always does,” said Captain Bill.“That reminds me of a story,” said Pat.“Hold it,” said Bob. “I’ve got another parachute for Lindy.”“Fire away,” said Pat. “But remember to remind me not to forget to tell you my own story.”“All right,” Bob put in. “Now the fourth time Lindy jumped was not long before his big flight. He was still flying for Robertson’s, carrying mail to Chicago. Just south of Peoria he ran into rain that changed to snow. Lindy flew around, waiting for the fog to lift, until he heard his motor sputter and die. He was up about 13,000 feet when he stepped out of the cockpit and jumped into the air. He landed on a barbed wire fence. Tore his shirt, but the plane was pretty much of a wreck. He grabbed the air mail; hurried to a train for Chicago, got another plane, and flew the mail through. A little late, but still, it got through. And he didn’t bat an eye. Not one of the jumps fazed him a bit.“But it wasn’t as though Lindy jumped at the slightest sign of anything going wrong. He stayed with his plane until the very last minute, doing everything he could to save it. He hated worse than anything to have a plane smashed up. Look how long he stayed with that new plane he was testing out—until he was just 300 feet above the ground.“Well, Lindy was one of the best mail pilots that the Robertson corporation had, in fact, he was their chief pilot. They could depend on him to go out in weather that no other pilot would think of bucking. He didn’t show off. Just knew that he could fly through anything, and he did.“At this time there was a lot of excitement in the air. Orteig was offering his $25,000 prize for the first man to cross the Atlantic, and there were a lot of aviators who would have liked the prize, and were trying for it. Of course, the money wasn’t the whole thing. There was the honor attached to it. And besides, there was the fact that crossing the Atlantic would make people sit up and take notice that flying wasn’t as dangerous as they thought. If a man could fly all that distance in a plane, maybe planes weren’t the death traps that some people had an idea they were. Lindy must have been thinking of this when he first decided that he’d like to try for the Orteig prize. Because everything that he’s done since his flight has been to get people interested in aviation.“But it takes money to fly across the ocean. You’ve got to get a special plane and all that. Lindy had to have backers. He couldn’t get them at first. Everybody tried to discourage him. In the first place, he looked such a kid. He was twenty-five, and that’s young, but he didn’t even look twenty-five. The men he asked to back him all but told him to run home and wait until he had grown up.“Then Major Robertson, Lindy’s Big Boss, tried to get backers for him. He knew that Lindy could fly and finally got some influential men to put up $15,000 for his flight. Maybe Lindy wasn’t glad! He tucked his check in his pocket and went on a shopping trip for a plane. He tried the Bellanca people in New York, but they didn’t have what he wanted, so he skipped to San Diego to the Ryan Airways, Inc., and told them what he wanted. They put their engineers to work on his specifications, and designed him a Ryan monoplane, the neat stream-lined job that was christened the Spirit of St. Louis. It’s a graceful bird—but you’ve all seen so many pictures of it, you know what it looks like. It has a wing span of 46 feet, and an overall length of over 27 feet. They put in a Wright engine—a Whirlwind, 200 horsepower. It’s a radial engine. You two probably know what a radial engine is, but Hal here doesn’t.” Bob paused and turned to Hal. “Do you?”“Uh-uh,” grunted Hal. “Do you?”“Of course I do. It’s one in which the cylinders aren’t in a straight line or in a V, but arranged around an axis, like the spokes of a wheel. Lindy’s plane had two spark plugs for each cylinder, so that in case one missed, there was another one ready. She could carry 450 gallons of gas and twenty gallons of oil, and she was loaded to the gills when Lindy took her off the ground at the Field.“Suppose Lindy wasn’t anxious about that plane. He hung around the factory all the time that it was being built, and made suggestions to help along Hawley Bowlus, who built the thing. You know Hawley Bowlus. The fellow who held the glider record until Lindy took it away from him—but that’s later. Bowlus knows how to build planes, and Lindy swears by him.“Well, they got the plane finished in 60 days, which isn’t bad time. Out in New York, Byrd and Chamberlin and the others were getting ready to fly the Atlantic. It’s wasn’t really a race to see who would be first, but of course, there’s no doubt that each one was anxious to be the first man to cross the Atlantic. Because after all, nobody likes to be second. So Lindy had to get out to the east coast as fast as he could. He could hardly wait for the plane to be finished. But at last it was, and all the equipment in place. Lindy climbed into the cockpit to test her out. The cockpit was inclosed. I don’t know whether I told that before or not. Anyway, he could see out little windows on each side, but he couldn’t see ahead, or above him. So it was really flying blind all the time, except for a sliding periscope that he could pull in or out at the side, in case he had to see straight ahead. But Lindy doesn’t mind blind flying. He’s a wonderful navigator.“Well, Lindy turned over the motor of his new plane, and it sounded sweet. He hadn’t got it any more than off the ground when he realized that this was the plane for him. It responded to every touch, although it was a heavy ship, and not much good for stunting. But Lindy didn’t want to stunt. He wanted to fly to Europe.“It was on May 10, I think, that he left San Diego. It was in the evening, not quite six o’clock. The next morning, a little after eight, he got into St. Louis. Took him just a bit over fourteen hours, the whole trip. It was the longest cross-country hop that any one man had made up to that time. His old pals at Lambert Field were pretty glad to see him, and he spent the night at his old stamping grounds. But he didn’t stay long. Early in the morning he got on his way, and made New York in the afternoon, in not quite seven and a half hours. Pretty flying.“Nobody much had heard of Lindy until he started from San Diego. Of course, he’d been a dandy mail pilot, but they’re usually unnamed heroes. Nobody hears about them, and they never get their names in the paper unless they crash. Not that they care. They’ve got their jobs to do, and they do them. But when Lindy flew that grand hop from San Diego to St. Louis to New York, people began to sit up and take notice. He didn’t say much after he got to the Curtiss Field.“Out at Curtiss he spent his time seeing that everything was ready, and all his instruments O.K. He had a lot of confidence in himself—he always has—but there was no use in taking chances. In back of the pilot’s seat was a collapsible rubber boat, that he could blow up with two tanks of gas that he carried with him. It had light oars, and was supposed to be able to float him for a week in case he decided suddenly to come down in the middle of the Atlantic instead of flying all the way across. Then there were his regular instruments. He had a tachometer, and an altimeter, an earth inductor compass, a drift indicator, and—”Captain Bill interrupted. “Just a minute, just a minute. You say those things pretty glibly. Do you know what they mean? What’s a tachometer? Pat here doesn’t know.”Bob looked embarrassed. “Well, they’re all pretty necessary instruments. I’ve been meaning to look them up, that is, Gee, I really ought to know, oughtn’t I?”“You ought,” said the Captain severely. “Do you mind if I interrupt your story for just a minute and give you a few pointers? This is mostly for you and Hal. You’ll never be able to fly unless you understand what the instruments on the dashboard are for. Of course a lot of the old flyers, like Patrick, here, flew just by instinct, and stuck their heads out over the cockpit to see what was happening. A real pilot nowadays, though, can be sealed in his cockpit and never see ahead of him from the time he takes off until he lands, just so long as his instruments are working. He can keep his course over any country, no matter how strange. You’ve got to know your instruments.”“Well, tell us,” said Bob.The Captain sat up. “I guess the first thing that Lindy watched was the tachometer. This is the instrument that shows the number of revolutions per minute, or R.P.M.’s that the engine is making. A flyer must know how many R.P.M.’s his engine must make to maintain a correct flying speed, or he’ll go into a stall, which is bad. I’ll tell you more about stalls later. The altimeter registers the height at which the plane is flying. It isn’t very accurate at low altitudes, but it’s all right higher up. You soon learn by the feel and the lay of the land how high up you are. The exact height doesn’t matter in ordinary flying, just so that you keep a good altitude. Then there’s that most important instrument, the earth inductor compass. This is much more accurate than a magnetic compass, and it keeps the ship on its course. It operates in regard to the electro-magnetic reactions of the earth’s field, and directions are indicated in reference to magnetic north. To steer by this compass, you have to set your desired heading on the controller, and then steer to keep the indicator on zero. If you veer to the left, the indicator will swing to the left, and to keep on your course you must bring your plane back to the right. When he changes his course, the pilot consults his maps and graphs, and makes a change in the indicator of the compass.“Then there is the air speed indicator, which shows the speed of the plane in the air. This is necessary so that the engine is not over-speeded. A pilot never runs his plane at full speed as a general thing, because he’ll wear out his engine. He keeps it at about 80 per cent of its potential speed, which is a good safe margin.“The turn and bank indicator also reads from zero, and deviates from zero when the plane dips. The bubble rides up to the left when the plane banks right, and rides up to the right when the plane banks left. When the ship is again on an even keel, the indicator goes back to zero. The pilot, when he isn’t flying blind, can keep his plane level by noticing the position of the radiator cap or top of the engine in respect to the horizon. But in a heavy fog, or if he can’t see over his cockpit, the horizon doesn’t exist, and a bank and turn indicator is his instrument.“The instruments that are no less important than these are the oil gauge, the gasoline pressure gauge, and the thermometer, which shows whether the motor is overheating. If the oil gauge shows that the oil is at a good cool temperature, and the gasoline pressure gauge shows that the gas pressure is up, the pilot knows that his motor is running nicely. The gas pressure gauge won’t tell you how much gas you have left, though. It’s always best to figure how much gas you’re going to need on a trip, and then take some over for emergencies. Most planes also have an emergency tank, so that if one tank gives out, the other can be switched on, and will give the flyer time to maneuver about until he finds a landing place.” Captain Bill paused. “Well, those are your instruments. I’ll probably have to explain them all over to you again when the plane comes, and I start to teach you to fly.”“Oh, no, not to me, you won’t,” Bob said.Hal sat quietly looking out over the valley below, saying nothing. He had listened intently to the Captain’s instructions, but there was an odd expression on his face.Finally Pat snorted. Bob and the others jumped.“Hi, what’s the idea. Is there a story being told, or isn’t there a story being told? Get on with you.”“It’s no fault of mine, Patrick,” said Bob, looking meaningly at the Captain, who appeared as innocent as a lamb. “I’m always being rudely interrupted. But I’ll go on. Where was I?”“The Lindbergh lad was at Curtiss Field, waiting this long time to be off,” said Pat.“Oh, yes. Well, when he got word that the weather was O.K., he got his sandwiches, his canteens of water, and started off on the greatest flight in aviation history. And I’ve told you about that.”“We seem to be right back where we started from,” the Captain said. “Is that the end of your story?”Bob laughed. “By no means. You’ve got a lot to hear yet. What do you suppose I’ve been collecting dope for all these weeks? I’ve got a lot to tell you. Lindy wasn’t satisfied with one great trip. He’s been flying since, and has made some pretty important jaunts. Things happened to him after he got back to America loaded down with about every kind of medal that one man can get. And I’m going to tell you all of them.”“I suppose we’ll have to listen. It’s part of the game,” Pat said. “But not now, my lad.” He rose stiffly from the grass. “You’re mother will be looking for us, and wondering what’s become of us. We’d better get for home.”“How about continuing in the next issue?” laughed the Captain.“O.K.” said Bob. “You get the rest of it tonight, whether you like it or not.”Hal looked up fervently at Bob. “Oh, we like it, Bob. I think it’s a great story. A great story.” The boy’s eyes shown in his pale face. “Golly, Bob, it must be wonderful to be able to do things like that.”Bob looked uncomfortable as they walked over to the car. “Well, kid, I don’t see why anybody can’t do great things if he’s got grit enough. That’s what it takes—Grit.”
