Marston was sitting there in the nose of the ship, his hands on the machine-gun scarf-mount and his head resting on his hands. His broad, powerful back did not move at all, and he had never looked around. He had his goggles up, I noticed.
In a short time, approaching each other at around eighty miles an hour, the other ship was close to us. It was not an Army ship, for it was painted a bright yellow, and it flashed golden in the sun. It was coming toward us at an angle. That was natural. A Martin Bomber is quite a sight in the air, trundling along like an aerial lumber wagon. It’s so heavy that it’s fairly stable, and after one gets off the ground the wheel handles so easily a baby could work it, so I watched the other ship and flew my huge craft automatically.
The ship was possibly a hundred and fifty yards from us, coming at a slight angle, as I’ve said. It was perhaps fifty feet above us. Suddenly it banked a bit, and its new course brought it on a line parallel to ours, but it was pointed, of course, in the opposite direction. In a flash I caught sight of a double Lewis machine-gun, swung on a scarf-mount in the back cockpit.
As it sprayed its hail of lead I had nosed my big, loggy Martin over as far as it would go. At the same second Marston, I realized, had stiffened, spun half around, recovered, and was at his guns. They had got him— I saw the blood soaking one arm of his flying suit.
I threw my ship around as the equally slow, but much smaller, Jenny banked and flew back at right angles to us for another shot, from above and behind. I spun the wheel desperately, to get the Bomber’s nose pointed toward the other ship. Subconsciously I realized that all my suspicions of Marston had been wrong. There was some gang trying to crab getting the Martins to Langham.
I was straightened around for them as the Jenny crossed above us, those wicked guns being sighted by the gunner in the rear. We were looking right up into their muzzles, a hundred feet away. Marston was on his knees, sighting too. If we were to get them, Imusthold the ship in position for a moment more. It was shot for shot.
It was. I saw Marston’s hand, a mass of blood, pull the trigger of his Lewis as a terrific impact made me cry out and seemed to pin me to the seat. Something crashed through my chest, and I felt as if I had been torn apart. As if in a dream I saw the Jenny spinning downward. Then, through blurred eyes that could not transfer to my brain what they saw, I saw a huge bulk looming above me. It looked as big as all the world. I knew the Martin was diving like mad for the ground, but my nerveless, groping fingers could not find the wheel. And I didn’t care. In short, I went out like a light, my last remembrance being a torrent of blood flowing down over my body.
I came partly to, not entirely, in what looked like a hospital, and for two weeks I was so weak I couldn’t even talk. In another week I was out of danger, and by the end of a month I knew I was in a Cleveland hospital. Then Les Fernald and Jim Tolley—Jim had taken my place as a ferry pilot—were allowed to see me.
“So you’re going to get well! My, my!” grinned Fernald. “Can’t the Air Service ever get rid of you?”
“I’m trying my best,” I told him. “What happened after I passed out?”
“Marston got you out of the seat and took the wheel before your ship crashed. He was —— badly wounded himself, an artery severed, for one thing, but he flew the ship with one hand and held a handkerchief to your chest with another, flew back to Cleveland and landed. That Martin came in like a drunken duck, and he cracked the landing gear all to ——, then fainted in the ship.”
“Is he alive?”
“Sure. But he’d about bled to death when he got here, and you’d have been as dead as the free silver issue if he hadn’t——”
“Well I’ll be ——!” was all that I could think of to say, and Les assured me that I was that already.
“Where’s the sarge now?” was my next question.
“Oh, he got his strength back quick—wounds weren’t as bad as yours—and he’s in the hospital at Langham now.”
“Well, have the sleuths unearthed anything?”
“Plenty, but not all,” big, serious Tolley told me. “One of the men in the Jenny that fought you was alive, but he wouldn’t say a word. They’ve arrested three more, though. Don’t know whether what they’ve said so far is right.”