CHAPTER V—The Eagle“Well,” began Bob, “I guess my story isn’t going to be very new to any of you. Gee, I know it almost by heart, and I suppose everybody else does, too.”“Don’t apologize,” said the Captain. “We’ll be only too glad to stop you if we’ve heard it before. I don’t think that we will, though. It’s a story that bears repeating.”Bob’s eyes lighted up. “You bet,” he said. “I never get tired of reading about it.” He plucked at the grass beside him. “Gee, it makes a fellow want to do things. It makes him feel that the older folks don’t know everything—”“A-hem,” interrupted Captain Bill.Bob laughed. “You’re not old folks, old bean. Don’t flatter yourself. Anyway, they told Lindbergh that he couldn’t do it. They told him that his plane was carrying too much, and he’d never be able to make it alone.”“Did he?” said Pat.Bob looked at him disgustedly. “Did he! Don’t make fun of me, you old Irishman!”The old Irishman looked grieved. “Well, I just wanted to know. I’m always willing to learn somethin’ new. And you’d better get started, or we’ll never know. We’ll be leaving the lad up in the air, so to speak.”“Ignore that ape,” said Captain Bill, “and proceed.”“Lindbergh didn’t listen to them. He just went ahead and did what he thought was right, and by golly, he was right. It makes a fellow feel that even if he is young he can do things. He doesn’t just have to sit around and do what everybody else has done before. There’s got to be a first every time. Lindy wasn’t afraid just because nobody had ever flown the Atlantic alone before, and the wiseacres said that it couldn’t be done. He just went ahead and flew it.”“It wasn’t as easy as all that,” quietly remarked Hal.Bob turned to him. “Of course not. Lindy had planned every move that he was going to make. He was prepared for anything. That’s why he’s always so successful. He has his plans all laid before he ever takes off. He’s got all the courage in the world, but he’s not reckless.”“Put that under your hat, my lad. It’s a good lesson to know by heart when you’re going into the flying game.”“You bet,” said Bob. “Gee, it needed a lot of courage for him to make that take-off. I’ve got the date down here. It was May 20, 1927, on a Friday. That must have been an exciting morning down at Roosevelt Field. He made up his mind on Thursday afternoon. They told him that the weather was all right over the North Atlantic, and that it would be best if he started out the next morning.“He didn’t tell anybody about his plans. He never talks very much anyway. Everybody found that out later. It was all sort of secret. He just told his mechanics to get the Spirit of St. Louis ready, and keep their mouths shut. I guess he didn’t want everybody messing around with his plans. But the men who delivered his gasoline weren’t so secret, I guess, and somehow his plans leaked out Thursday night.“That Thursday night was pretty awful. It was raining, and the weather could be cut with a knife. But once people found out that Slim was going to start, they began to come around to Curtiss Field, and at two o’clock in the morning there was a big crowd of them standing around in the rain and mud. Slim wasn’t leaving from Curtiss, though, and they towed his plane by truck over to Roosevelt. They got there just about when it was getting light.“There was a crowd over at Curtiss, too. But Slim didn’t care. Crowds never mean much to him. He saw a whole lot more of them later on, too, but he never was one to strut or show off. He just got into his fur-lined suit, and waited for the men to start his engine. Somebody asked him if he had only five sandwiches and two canteens of water. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘If I get to Paris, I won’t need any more, and if I don’t get there, I won’t need any more, either.’ It was just like him to say that, but the real reason he didn’t take any more was because he had too much weight already. He had over 200 gallons of gas, and the load was heavy. He had to cut down on everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary.“Well, they started his motor for him. The plane was standing on the Roosevelt runway, which is pretty smooth, and five thousand feet long. The weather had cleared up a little. And there was the monoplane looking all silver and slick, roaring away for all it was worth. Lindy said goodbye to his mother, and to Byrd and Chamberlin and Acosta, who were planning their own trips across the Atlantic, and then he stepped into the cockpit, and closed the door.“He raced his motor a little bit. She must have sounded pretty sweet to him, because he gave her the gun, and off he went. That start must have been one of the hardest parts of the whole trip. The Spirit of St. Louis bumped along that muddy runway, and the people watching thought she’d go over on her nose any moment. She was over-loaded. Her motor was pulling for all she was worth, but it didn’t seem as though they’d ever make it. She went off the ground a few feet, and bounced down again. But then the crowd held its breath. She was leaving the ground. They were up about fifteen feet. And there were telegraph wires in their path. If they hit those, the trip to Paris was over right then. But they didn’t. The landing gear cleared by a few inches. That crowd simply roared. But Slim didn’t hear them. He was on his way to Paris.”Bob paused for breath. He had been talking very fast, carried away by his story. The others did not speak, but sat waiting for him to go on. They had all heard the story before, but as the Captain had said, it bore repeating, and they could hear it again and again. There was something agelessly appealing in the tale of that young man’s feat.Bob was talking again. “I’m not much at poetry,” he said.“You bet you’re not,” said Captain Bill. “I’ve read some of yours.”Bob glared at him. “I never wrote a poem!” he said defensively.The Captain looked contrite. “It must have been Hal,” he said. “I beg your pardon. Go on with your story. Where does the poetry come in?”“I was going to tell you, before you interrupted, so rudely, that there’s somebody who’s written a poem—a lot of poetry, to music—a cantata I think they call it. It’s about Lindy’s flight, and it tells the story of the flight across the Atlantic. I guess it’s pretty thrilling. Maybe that’s the only way the story can be told—in poetry and music, because it always sounds pretty flat when you just say Lindy flew across the Atlantic in a monoplane. It needs music, with a lot of trumpets—”“Go on, go on, my lad. More words, less music.” Pat seemed to be getting impatient. The sun was pretty high over their heads now, and bees were buzzing drowsily in the tall grass all around them. Hal had stretched out on his stomach, facing the little group, which was seated now in a semi-circle. “I’ll be falling asleep if you don’t get on.”Bob laughed embarrassedly. “All right, you just stop me if I get to rambling. You keep me straight, Irish.”Captain Bill leaned back on a hummock of earth, his arms folded behind his head. “I’m so comfortable, I could listen to anything, even to Bob telling a story. Go on, Bob.”“One more crack, and you don’t hear anything,” said Bob. “Remember the rules, no interruptions from the gallery.”“We stand corrected. Go on.”Bob settled himself once again into the grass. “Well, we’ve got Lindy into the air. No sooner had he set out when people began reporting that they’d seen him. Some of them had. A lot of them were just excited individuals who’d heard a motorcycle back-firing. But somebody actually did see him flying over Rhode Island, and about two hours, nearly, after he had set out, they flashed back that he’d been seen at Halifax, Massachusetts. Then he dropped out of sight. Nobody reported seeing him. That was because he took an over-water route, and was out some distance, flying along the coast of New England.“They saw him next over Nova Scotia, running along nicely, and then Springfield, Nova Scotia saw him. It was about one o’clock, and he was going strong. But he was getting into a dangerous region, cold and foggy. They had watchers looking for him everywhere. Lindy left Nova Scotia at Cape Breton, headed for Newfoundland. It was pretty stiff going, about 200 miles without sight of land, and over a pretty treacherous sea. But at 7:15 they saw him flying low over St. John’s, in Newfoundland. They could see the number on the wings, and sent back word to the world that he had passed there. And that was the last word that anybody received that Friday.“The going had been pretty good until then. The weather was clear, and the ceiling pretty high. But as soon as it got dark, Lindy and his plane hit some pretty bad weather. It grew mighty cold, and a thick swirling fog came up and swallowed up the plane. This was mighty tough, because if he flew low, he was bound to run into one of the icebergs that were floating in the icy sea. So he climbed up to about 10,000 feet, and stayed there. Flying high was all right, but it added another danger. Ice was forming on the wings of the Spirit of St. Louis, and if it got thick enough, it would break off a wing of the plane, and send the plane and Lindy into the sea.“Lindy could have turned back, but he didn’t. He kept right on, through fog and sleet and rain. His motor never missed. It was a good pal, and no wonder he included it in his feat, and said later that ‘we crossed the Atlantic.’“When morning came, a whole flock of cables came, too. It seems a whole lot of ships had sighted Lindy’s plane, or somebody’s plane, anywhere from 500 to 100 miles off the coast of Ireland, where he was headed. Nobody knew who to believe, but at 10:00 o’clock came the real news, that he was over a place called Valencia, Ireland.“Lindy wondered where he was, himself. Flying blind as he had, he didn’t know just where he had come out. So he decided to ask the first person he met. Now you can imagine the air roads weren’t full of planes flying to Ireland, and Lindy had to wait until he sighted a fishing schooner. He swooped low and shouted out, ‘Am I headed for Ireland?’ The fishermen were so astounded that they couldn’t answer, so Lindy flew on his course, depending as he had all night, on his compass. Pretty soon he came in sight of land, and knew that it was Ireland.”“Because it was so beautiful,” said Pat.“No, because it was rocky, and his maps indicated that the land would be rocky,” said Bob.“Oh, no doubt he could tell it was Ireland,” insisted Pat. “His mother was Irish, you know, and it needs mighty little Irish blood to make a man long for the ould sod.”“Well, anyway, there he was over Ireland,” put in Bob, pointedly. “And from Ireland, on to England, and from England, on to France. Along the Seine, and then Paris. They were waiting for him at Le Bourget, and sent up flares and rockets, long before he got there. Maybe they weren’t excited when he flew into range! It was about 8:30, that is, French time, but about 5:30 New York time, when Lindy and the Spirit of St. Louis circled around the landing field at Le Bourget and landed. Golly, I wish I’d been there. The first man in the world to fly the Atlantic, landing before my very eyes! He’d gone 3,640 miles, and had made it in 33½ hours. Some going!“Well, he was there. And he got out of the plane. And you all know what he said when he got out. I—”“I am Charles Lindbergh,” said Captain Bill and Pat, not quite in unison.“Yup,” said Bob, “‘I am Charles Lindbergh.’ He thought that they wouldn’t know who he was. He’d been flying pretty low over Ireland and England, and so far as he could see, nobody had paid much attention to him. So he introduced himself, just as though every man, woman and child in every civilized country wasn’t saying that very name all through the day. Remember when we heard the news over the radio, Hal? We were so excited we nearly upset the furniture. Golly, that was a day.“Well, that was Slim Lindbergh’s flight, and now about Slim himself. He was born in Detroit, Michigan, on February 2, 1902, and that means that he was only twenty-five years old when he made his greatest flight, which is pretty young to become the most famous man in the world.“His dad was Charles A. Lindbergh, and he died in 1924, when he was running for governor of Minnesota on the Farmer-Labor ticket. He’d been a Representative in Congress before. Lindy and he were great pals, and played around together a lot. Lindy’s mother was Irish, and taught school in Detroit.“Lindy went to school in Little Falls, and to Little Falls High School. He graduated from there when he was 16. He was good in Math and in other things he liked, but not in grammar.“Lindy didn’t go right to college. In fact, he didn’t go until three years after he’d graduated from high school, and then he went to the University of Wisconsin, to take up mechanical engineering. He was good at that. He’d always liked to tinker, and he got his chance there. He did at college just what you’d expect him to do. He had some friends and acquaintances, but mostly he kept to himself. He was the same quiet, shy person that everybody got to know later, when he became famous.“Slim didn’t stay at Wisconsin very long, so we don’t know what he would have finally done there. He went over to Lincoln, Nebraska, where they had a flying school, and asked them to teach him to fly. They taught him the beginnings of flying, and from the moment his hands touched the controls, he knew that this was what he was cut out for. He just took naturally to those levers and gadgets, and could handle his plane like a toy.“It seems that Lindy was born to be a pilot. He’s built for one, in the first place. Long and rangy, and slim. No extra weight, but plenty of muscle and endurance. He’s got a lot of nerve and never gets excited He showed that when he got himself elected to the Caterpillar Club. But I’ll get to that later.” Here Bob paused, and looked up at the sun, which was just slipping a little westward. “Say,” he said. “Would you folks mind if I continued my story later? I feel just a little empty. How about the food?”“I’ve been thinking that for a long time,” said the Captain. “But rules are rules. I didn’t want to interrupt you.”Bob snorted. “Say, for food you can interrupt me any time. Let’s go.”He jumped up, stretched himself, and made for the car, to get out the huge hamper of lunch. “Say,” he called back, “Lindy may have been satisfied with five sandwiches all the way to Paris, but darned if I couldn’t eat five right now.” He carried the hamper over to the knoll where the others were. They were all standing now, limbering up, stretching, sniffing the good air, and looking eagerly toward the food.“Here, lend a hand,” said Bob. He plumped down the basket so that they could hear the rattle of forks and tin cups within, and sat down beside it.“You’re the host,” said Hal, seating himself comfortably on the grass and looking on. “It’s your party. We have to listen to your story, so the least you can do is feed us.”Bob had opened the hamper, and was viewing its contents eagerly. He dived into the basket. “Say, anybody who doesn’t help himself, doesn’t eat. Fall to.”They fell to, doing much eating but little talking. Finally Bob sat back, a sandwich in one hand, a cup of steaming coffee out of the thermos bottle in the other. “I have a suspicion,” he said, “that you don’t like my story.”“Don’t get ideas like that, Bob, my lad,” said Pat. “We love your story. We just like sandwiches better.”“All right, then I won’t finish,” said Bob. “I’m going to be independent.”Hal looked up. “Not finish? You’ve got finish any story you start.”“One of the rules? There aren’t any rules. You just made that up.”Hal was cajoling now. “Aw, come on, Bob. We want to hear the end. Come on, tell us the rest.”Bob bit into a huge slice of cake. He shook his head. “Nope, no end.”“Well, at least about the Caterpillar Club. At least you’ll tell us how Lindy saved his life by bailing out. We’ve got to hear that.”But Bob was adamant. “I’ve been insulted. I’m not going on. Anyway, Lindy didn’t save his life once by bailing out of a plane.”“He didn’t? You said a little while ago that he did.”“I didn’t say once. He became eligible to the Caterpillar Club four times.”Hal looked at Bob with disgust. “I must say that you’re being very disagreeable.”Captain Bill, who had been looking on in amusement, suddenly laughed very loudly. “Don’t coax him, Hal. He doesn’t need coaxing. He’s going to tell the rest of the story, don’t you worry. Wild horses couldn’t keep him from finishing the tale. Could they, Bob, old man?”Bob looked over at his uncle and grinned. “Why, you old sinner. What a way to talk about your favorite nephew. But now that you mention it, maybe I did intend to finish the story, seeing that I’d started it. Now, where was I?”Pat was clearing up the debris made by four men eating a picnic lunch. “You’ve got Lindbergh at the Nebraska flying school for a long time.”“Oh, not very long,” said Bob. “You see, he stayed there really a short time. In fact, he never did any solo flying there.”“Well, why not?” asked Hal.“They asked for a five-hundred dollar bond from every student before he went up on his first solo flight. This seemed silly to Lindy, and he left the school.“When he left, he did what so many of the flyers were doing then. He went out west, and did stunting, risking his neck at county fairs and air circuses to give the people a thrill. He did, too. He handled his plane like a toy, doing rolls, tail spins, and every kind of stunt imaginable. But the most exciting thing that he did, and it usually isn’t an exciting thing at all, was landing his plane. He could land on a dime, and as lightly as a feather. That’s really piloting, isn’t it, Bill?”“You bet,” said the Captain. He was sprawled out on his back, enjoying his after dinner rest. “A landing will show you your flyer’s ability every time. Provided, of course, that he has a fairly decent landing field. Did I ever tell you the story that Hawks tells in his autobiography? Do you mind if I interrupt for just a minute, Bob?”“Oh, no, go right ahead,” said Bob, witheringly. “Go right ahead. I was just telling a story.”“Thanks,” said Captain Bill with a grin. “I will. Well, it seems that Hawks was stunting down in Mexico, and doing quite a bit of private flying. He got a commission to fly a Congressman and a General, I think it was, back to their home town of Huatemo. Have you ever heard of Huatemo? I thought not. Well, Huatemo had never seen an airplane close up, and the two high muckamucks decided that they’d give the natives a thrill by coming back via plane. Hawks had them wire ahead to have a landing field prepared. The native officials wired that they had a fine field, clear of all obstructions, but dotted with a few small trees. ‘Fine, says Hawks, but have them remove the trees immediately.’ The natives said that this had been done, and the party started out.“After several adventures, Hawks flew over Huatemo, and prepared to spiral down to the landing field. Imagine his chagrin and surprise, my dear boys, when he discovered, that the officials of Huatemo had indeed cut down the Huateman trees, but had left the stumps standing!”“Whew,” said Bob. “What did he do, turn around?”“No, he couldn’t. And anyway, there was no other place to land. The field was surrounded by dense forests. He had to make it. He brought his plane down without hitting a stump, and then zig-zagged wildly from stump to stump like a croquet ball trying to miss wickets. And he missed them all, too, except one. The wheel hit it an awful smack, and collapsed. The plane tilted up on its nose, and came to rest with its propeller in the ground and its tail waving gayly in the air, not at all like a proper plane should.”“And killed them all,” said Pat.“Who, Hawks? Not on your life. He’s a lucky fellow. Not one of them was hurt. They climbed out of the plane, and were greeted by the natives, joyously and with acclaim. And not one of the natives seemed to suspect in the least that this wasn’t the way a plane should land. Or at least the way a crazy American would land a plane.” The Captain finished his story, and paused.“Well,” said Bob grudgingly, “that was a good story, too. But, as I was saying, Lindy was a good stunter, and a good flyer. He decided that he wanted a plane of his own. He heard that there was going to be a sale of army planes down in Georgia, and he went down and bought a Curtiss Jenny with the money that he had saved from his stunting work. He fixed it up, and was soon off barnstorming again. But I guess the Jenny was too clumsy a boat for Lindy. He wanted to fly the newer, better planes that the army had. So he joined the army’s training school at Brook Field, San Antonio. This was when he was 22 years old.“I guess he got along pretty fine at San Antonio, and he was sent down to the pursuit school at Kelly Field. He joined the Caterpillar Club there. It was the first time that he had to jump from a moving plane and get down with his parachute. I guess it was a pretty close shave.”“Gee, how did it happen?” said Hal, his eyes wide.“Wait a second, I’m coming to it,” said Bob. “He and another officer were to go up and attack another plane that they called the enemy. It was a sort of problem they had to work out. Well, Slim dove at the enemy from the left, and the other fellow from the right. The enemy plane pulled up, but Lindy and the other officer kept on going, dead toward each other. There was an awful crack, and their wings locked. The two planes began to spin around and drop through the air. Lindy did the only thing there was to do. He kept his head, stepped out on one of the damaged wings, and stepped off backwards. He didn’t pull the rip-cord until he had fallen quite a way, because he didn’t want the ships to fall on him. When he’d gone far enough, he pulled the cord, and floated gently down. That was the first.”“And the second?” said Hal.