“Come on—get out of here!” my jovial doctor interrupted at this stage, coming into the room. “Slim’s still weak as a cup of tea. Tell him tomorrow, whatever it is.”
Before I left the hospital Les, who visited me every trip, told me confidentially all that had happened. Hold your breath now, and prepare. I suppose you think that at the very least you’re about to hear that all the countries of the world got together and concentrated their nefarious master-spies in Cleveland and Boundville, bent on the destruction of the American Air Service. Well, they didn’t. There is no international ephillipsoppenheiming about to be indulged in by me.
With that out, you figure big business. It is always proper to blame Wall Street for everything from the earthquake in Japan to the fact that it didn’t rain in the wheat-belt during July. Well, that’s out, too. You might know that anything I was connected with would turn out to be a farce-comedy eventually. I had to lay back in my bed and laugh myself sick again when I heard it. If there’d been any bullets left in my carcass they’d have clinked together like a castenets.
The fact of the matter was that a wealthy, gentle, gray-haired old nut inventor—a man who’d evidently gone crazy trying to get a perpetual motion machine or something like that—was really responsible for the whole thing. He’s safely ensconced in a lunatic asylum now, working on a mechanical flyswatter or something like that. The facts are approximately as follows:
This old fellow was a multimillionaire, and for years had been trying in his senile way to invent things. Finally he’d concentrated on the Air Service, and had been submitting to McCook Field all sorts of things from a motor run by gun powder to an automobile that turned into a ship, wings sprung out, a propeller attached to the front of the motor, and all that. Naturally, all his stuff was infinitely ridiculous. If you don’t believe how many crack-brained inventors there are who submit perpetual motion machines and all that, ask an official of any big company, or the patent office. And McCook Field gets its share.
He had been a harmless old coot, although a nuisance. Well, when the bombing was broached, he set to work, and figured out a scheme to carry bombs, each bomb to be hung under an individual balloon which was to be filled with poison gas. Then there was some magnetic idea which would make the bomb and the balloon go straight for the battleship attracted by the steel in it. When the bomb hit, the balloon would burst and spread poison gas all over. The only thing he hadn’t figured out was what would become of the pilot, except that he might jump into the middle of the ocean in a parachute.
This old bird was very patriotic, offering all his nutty ideas to the Government free and clear. Now comes the hitch. A soldier of fortune, named Gimbel, and reputedly—I never met him—a very keen, unscrupulous and strong-minded person, had attached himself to this old gentleman and worked him for a fairly comfortable living, suggesting newer and nuttier ideas and pretending to help him work on them at a comfortable salary.
The old boy trusted him a good deal, and was pretty strongly under the sway of said Gimbel. Gimbel had decided, evidently, that he wanted a big piece of change all in a lump, instead of putting up with the vagaries of the old boy for merely a stipend, so to speak. So he’d worked on the old boy’s mind, helping him become convinced that there was a deep laid plot to keep the Government from taking advantage of this priceless method of bombing.
The inventor was absolutely certain, finally, that the Government was in the hands of traitors who were working deliberately to make the bombing tests a failure, or at least, not as successful as they could be. The Martin factory, Gimbel convinced him, had bribed high Government officials to make them turn down his invention so that they could sell a lot of very expensive ships.
Then Gimbel convinced him that, in view of the fine patriotic motives behind the scheme, it would be a good thing to get rid of the factory entirely, thus at one and the same time getting rid of a big business which was working against the country for their own ends, and forcing the country to use the balloons and bombs of the inventor, which, of course, would be tremendously successful.
Gimbel patriotically offered to burn the Martin factory, or in some way stop the use of Martins in the tests, for a consideration of three hundred thousand dollars to be paid him because of the risk. The old boy fell for it and, when the thing was broken up, was actually working about fifty men getting the magnetic apparatus ready, and had sent a letter to a prominent rubber company in Akron, warning them to be ready to furnish the Government at least thirty free balloons at a month’s notice.