“The second,” went on Bob, “happened in 1927, just about a year before Lindy flew the Atlantic. He took a new type of plane up to test her. He put her through all the stunts that he could think of, and she stood them all right. It seemed as though she was going to come through the test O.K., when Lindy put her into a tail spin. They spiraled down for a while, and Lindy tried to pull her out of it. She wouldn’t respond and went completely out of control. Lindy tugged and yanked at the controls, but he couldn’t get that bus to go into a dive. He did his best to save the ship, but it was no use. He didn’t give up until they were about 300 feet from the ground, which is a mighty short distance to make a jump, if you ask me. But Lindy made it, and landed in somebody’s back yard, the wind knocked out of him, but otherwise all right. That was the second.”“And the third?” asked Hal.“We’re getting ahead of the story. In fact, we’re ahead of the story already. Before he made his second jump, Lindy had joined the Missouri National Guard, and was promoted to a Captaincy in the Reserve and Flight Commander of the 110th Observation Squadron. That’s how he got to be a Captain, you know how he got to be a Colonel.“Then Lindy joined the Robertson Aircraft Corporation, at St. Louis. While he was with them, he helped map out the first mail route from St. Louis to Chicago, and was the first pilot to carry mail along this route. Slim had a habit of starting things off. He was the first to do a lot of things. No sitting back and waiting for others to start things. It was first or nothing for him. Maybe it was his Viking ancestors, I don’t know.“It was while he was flying this route that Lindy had his third initiation into the Caterpillars. He took off one September afternoon from Lambert Field, in St. Louis, on his way to Maywood. Just outside of Peoria a fog rolled in, so thick you could cut it with a knife, Lindy could climb up over it for flying, but he couldn’t land blind. He dropped a flare, but it only lit up a cloud bank. He saw lights, then, through the fog, and knew that he was around Maywood, but couldn’t get the exact location of the field. He’d circled around for two hours, when his engine sputtered and died. The tank was dry. Lindy quickly turned on the reserve gravity tank. There was twenty minutes of flying in that tank, and Lindy had to think fast.“He tried flares again, but it was no use. When he had just a few minutes of gas left, he saw the glow of a town. He didn’t want to take a chance on landing in a town and killing somebody, so he headed for open country. In a few minutes his engine died. Lindy stepped out into the blind fog and jumped. After falling a hundred feet, he pulled the rip-cord, and left the rest to chance. Every once in a while his ship appeared, twirling away in spirals, the outside of the circle about 300 yards away from Lindy. He counted five spirals, and then lost sight of the bus. He landed in a corn field, shaken, of course, but all right. He found his way to the farm house, and told the farmer who he was. The farmer, who had heard the crash of the plane as it smashed to earth wouldn’t believe that this safe and sound man was the pilot of it. Finally Lindy convinced him, and they went in search of the plane, which the farmer was sure had landed close to his house. They found it two miles away, looking not much like a plane, but a heap of rubbish. The mail wasn’t hurt. They got it to a train for Chicago, and the mail went through. It always does, you know.”“Yup, it always does,” said Captain Bill.“That reminds me of a story,” said Pat.“Hold it,” said Bob. “I’ve got another parachute for Lindy.”“Fire away,” said Pat. “But remember to remind me not to forget to tell you my own story.”“All right,” Bob put in. “Now the fourth time Lindy jumped was not long before his big flight. He was still flying for Robertson’s, carrying mail to Chicago. Just south of Peoria he ran into rain that changed to snow. Lindy flew around, waiting for the fog to lift, until he heard his motor sputter and die. He was up about 13,000 feet when he stepped out of the cockpit and jumped into the air. He landed on a barbed wire fence. Tore his shirt, but the plane was pretty much of a wreck. He grabbed the air mail; hurried to a train for Chicago, got another plane, and flew the mail through. A little late, but still, it got through. And he didn’t bat an eye. Not one of the jumps fazed him a bit.“But it wasn’t as though Lindy jumped at the slightest sign of anything going wrong. He stayed with his plane until the very last minute, doing everything he could to save it. He hated worse than anything to have a plane smashed up. Look how long he stayed with that new plane he was testing out—until he was just 300 feet above the ground.“Well, Lindy was one of the best mail pilots that the Robertson corporation had, in fact, he was their chief pilot. They could depend on him to go out in weather that no other pilot would think of bucking. He didn’t show off. Just knew that he could fly through anything, and he did.“At this time there was a lot of excitement in the air. Orteig was offering his $25,000 prize for the first man to cross the Atlantic, and there were a lot of aviators who would have liked the prize, and were trying for it. Of course, the money wasn’t the whole thing. There was the honor attached to it. And besides, there was the fact that crossing the Atlantic would make people sit up and take notice that flying wasn’t as dangerous as they thought. If a man could fly all that distance in a plane, maybe planes weren’t the death traps that some people had an idea they were. Lindy must have been thinking of this when he first decided that he’d like to try for the Orteig prize. Because everything that he’s done since his flight has been to get people interested in aviation.“But it takes money to fly across the ocean. You’ve got to get a special plane and all that. Lindy had to have backers. He couldn’t get them at first. Everybody tried to discourage him. In the first place, he looked such a kid. He was twenty-five, and that’s young, but he didn’t even look twenty-five. The men he asked to back him all but told him to run home and wait until he had grown up.“Then Major Robertson, Lindy’s Big Boss, tried to get backers for him. He knew that Lindy could fly and finally got some influential men to put up $15,000 for his flight. Maybe Lindy wasn’t glad! He tucked his check in his pocket and went on a shopping trip for a plane. He tried the Bellanca people in New York, but they didn’t have what he wanted, so he skipped to San Diego to the Ryan Airways, Inc., and told them what he wanted. They put their engineers to work on his specifications, and designed him a Ryan monoplane, the neat stream-lined job that was christened the Spirit of St. Louis. It’s a graceful bird—but you’ve all seen so many pictures of it, you know what it looks like. It has a wing span of 46 feet, and an overall length of over 27 feet. They put in a Wright engine—a Whirlwind, 200 horsepower. It’s a radial engine. You two probably know what a radial engine is, but Hal here doesn’t.” Bob paused and turned to Hal. “Do you?”“Uh-uh,” grunted Hal. “Do you?”“Of course I do. It’s one in which the cylinders aren’t in a straight line or in a V, but arranged around an axis, like the spokes of a wheel. Lindy’s plane had two spark plugs for each cylinder, so that in case one missed, there was another one ready. She could carry 450 gallons of gas and twenty gallons of oil, and she was loaded to the gills when Lindy took her off the ground at the Field.“Suppose Lindy wasn’t anxious about that plane. He hung around the factory all the time that it was being built, and made suggestions to help along Hawley Bowlus, who built the thing. You know Hawley Bowlus. The fellow who held the glider record until Lindy took it away from him—but that’s later. Bowlus knows how to build planes, and Lindy swears by him.“Well, they got the plane finished in 60 days, which isn’t bad time. Out in New York, Byrd and Chamberlin and the others were getting ready to fly the Atlantic. It’s wasn’t really a race to see who would be first, but of course, there’s no doubt that each one was anxious to be the first man to cross the Atlantic. Because after all, nobody likes to be second. So Lindy had to get out to the east coast as fast as he could. He could hardly wait for the plane to be finished. But at last it was, and all the equipment in place. Lindy climbed into the cockpit to test her out. The cockpit was inclosed. I don’t know whether I told that before or not. Anyway, he could see out little windows on each side, but he couldn’t see ahead, or above him. So it was really flying blind all the time, except for a sliding periscope that he could pull in or out at the side, in case he had to see straight ahead. But Lindy doesn’t mind blind flying. He’s a wonderful navigator.“Well, Lindy turned over the motor of his new plane, and it sounded sweet. He hadn’t got it any more than off the ground when he realized that this was the plane for him. It responded to every touch, although it was a heavy ship, and not much good for stunting. But Lindy didn’t want to stunt. He wanted to fly to Europe.“It was on May 10, I think, that he left San Diego. It was in the evening, not quite six o’clock. The next morning, a little after eight, he got into St. Louis. Took him just a bit over fourteen hours, the whole trip. It was the longest cross-country hop that any one man had made up to that time. His old pals at Lambert Field were pretty glad to see him, and he spent the night at his old stamping grounds. But he didn’t stay long. Early in the morning he got on his way, and made New York in the afternoon, in not quite seven and a half hours. Pretty flying.“Nobody much had heard of Lindy until he started from San Diego. Of course, he’d been a dandy mail pilot, but they’re usually unnamed heroes. Nobody hears about them, and they never get their names in the paper unless they crash. Not that they care. They’ve got their jobs to do, and they do them. But when Lindy flew that grand hop from San Diego to St. Louis to New York, people began to sit up and take notice. He didn’t say much after he got to the Curtiss Field.“Out at Curtiss he spent his time seeing that everything was ready, and all his instruments O.K. He had a lot of confidence in himself—he always has—but there was no use in taking chances. In back of the pilot’s seat was a collapsible rubber boat, that he could blow up with two tanks of gas that he carried with him. It had light oars, and was supposed to be able to float him for a week in case he decided suddenly to come down in the middle of the Atlantic instead of flying all the way across. Then there were his regular instruments. He had a tachometer, and an altimeter, an earth inductor compass, a drift indicator, and—”Captain Bill interrupted. “Just a minute, just a minute. You say those things pretty glibly. Do you know what they mean? What’s a tachometer? Pat here doesn’t know.”Bob looked embarrassed. “Well, they’re all pretty necessary instruments. I’ve been meaning to look them up, that is, Gee, I really ought to know, oughtn’t I?”“You ought,” said the Captain severely. “Do you mind if I interrupt your story for just a minute and give you a few pointers? This is mostly for you and Hal. You’ll never be able to fly unless you understand what the instruments on the dashboard are for. Of course a lot of the old flyers, like Patrick, here, flew just by instinct, and stuck their heads out over the cockpit to see what was happening. A real pilot nowadays, though, can be sealed in his cockpit and never see ahead of him from the time he takes off until he lands, just so long as his instruments are working. He can keep his course over any country, no matter how strange. You’ve got to know your instruments.”“Well, tell us,” said Bob.The Captain sat up. “I guess the first thing that Lindy watched was the tachometer. This is the instrument that shows the number of revolutions per minute, or R.P.M.’s that the engine is making. A flyer must know how many R.P.M.’s his engine must make to maintain a correct flying speed, or he’ll go into a stall, which is bad. I’ll tell you more about stalls later. The altimeter registers the height at which the plane is flying. It isn’t very accurate at low altitudes, but it’s all right higher up. You soon learn by the feel and the lay of the land how high up you are. The exact height doesn’t matter in ordinary flying, just so that you keep a good altitude. Then there’s that most important instrument, the earth inductor compass. This is much more accurate than a magnetic compass, and it keeps the ship on its course. It operates in regard to the electro-magnetic reactions of the earth’s field, and directions are indicated in reference to magnetic north. To steer by this compass, you have to set your desired heading on the controller, and then steer to keep the indicator on zero. If you veer to the left, the indicator will swing to the left, and to keep on your course you must bring your plane back to the right. When he changes his course, the pilot consults his maps and graphs, and makes a change in the indicator of the compass.“Then there is the air speed indicator, which shows the speed of the plane in the air. This is necessary so that the engine is not over-speeded. A pilot never runs his plane at full speed as a general thing, because he’ll wear out his engine. He keeps it at about 80 per cent of its potential speed, which is a good safe margin.“The turn and bank indicator also reads from zero, and deviates from zero when the plane dips. The bubble rides up to the left when the plane banks right, and rides up to the right when the plane banks left. When the ship is again on an even keel, the indicator goes back to zero. The pilot, when he isn’t flying blind, can keep his plane level by noticing the position of the radiator cap or top of the engine in respect to the horizon. But in a heavy fog, or if he can’t see over his cockpit, the horizon doesn’t exist, and a bank and turn indicator is his instrument.“The instruments that are no less important than these are the oil gauge, the gasoline pressure gauge, and the thermometer, which shows whether the motor is overheating. If the oil gauge shows that the oil is at a good cool temperature, and the gasoline pressure gauge shows that the gas pressure is up, the pilot knows that his motor is running nicely. The gas pressure gauge won’t tell you how much gas you have left, though. It’s always best to figure how much gas you’re going to need on a trip, and then take some over for emergencies. Most planes also have an emergency tank, so that if one tank gives out, the other can be switched on, and will give the flyer time to maneuver about until he finds a landing place.” Captain Bill paused. “Well, those are your instruments. I’ll probably have to explain them all over to you again when the plane comes, and I start to teach you to fly.”“Oh, no, not to me, you won’t,” Bob said.Hal sat quietly looking out over the valley below, saying nothing. He had listened intently to the Captain’s instructions, but there was an odd expression on his face.Finally Pat snorted. Bob and the others jumped.“Hi, what’s the idea. Is there a story being told, or isn’t there a story being told? Get on with you.”“It’s no fault of mine, Patrick,” said Bob, looking meaningly at the Captain, who appeared as innocent as a lamb. “I’m always being rudely interrupted. But I’ll go on. Where was I?”“The Lindbergh lad was at Curtiss Field, waiting this long time to be off,” said Pat.“Oh, yes. Well, when he got word that the weather was O.K., he got his sandwiches, his canteens of water, and started off on the greatest flight in aviation history. And I’ve told you about that.”“We seem to be right back where we started from,” the Captain said. “Is that the end of your story?”Bob laughed. “By no means. You’ve got a lot to hear yet. What do you suppose I’ve been collecting dope for all these weeks? I’ve got a lot to tell you. Lindy wasn’t satisfied with one great trip. He’s been flying since, and has made some pretty important jaunts. Things happened to him after he got back to America loaded down with about every kind of medal that one man can get. And I’m going to tell you all of them.”“I suppose we’ll have to listen. It’s part of the game,” Pat said. “But not now, my lad.” He rose stiffly from the grass. “You’re mother will be looking for us, and wondering what’s become of us. We’d better get for home.”“How about continuing in the next issue?” laughed the Captain.“O.K.” said Bob. “You get the rest of it tonight, whether you like it or not.”Hal looked up fervently at Bob. “Oh, we like it, Bob. I think it’s a great story. A great story.” The boy’s eyes shown in his pale face. “Golly, Bob, it must be wonderful to be able to do things like that.”Bob looked uncomfortable as they walked over to the car. “Well, kid, I don’t see why anybody can’t do great things if he’s got grit enough. That’s what it takes—Grit.”
“Well,” began Bob, “I guess my story isn’t going to be very new to any of you. Gee, I know it almost by heart, and I suppose everybody else does, too.”
“Don’t apologize,” said the Captain. “We’ll be only too glad to stop you if we’ve heard it before. I don’t think that we will, though. It’s a story that bears repeating.”
Bob’s eyes lighted up. “You bet,” he said. “I never get tired of reading about it.” He plucked at the grass beside him. “Gee, it makes a fellow want to do things. It makes him feel that the older folks don’t know everything—”
“A-hem,” interrupted Captain Bill.
Bob laughed. “You’re not old folks, old bean. Don’t flatter yourself. Anyway, they told Lindbergh that he couldn’t do it. They told him that his plane was carrying too much, and he’d never be able to make it alone.”
“Did he?” said Pat.
Bob looked at him disgustedly. “Did he! Don’t make fun of me, you old Irishman!”
The old Irishman looked grieved. “Well, I just wanted to know. I’m always willing to learn somethin’ new. And you’d better get started, or we’ll never know. We’ll be leaving the lad up in the air, so to speak.”
“Ignore that ape,” said Captain Bill, “and proceed.”
“Lindbergh didn’t listen to them. He just went ahead and did what he thought was right, and by golly, he was right. It makes a fellow feel that even if he is young he can do things. He doesn’t just have to sit around and do what everybody else has done before. There’s got to be a first every time. Lindy wasn’t afraid just because nobody had ever flown the Atlantic alone before, and the wiseacres said that it couldn’t be done. He just went ahead and flew it.”
“It wasn’t as easy as all that,” quietly remarked Hal.
Bob turned to him. “Of course not. Lindy had planned every move that he was going to make. He was prepared for anything. That’s why he’s always so successful. He has his plans all laid before he ever takes off. He’s got all the courage in the world, but he’s not reckless.”
“Put that under your hat, my lad. It’s a good lesson to know by heart when you’re going into the flying game.”
“You bet,” said Bob. “Gee, it needed a lot of courage for him to make that take-off. I’ve got the date down here. It was May 20, 1927, on a Friday. That must have been an exciting morning down at Roosevelt Field. He made up his mind on Thursday afternoon. They told him that the weather was all right over the North Atlantic, and that it would be best if he started out the next morning.
“He didn’t tell anybody about his plans. He never talks very much anyway. Everybody found that out later. It was all sort of secret. He just told his mechanics to get the Spirit of St. Louis ready, and keep their mouths shut. I guess he didn’t want everybody messing around with his plans. But the men who delivered his gasoline weren’t so secret, I guess, and somehow his plans leaked out Thursday night.
“That Thursday night was pretty awful. It was raining, and the weather could be cut with a knife. But once people found out that Slim was going to start, they began to come around to Curtiss Field, and at two o’clock in the morning there was a big crowd of them standing around in the rain and mud. Slim wasn’t leaving from Curtiss, though, and they towed his plane by truck over to Roosevelt. They got there just about when it was getting light.
“There was a crowd over at Curtiss, too. But Slim didn’t care. Crowds never mean much to him. He saw a whole lot more of them later on, too, but he never was one to strut or show off. He just got into his fur-lined suit, and waited for the men to start his engine. Somebody asked him if he had only five sandwiches and two canteens of water. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘If I get to Paris, I won’t need any more, and if I don’t get there, I won’t need any more, either.’ It was just like him to say that, but the real reason he didn’t take any more was because he had too much weight already. He had over 200 gallons of gas, and the load was heavy. He had to cut down on everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary.
“Well, they started his motor for him. The plane was standing on the Roosevelt runway, which is pretty smooth, and five thousand feet long. The weather had cleared up a little. And there was the monoplane looking all silver and slick, roaring away for all it was worth. Lindy said goodbye to his mother, and to Byrd and Chamberlin and Acosta, who were planning their own trips across the Atlantic, and then he stepped into the cockpit, and closed the door.
“He raced his motor a little bit. She must have sounded pretty sweet to him, because he gave her the gun, and off he went. That start must have been one of the hardest parts of the whole trip. The Spirit of St. Louis bumped along that muddy runway, and the people watching thought she’d go over on her nose any moment. She was over-loaded. Her motor was pulling for all she was worth, but it didn’t seem as though they’d ever make it. She went off the ground a few feet, and bounced down again. But then the crowd held its breath. She was leaving the ground. They were up about fifteen feet. And there were telegraph wires in their path. If they hit those, the trip to Paris was over right then. But they didn’t. The landing gear cleared by a few inches. That crowd simply roared. But Slim didn’t hear them. He was on his way to Paris.”