Gimbel, hot after the three hundred grand, had decided to carry on after the failure of his attempt to ignite the factory in Cleveland. He had assured the old boy that the wrecks in Boundville had been due to the rotten construction of the Martins, and did not plan to let him realize what he was actually doing.
You can see, by the methods used, how easy it would be to ruin enough shipsen route, without being caught, they figured, to cause the bombing to be a bust that year. And that meant Gimbel’s three hundred thousand. He had got the aged millionaire so completelynon compos mentisthat the poor old man considered it a holy crusade for the good of the country.
The way Gimbel was operating was this:
Two men had drifted to the field at Boundville, without anybody seeing them, chatted with Marston, and then suggested some coffee. They had doped it, so Marston slept like the dead and they came back and filed the wires. In the gang Gimbel had collected—three men, it appeared—there was one flyer. In some way they were informed when I left Cleveland—that would be simple enough—and their plan of shooting me down was a very good one.
The wreck would have been a total, soul-satisfying and complete catastrophe, of course, with four tons dropping a few thousand feet out of control. Fire would have been inevitable, and the chance of ever discovering, from two heaps of bones, that we had been shot would have been negligible. By the time it was decided the two flyers would have been safely away, anyhow.
They might have reported the wreck themselves, or landed, looked over the bones, and made certain that any tell-tale signs of bullets had disappeared before they did anything about reporting it. Any farmers around would have known nothing whatever about such technical matters, and guns can not be heard above the roar of motors.
On my way back to Langham, and for several hours before I started, I had a good chance to think over all that Marston had done. Desperately wounded as he was, he had had to climb from his cockpit over into mine, get the ship under control from the seat alongside me, leaning over to grasp the wheel, and then unbuckle my belt and heave me out of my seat.
Then he had probably slid into my seat himself, and in some way pulled my far from minute body up beside him. He had flown the bomber back into Cleveland, amateur as he was at airmanship, and stanched my wound and let his own bleed.
When I arrived at the field all the gang were there. The leading flyers of the border, the California fields and even from Panama, Hawaii and the Philippines, were on the job practising for the big chance. And Marston was still the hero of the field.
I got my flight back, and went to see him right away.
“Thanks, Marston,” I said as we shook hands.
“Don’t bother yourself, Lieutenant,” he returned in his rasping voice.
The sullen look was gone, but otherwise he was the same. He wasn’t any chunk of soft-soap by any means. But his grudge against the Army in general had disappeared, anyway. A little adulation will go a long, long way.
“You gave me a square deal when you might have ruined me,” he went on without a smile, his light eyes staring belligerently into mine. “You gave me a chance. You’re a man, Lieutenant, I’ll say that for you. But as a soldier——”
I let him talk. We were alone. Then I talked.
“Same goes for you, Marston,” I informed him. “You saved my life, and you proved yourself a —— good man. I admire you. But my personal opinion of you still goes. We’ll get along. I’ll give orders and you’ll take ’em, and this is the last occasion for conversation on anything except business that we’ll have.”
“Yes, sir. Now about Number 14, I think she’s ready for test.”
And that was that.
Not only that, but it’s about every bit of it, I guess. You probably thought I was going to make myself out a hero. Now you see how dumb I was. All wrong. Funny how I keep muddling through, getting dumber and dumber, seems like, every year. I’d like to report that Marston and I fell into each other’s arms, and that he became my stanch friend and my man Friday and all that, but even in that this yarn is completely cockeyed, and isn’t like it ought to be at all.
But that’s the way things work out in real life, I guess. Marston and I respect each other, and it’s nothing to his discredit that he doesn’t like me. He can find several people who would say that disliking me was only another proof of his remarkable powers.
Occasionally, when the wind is in the east, I am a pessimist, and at those times—whisper it—I’m inclined to agree with those last-named folks.
And thatisall of it.
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the May 20, 1925 issue ofAdventuremagazine.