Bob paused for breath. He had been talking very fast, carried away by his story. The others did not speak, but sat waiting for him to go on. They had all heard the story before, but as the Captain had said, it bore repeating, and they could hear it again and again. There was something agelessly appealing in the tale of that young man’s feat.
Bob was talking again. “I’m not much at poetry,” he said.
“You bet you’re not,” said Captain Bill. “I’ve read some of yours.”
Bob glared at him. “I never wrote a poem!” he said defensively.
The Captain looked contrite. “It must have been Hal,” he said. “I beg your pardon. Go on with your story. Where does the poetry come in?”
“I was going to tell you, before you interrupted, so rudely, that there’s somebody who’s written a poem—a lot of poetry, to music—a cantata I think they call it. It’s about Lindy’s flight, and it tells the story of the flight across the Atlantic. I guess it’s pretty thrilling. Maybe that’s the only way the story can be told—in poetry and music, because it always sounds pretty flat when you just say Lindy flew across the Atlantic in a monoplane. It needs music, with a lot of trumpets—”
“Go on, go on, my lad. More words, less music.” Pat seemed to be getting impatient. The sun was pretty high over their heads now, and bees were buzzing drowsily in the tall grass all around them. Hal had stretched out on his stomach, facing the little group, which was seated now in a semi-circle. “I’ll be falling asleep if you don’t get on.”
Bob laughed embarrassedly. “All right, you just stop me if I get to rambling. You keep me straight, Irish.”
Captain Bill leaned back on a hummock of earth, his arms folded behind his head. “I’m so comfortable, I could listen to anything, even to Bob telling a story. Go on, Bob.”
“One more crack, and you don’t hear anything,” said Bob. “Remember the rules, no interruptions from the gallery.”
“We stand corrected. Go on.”
Bob settled himself once again into the grass. “Well, we’ve got Lindy into the air. No sooner had he set out when people began reporting that they’d seen him. Some of them had. A lot of them were just excited individuals who’d heard a motorcycle back-firing. But somebody actually did see him flying over Rhode Island, and about two hours, nearly, after he had set out, they flashed back that he’d been seen at Halifax, Massachusetts. Then he dropped out of sight. Nobody reported seeing him. That was because he took an over-water route, and was out some distance, flying along the coast of New England.
“They saw him next over Nova Scotia, running along nicely, and then Springfield, Nova Scotia saw him. It was about one o’clock, and he was going strong. But he was getting into a dangerous region, cold and foggy. They had watchers looking for him everywhere. Lindy left Nova Scotia at Cape Breton, headed for Newfoundland. It was pretty stiff going, about 200 miles without sight of land, and over a pretty treacherous sea. But at 7:15 they saw him flying low over St. John’s, in Newfoundland. They could see the number on the wings, and sent back word to the world that he had passed there. And that was the last word that anybody received that Friday.
“The going had been pretty good until then. The weather was clear, and the ceiling pretty high. But as soon as it got dark, Lindy and his plane hit some pretty bad weather. It grew mighty cold, and a thick swirling fog came up and swallowed up the plane. This was mighty tough, because if he flew low, he was bound to run into one of the icebergs that were floating in the icy sea. So he climbed up to about 10,000 feet, and stayed there. Flying high was all right, but it added another danger. Ice was forming on the wings of the Spirit of St. Louis, and if it got thick enough, it would break off a wing of the plane, and send the plane and Lindy into the sea.
“Lindy could have turned back, but he didn’t. He kept right on, through fog and sleet and rain. His motor never missed. It was a good pal, and no wonder he included it in his feat, and said later that ‘we crossed the Atlantic.’
“When morning came, a whole flock of cables came, too. It seems a whole lot of ships had sighted Lindy’s plane, or somebody’s plane, anywhere from 500 to 100 miles off the coast of Ireland, where he was headed. Nobody knew who to believe, but at 10:00 o’clock came the real news, that he was over a place called Valencia, Ireland.
“Lindy wondered where he was, himself. Flying blind as he had, he didn’t know just where he had come out. So he decided to ask the first person he met. Now you can imagine the air roads weren’t full of planes flying to Ireland, and Lindy had to wait until he sighted a fishing schooner. He swooped low and shouted out, ‘Am I headed for Ireland?’ The fishermen were so astounded that they couldn’t answer, so Lindy flew on his course, depending as he had all night, on his compass. Pretty soon he came in sight of land, and knew that it was Ireland.”
“Because it was so beautiful,” said Pat.
“No, because it was rocky, and his maps indicated that the land would be rocky,” said Bob.
“Oh, no doubt he could tell it was Ireland,” insisted Pat. “His mother was Irish, you know, and it needs mighty little Irish blood to make a man long for the ould sod.”
“Well, anyway, there he was over Ireland,” put in Bob, pointedly. “And from Ireland, on to England, and from England, on to France. Along the Seine, and then Paris. They were waiting for him at Le Bourget, and sent up flares and rockets, long before he got there. Maybe they weren’t excited when he flew into range! It was about 8:30, that is, French time, but about 5:30 New York time, when Lindy and the Spirit of St. Louis circled around the landing field at Le Bourget and landed. Golly, I wish I’d been there. The first man in the world to fly the Atlantic, landing before my very eyes! He’d gone 3,640 miles, and had made it in 33½ hours. Some going!
“Well, he was there. And he got out of the plane. And you all know what he said when he got out. I—”
“I am Charles Lindbergh,” said Captain Bill and Pat, not quite in unison.
“Yup,” said Bob, “‘I am Charles Lindbergh.’ He thought that they wouldn’t know who he was. He’d been flying pretty low over Ireland and England, and so far as he could see, nobody had paid much attention to him. So he introduced himself, just as though every man, woman and child in every civilized country wasn’t saying that very name all through the day. Remember when we heard the news over the radio, Hal? We were so excited we nearly upset the furniture. Golly, that was a day.
“Well, that was Slim Lindbergh’s flight, and now about Slim himself. He was born in Detroit, Michigan, on February 2, 1902, and that means that he was only twenty-five years old when he made his greatest flight, which is pretty young to become the most famous man in the world.
“His dad was Charles A. Lindbergh, and he died in 1924, when he was running for governor of Minnesota on the Farmer-Labor ticket. He’d been a Representative in Congress before. Lindy and he were great pals, and played around together a lot. Lindy’s mother was Irish, and taught school in Detroit.
“Lindy went to school in Little Falls, and to Little Falls High School. He graduated from there when he was 16. He was good in Math and in other things he liked, but not in grammar.
“Lindy didn’t go right to college. In fact, he didn’t go until three years after he’d graduated from high school, and then he went to the University of Wisconsin, to take up mechanical engineering. He was good at that. He’d always liked to tinker, and he got his chance there. He did at college just what you’d expect him to do. He had some friends and acquaintances, but mostly he kept to himself. He was the same quiet, shy person that everybody got to know later, when he became famous.
“Slim didn’t stay at Wisconsin very long, so we don’t know what he would have finally done there. He went over to Lincoln, Nebraska, where they had a flying school, and asked them to teach him to fly. They taught him the beginnings of flying, and from the moment his hands touched the controls, he knew that this was what he was cut out for. He just took naturally to those levers and gadgets, and could handle his plane like a toy.
“It seems that Lindy was born to be a pilot. He’s built for one, in the first place. Long and rangy, and slim. No extra weight, but plenty of muscle and endurance. He’s got a lot of nerve and never gets excited He showed that when he got himself elected to the Caterpillar Club. But I’ll get to that later.” Here Bob paused, and looked up at the sun, which was just slipping a little westward. “Say,” he said. “Would you folks mind if I continued my story later? I feel just a little empty. How about the food?”
“I’ve been thinking that for a long time,” said the Captain. “But rules are rules. I didn’t want to interrupt you.”
Bob snorted. “Say, for food you can interrupt me any time. Let’s go.”
He jumped up, stretched himself, and made for the car, to get out the huge hamper of lunch. “Say,” he called back, “Lindy may have been satisfied with five sandwiches all the way to Paris, but darned if I couldn’t eat five right now.” He carried the hamper over to the knoll where the others were. They were all standing now, limbering up, stretching, sniffing the good air, and looking eagerly toward the food.
“Here, lend a hand,” said Bob. He plumped down the basket so that they could hear the rattle of forks and tin cups within, and sat down beside it.
“You’re the host,” said Hal, seating himself comfortably on the grass and looking on. “It’s your party. We have to listen to your story, so the least you can do is feed us.”
Bob had opened the hamper, and was viewing its contents eagerly. He dived into the basket. “Say, anybody who doesn’t help himself, doesn’t eat. Fall to.”
They fell to, doing much eating but little talking. Finally Bob sat back, a sandwich in one hand, a cup of steaming coffee out of the thermos bottle in the other. “I have a suspicion,” he said, “that you don’t like my story.”
“Don’t get ideas like that, Bob, my lad,” said Pat. “We love your story. We just like sandwiches better.”
“All right, then I won’t finish,” said Bob. “I’m going to be independent.”
Hal looked up. “Not finish? You’ve got finish any story you start.”
“One of the rules? There aren’t any rules. You just made that up.”
Hal was cajoling now. “Aw, come on, Bob. We want to hear the end. Come on, tell us the rest.”
Bob bit into a huge slice of cake. He shook his head. “Nope, no end.”
“Well, at least about the Caterpillar Club. At least you’ll tell us how Lindy saved his life by bailing out. We’ve got to hear that.”
But Bob was adamant. “I’ve been insulted. I’m not going on. Anyway, Lindy didn’t save his life once by bailing out of a plane.”
“He didn’t? You said a little while ago that he did.”
“I didn’t say once. He became eligible to the Caterpillar Club four times.”
Hal looked at Bob with disgust. “I must say that you’re being very disagreeable.”
Captain Bill, who had been looking on in amusement, suddenly laughed very loudly. “Don’t coax him, Hal. He doesn’t need coaxing. He’s going to tell the rest of the story, don’t you worry. Wild horses couldn’t keep him from finishing the tale. Could they, Bob, old man?”
Bob looked over at his uncle and grinned. “Why, you old sinner. What a way to talk about your favorite nephew. But now that you mention it, maybe I did intend to finish the story, seeing that I’d started it. Now, where was I?”
Pat was clearing up the debris made by four men eating a picnic lunch. “You’ve got Lindbergh at the Nebraska flying school for a long time.”
“Oh, not very long,” said Bob. “You see, he stayed there really a short time. In fact, he never did any solo flying there.”
“Well, why not?” asked Hal.
“They asked for a five-hundred dollar bond from every student before he went up on his first solo flight. This seemed silly to Lindy, and he left the school.
“When he left, he did what so many of the flyers were doing then. He went out west, and did stunting, risking his neck at county fairs and air circuses to give the people a thrill. He did, too. He handled his plane like a toy, doing rolls, tail spins, and every kind of stunt imaginable. But the most exciting thing that he did, and it usually isn’t an exciting thing at all, was landing his plane. He could land on a dime, and as lightly as a feather. That’s really piloting, isn’t it, Bill?”
“You bet,” said the Captain. He was sprawled out on his back, enjoying his after dinner rest. “A landing will show you your flyer’s ability every time. Provided, of course, that he has a fairly decent landing field. Did I ever tell you the story that Hawks tells in his autobiography? Do you mind if I interrupt for just a minute, Bob?”
“Oh, no, go right ahead,” said Bob, witheringly. “Go right ahead. I was just telling a story.”
“Thanks,” said Captain Bill with a grin. “I will. Well, it seems that Hawks was stunting down in Mexico, and doing quite a bit of private flying. He got a commission to fly a Congressman and a General, I think it was, back to their home town of Huatemo. Have you ever heard of Huatemo? I thought not. Well, Huatemo had never seen an airplane close up, and the two high muckamucks decided that they’d give the natives a thrill by coming back via plane. Hawks had them wire ahead to have a landing field prepared. The native officials wired that they had a fine field, clear of all obstructions, but dotted with a few small trees. ‘Fine, says Hawks, but have them remove the trees immediately.’ The natives said that this had been done, and the party started out.
“After several adventures, Hawks flew over Huatemo, and prepared to spiral down to the landing field. Imagine his chagrin and surprise, my dear boys, when he discovered, that the officials of Huatemo had indeed cut down the Huateman trees, but had left the stumps standing!”
“Whew,” said Bob. “What did he do, turn around?”
“No, he couldn’t. And anyway, there was no other place to land. The field was surrounded by dense forests. He had to make it. He brought his plane down without hitting a stump, and then zig-zagged wildly from stump to stump like a croquet ball trying to miss wickets. And he missed them all, too, except one. The wheel hit it an awful smack, and collapsed. The plane tilted up on its nose, and came to rest with its propeller in the ground and its tail waving gayly in the air, not at all like a proper plane should.”
“And killed them all,” said Pat.
“Who, Hawks? Not on your life. He’s a lucky fellow. Not one of them was hurt. They climbed out of the plane, and were greeted by the natives, joyously and with acclaim. And not one of the natives seemed to suspect in the least that this wasn’t the way a plane should land. Or at least the way a crazy American would land a plane.” The Captain finished his story, and paused.
“Well,” said Bob grudgingly, “that was a good story, too. But, as I was saying, Lindy was a good stunter, and a good flyer. He decided that he wanted a plane of his own. He heard that there was going to be a sale of army planes down in Georgia, and he went down and bought a Curtiss Jenny with the money that he had saved from his stunting work. He fixed it up, and was soon off barnstorming again. But I guess the Jenny was too clumsy a boat for Lindy. He wanted to fly the newer, better planes that the army had. So he joined the army’s training school at Brook Field, San Antonio. This was when he was 22 years old.
“I guess he got along pretty fine at San Antonio, and he was sent down to the pursuit school at Kelly Field. He joined the Caterpillar Club there. It was the first time that he had to jump from a moving plane and get down with his parachute. I guess it was a pretty close shave.”
“Gee, how did it happen?” said Hal, his eyes wide.
“Wait a second, I’m coming to it,” said Bob. “He and another officer were to go up and attack another plane that they called the enemy. It was a sort of problem they had to work out. Well, Slim dove at the enemy from the left, and the other fellow from the right. The enemy plane pulled up, but Lindy and the other officer kept on going, dead toward each other. There was an awful crack, and their wings locked. The two planes began to spin around and drop through the air. Lindy did the only thing there was to do. He kept his head, stepped out on one of the damaged wings, and stepped off backwards. He didn’t pull the rip-cord until he had fallen quite a way, because he didn’t want the ships to fall on him. When he’d gone far enough, he pulled the cord, and floated gently down. That was the first.”
“And the second?” said Hal.
“The second,” went on Bob, “happened in 1927, just about a year before Lindy flew the Atlantic. He took a new type of plane up to test her. He put her through all the stunts that he could think of, and she stood them all right. It seemed as though she was going to come through the test O.K., when Lindy put her into a tail spin. They spiraled down for a while, and Lindy tried to pull her out of it. She wouldn’t respond and went completely out of control. Lindy tugged and yanked at the controls, but he couldn’t get that bus to go into a dive. He did his best to save the ship, but it was no use. He didn’t give up until they were about 300 feet from the ground, which is a mighty short distance to make a jump, if you ask me. But Lindy made it, and landed in somebody’s back yard, the wind knocked out of him, but otherwise all right. That was the second.”
“And the third?” asked Hal.
“We’re getting ahead of the story. In fact, we’re ahead of the story already. Before he made his second jump, Lindy had joined the Missouri National Guard, and was promoted to a Captaincy in the Reserve and Flight Commander of the 110th Observation Squadron. That’s how he got to be a Captain, you know how he got to be a Colonel.
“Then Lindy joined the Robertson Aircraft Corporation, at St. Louis. While he was with them, he helped map out the first mail route from St. Louis to Chicago, and was the first pilot to carry mail along this route. Slim had a habit of starting things off. He was the first to do a lot of things. No sitting back and waiting for others to start things. It was first or nothing for him. Maybe it was his Viking ancestors, I don’t know.
“It was while he was flying this route that Lindy had his third initiation into the Caterpillars. He took off one September afternoon from Lambert Field, in St. Louis, on his way to Maywood. Just outside of Peoria a fog rolled in, so thick you could cut it with a knife, Lindy could climb up over it for flying, but he couldn’t land blind. He dropped a flare, but it only lit up a cloud bank. He saw lights, then, through the fog, and knew that he was around Maywood, but couldn’t get the exact location of the field. He’d circled around for two hours, when his engine sputtered and died. The tank was dry. Lindy quickly turned on the reserve gravity tank. There was twenty minutes of flying in that tank, and Lindy had to think fast.
“He tried flares again, but it was no use. When he had just a few minutes of gas left, he saw the glow of a town. He didn’t want to take a chance on landing in a town and killing somebody, so he headed for open country. In a few minutes his engine died. Lindy stepped out into the blind fog and jumped. After falling a hundred feet, he pulled the rip-cord, and left the rest to chance. Every once in a while his ship appeared, twirling away in spirals, the outside of the circle about 300 yards away from Lindy. He counted five spirals, and then lost sight of the bus. He landed in a corn field, shaken, of course, but all right. He found his way to the farm house, and told the farmer who he was. The farmer, who had heard the crash of the plane as it smashed to earth wouldn’t believe that this safe and sound man was the pilot of it. Finally Lindy convinced him, and they went in search of the plane, which the farmer was sure had landed close to his house. They found it two miles away, looking not much like a plane, but a heap of rubbish. The mail wasn’t hurt. They got it to a train for Chicago, and the mail went through. It always does, you know.”
“Yup, it always does,” said Captain Bill.
“That reminds me of a story,” said Pat.
“Hold it,” said Bob. “I’ve got another parachute for Lindy.”
“Fire away,” said Pat. “But remember to remind me not to forget to tell you my own story.”
“All right,” Bob put in. “Now the fourth time Lindy jumped was not long before his big flight. He was still flying for Robertson’s, carrying mail to Chicago. Just south of Peoria he ran into rain that changed to snow. Lindy flew around, waiting for the fog to lift, until he heard his motor sputter and die. He was up about 13,000 feet when he stepped out of the cockpit and jumped into the air. He landed on a barbed wire fence. Tore his shirt, but the plane was pretty much of a wreck. He grabbed the air mail; hurried to a train for Chicago, got another plane, and flew the mail through. A little late, but still, it got through. And he didn’t bat an eye. Not one of the jumps fazed him a bit.
“But it wasn’t as though Lindy jumped at the slightest sign of anything going wrong. He stayed with his plane until the very last minute, doing everything he could to save it. He hated worse than anything to have a plane smashed up. Look how long he stayed with that new plane he was testing out—until he was just 300 feet above the ground.
“Well, Lindy was one of the best mail pilots that the Robertson corporation had, in fact, he was their chief pilot. They could depend on him to go out in weather that no other pilot would think of bucking. He didn’t show off. Just knew that he could fly through anything, and he did.
“At this time there was a lot of excitement in the air. Orteig was offering his $25,000 prize for the first man to cross the Atlantic, and there were a lot of aviators who would have liked the prize, and were trying for it. Of course, the money wasn’t the whole thing. There was the honor attached to it. And besides, there was the fact that crossing the Atlantic would make people sit up and take notice that flying wasn’t as dangerous as they thought. If a man could fly all that distance in a plane, maybe planes weren’t the death traps that some people had an idea they were. Lindy must have been thinking of this when he first decided that he’d like to try for the Orteig prize. Because everything that he’s done since his flight has been to get people interested in aviation.
“But it takes money to fly across the ocean. You’ve got to get a special plane and all that. Lindy had to have backers. He couldn’t get them at first. Everybody tried to discourage him. In the first place, he looked such a kid. He was twenty-five, and that’s young, but he didn’t even look twenty-five. The men he asked to back him all but told him to run home and wait until he had grown up.
“Then Major Robertson, Lindy’s Big Boss, tried to get backers for him. He knew that Lindy could fly and finally got some influential men to put up $15,000 for his flight. Maybe Lindy wasn’t glad! He tucked his check in his pocket and went on a shopping trip for a plane. He tried the Bellanca people in New York, but they didn’t have what he wanted, so he skipped to San Diego to the Ryan Airways, Inc., and told them what he wanted. They put their engineers to work on his specifications, and designed him a Ryan monoplane, the neat stream-lined job that was christened the Spirit of St. Louis. It’s a graceful bird—but you’ve all seen so many pictures of it, you know what it looks like. It has a wing span of 46 feet, and an overall length of over 27 feet. They put in a Wright engine—a Whirlwind, 200 horsepower. It’s a radial engine. You two probably know what a radial engine is, but Hal here doesn’t.” Bob paused and turned to Hal. “Do you?”
“Uh-uh,” grunted Hal. “Do you?”
“Of course I do. It’s one in which the cylinders aren’t in a straight line or in a V, but arranged around an axis, like the spokes of a wheel. Lindy’s plane had two spark plugs for each cylinder, so that in case one missed, there was another one ready. She could carry 450 gallons of gas and twenty gallons of oil, and she was loaded to the gills when Lindy took her off the ground at the Field.
“Suppose Lindy wasn’t anxious about that plane. He hung around the factory all the time that it was being built, and made suggestions to help along Hawley Bowlus, who built the thing. You know Hawley Bowlus. The fellow who held the glider record until Lindy took it away from him—but that’s later. Bowlus knows how to build planes, and Lindy swears by him.
“Well, they got the plane finished in 60 days, which isn’t bad time. Out in New York, Byrd and Chamberlin and the others were getting ready to fly the Atlantic. It’s wasn’t really a race to see who would be first, but of course, there’s no doubt that each one was anxious to be the first man to cross the Atlantic. Because after all, nobody likes to be second. So Lindy had to get out to the east coast as fast as he could. He could hardly wait for the plane to be finished. But at last it was, and all the equipment in place. Lindy climbed into the cockpit to test her out. The cockpit was inclosed. I don’t know whether I told that before or not. Anyway, he could see out little windows on each side, but he couldn’t see ahead, or above him. So it was really flying blind all the time, except for a sliding periscope that he could pull in or out at the side, in case he had to see straight ahead. But Lindy doesn’t mind blind flying. He’s a wonderful navigator.
“Well, Lindy turned over the motor of his new plane, and it sounded sweet. He hadn’t got it any more than off the ground when he realized that this was the plane for him. It responded to every touch, although it was a heavy ship, and not much good for stunting. But Lindy didn’t want to stunt. He wanted to fly to Europe.
“It was on May 10, I think, that he left San Diego. It was in the evening, not quite six o’clock. The next morning, a little after eight, he got into St. Louis. Took him just a bit over fourteen hours, the whole trip. It was the longest cross-country hop that any one man had made up to that time. His old pals at Lambert Field were pretty glad to see him, and he spent the night at his old stamping grounds. But he didn’t stay long. Early in the morning he got on his way, and made New York in the afternoon, in not quite seven and a half hours. Pretty flying.
“Nobody much had heard of Lindy until he started from San Diego. Of course, he’d been a dandy mail pilot, but they’re usually unnamed heroes. Nobody hears about them, and they never get their names in the paper unless they crash. Not that they care. They’ve got their jobs to do, and they do them. But when Lindy flew that grand hop from San Diego to St. Louis to New York, people began to sit up and take notice. He didn’t say much after he got to the Curtiss Field.
“Out at Curtiss he spent his time seeing that everything was ready, and all his instruments O.K. He had a lot of confidence in himself—he always has—but there was no use in taking chances. In back of the pilot’s seat was a collapsible rubber boat, that he could blow up with two tanks of gas that he carried with him. It had light oars, and was supposed to be able to float him for a week in case he decided suddenly to come down in the middle of the Atlantic instead of flying all the way across. Then there were his regular instruments. He had a tachometer, and an altimeter, an earth inductor compass, a drift indicator, and—”
Captain Bill interrupted. “Just a minute, just a minute. You say those things pretty glibly. Do you know what they mean? What’s a tachometer? Pat here doesn’t know.”
Bob looked embarrassed. “Well, they’re all pretty necessary instruments. I’ve been meaning to look them up, that is, Gee, I really ought to know, oughtn’t I?”
“You ought,” said the Captain severely. “Do you mind if I interrupt your story for just a minute and give you a few pointers? This is mostly for you and Hal. You’ll never be able to fly unless you understand what the instruments on the dashboard are for. Of course a lot of the old flyers, like Patrick, here, flew just by instinct, and stuck their heads out over the cockpit to see what was happening. A real pilot nowadays, though, can be sealed in his cockpit and never see ahead of him from the time he takes off until he lands, just so long as his instruments are working. He can keep his course over any country, no matter how strange. You’ve got to know your instruments.”
“Well, tell us,” said Bob.
The Captain sat up. “I guess the first thing that Lindy watched was the tachometer. This is the instrument that shows the number of revolutions per minute, or R.P.M.’s that the engine is making. A flyer must know how many R.P.M.’s his engine must make to maintain a correct flying speed, or he’ll go into a stall, which is bad. I’ll tell you more about stalls later. The altimeter registers the height at which the plane is flying. It isn’t very accurate at low altitudes, but it’s all right higher up. You soon learn by the feel and the lay of the land how high up you are. The exact height doesn’t matter in ordinary flying, just so that you keep a good altitude. Then there’s that most important instrument, the earth inductor compass. This is much more accurate than a magnetic compass, and it keeps the ship on its course. It operates in regard to the electro-magnetic reactions of the earth’s field, and directions are indicated in reference to magnetic north. To steer by this compass, you have to set your desired heading on the controller, and then steer to keep the indicator on zero. If you veer to the left, the indicator will swing to the left, and to keep on your course you must bring your plane back to the right. When he changes his course, the pilot consults his maps and graphs, and makes a change in the indicator of the compass.
“Then there is the air speed indicator, which shows the speed of the plane in the air. This is necessary so that the engine is not over-speeded. A pilot never runs his plane at full speed as a general thing, because he’ll wear out his engine. He keeps it at about 80 per cent of its potential speed, which is a good safe margin.
“The turn and bank indicator also reads from zero, and deviates from zero when the plane dips. The bubble rides up to the left when the plane banks right, and rides up to the right when the plane banks left. When the ship is again on an even keel, the indicator goes back to zero. The pilot, when he isn’t flying blind, can keep his plane level by noticing the position of the radiator cap or top of the engine in respect to the horizon. But in a heavy fog, or if he can’t see over his cockpit, the horizon doesn’t exist, and a bank and turn indicator is his instrument.
“The instruments that are no less important than these are the oil gauge, the gasoline pressure gauge, and the thermometer, which shows whether the motor is overheating. If the oil gauge shows that the oil is at a good cool temperature, and the gasoline pressure gauge shows that the gas pressure is up, the pilot knows that his motor is running nicely. The gas pressure gauge won’t tell you how much gas you have left, though. It’s always best to figure how much gas you’re going to need on a trip, and then take some over for emergencies. Most planes also have an emergency tank, so that if one tank gives out, the other can be switched on, and will give the flyer time to maneuver about until he finds a landing place.” Captain Bill paused. “Well, those are your instruments. I’ll probably have to explain them all over to you again when the plane comes, and I start to teach you to fly.”
“Oh, no, not to me, you won’t,” Bob said.
Hal sat quietly looking out over the valley below, saying nothing. He had listened intently to the Captain’s instructions, but there was an odd expression on his face.
Finally Pat snorted. Bob and the others jumped.
“Hi, what’s the idea. Is there a story being told, or isn’t there a story being told? Get on with you.”
“It’s no fault of mine, Patrick,” said Bob, looking meaningly at the Captain, who appeared as innocent as a lamb. “I’m always being rudely interrupted. But I’ll go on. Where was I?”
“The Lindbergh lad was at Curtiss Field, waiting this long time to be off,” said Pat.
“Oh, yes. Well, when he got word that the weather was O.K., he got his sandwiches, his canteens of water, and started off on the greatest flight in aviation history. And I’ve told you about that.”
“We seem to be right back where we started from,” the Captain said. “Is that the end of your story?”
Bob laughed. “By no means. You’ve got a lot to hear yet. What do you suppose I’ve been collecting dope for all these weeks? I’ve got a lot to tell you. Lindy wasn’t satisfied with one great trip. He’s been flying since, and has made some pretty important jaunts. Things happened to him after he got back to America loaded down with about every kind of medal that one man can get. And I’m going to tell you all of them.”
“I suppose we’ll have to listen. It’s part of the game,” Pat said. “But not now, my lad.” He rose stiffly from the grass. “You’re mother will be looking for us, and wondering what’s become of us. We’d better get for home.”
“How about continuing in the next issue?” laughed the Captain.
“O.K.” said Bob. “You get the rest of it tonight, whether you like it or not.”
Hal looked up fervently at Bob. “Oh, we like it, Bob. I think it’s a great story. A great story.” The boy’s eyes shown in his pale face. “Golly, Bob, it must be wonderful to be able to do things like that.”
Bob looked uncomfortable as they walked over to the car. “Well, kid, I don’t see why anybody can’t do great things if he’s got grit enough. That’s what it takes—Grit.”