“Please, Sheriff, let me get this off my chest. Maybe you’ll be through with me, now, too.”
They sank into their chairs, Mr. Curran wiping his brow with a shaking hand. As Penoch made a clean breast of his relationship with Kennedy, I half listened, but I didn’t pay close attention at that. A thousand crazy ideas were running through my head, and suddenly it seemed as if I couldn’t wait to get Penoch alone. I had a queer hunch.
Those old-timers understood the little flyer’s position, and the sheriff summed up the general sentiment, when he put his hand on Penoch’s shoulder and told him:
“Mike, here, and me, ain’t blamin’ you a bit, son. And you was ready to prevent any trouble. You couldn’t be blamed, any way you take it, for givin’ him the benefit of the doubt for a while. Gosh! What a snake in the grass he is! And I aim to git him in jail. We’ll plaster him for life—”
“And me with him,” barked O’Reilly.
“Not a bit of it. Say, young feller, he can go up for a long time right in this country for what he done! More’n he deserves for this trick; but we’ll sort o’ consider his other crimes, see?”
“Listen Sheriff,” I found myself saying. “Some way or another I’ve got a funny idea. Let me talk it over with Penoch and call you back, eh?”
The leonine old man peered at me through puckered eyes.
“Shore,” he commented. “But what’s the secret?”
“I’ll tell you when I’m sure of it myself,” I told him. “Good night, Mr. Curran. I sure hope Shirley won’t take it too hard.”
“She will, for awhile. But when I think o’ what might ’a’ happened if he hadn’t give himself away—say, I ought to be thankful for this night!”
We had no sooner got out the door and into the car than I said:
“Don’t start her for a minute. Penoch, my boy, just how good it was, or ought to be Kennedy with his fingers and a deck of cards?”
“Used to be a wonder!”
“And he deliberately, before five people, does the clumsiest piece of cheating a man ever did in the world! If he’d wanted to be caught, he couldn’t have done it more openly.”
“By God!”
It was almost a prayer from Penoch. Then he faced me, tense and strained, and his attempted whisper couldn’t have been heard more than a hundred feet.
“He couldn’t have done it deliberately! I know what you think—that because of what I did for him at Laguna he decided to give up Shirley and took that way. But all he had to do was walk out on her, without putting himself in disgrace.”
“Let’s talk to him,” I suggested, and we started immediately to make a new speed record between McMullen and the flying field.
It did seem ridiculous. For what possible reason, short of sheer insanity, would a man brand himself a card-cheat? A man who’d do that would cut off his head to cure an earache. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, but I was exuding curiosity in corpulent chunks. I aimed to get at the bottom of things, and quickly.
We found him in his tent, alone, holding communion with a large bottle oftequila.
He stared at us, as we came in, and I’ll swear his eyes brought me up short. There was suffering in them, and a sort of bewilderment. It changed the whole aspect of the man. It was his eyes that repelled one, ordinarily. Now that there was something human in them, the change was magical.
Penoch O’Reilly planted himself, as per usual, his mustache turned upward belligerently, and his eyes snapping.
“Regardless of anything else, Ralph, how the ’ell did you happen to cheat so clumsily? The cheating I can understand; the way it was done I can’t.”
Kennedy took a big drink, gave us one and, as he poured them, said sardonically:
“You give me credit for knowing better, then? You ought to.”
“If you did it deliberately, why?” I broke in. “If you wanted to do what Penoch asked, and lay off the girl—”
“We both happened to be in love,” he said calmly, as if laughing up his sleeve. His eyes, however, were averted.
“Huh?” snorted Penoch scathingly. “You in love?”
“For the first and only time in my life,” Kennedy admitted casually, his back toward us. “In fact, I’m so nuts about her that I couldn’t let her in for what she’d be in for with me. Don’t flatter yourself, Peewee. It wasn’t for you I did it. It was for her.”
“But why that way?” I barked.
“If I just broke off,” he said, eying a new glass oftequilawith narrowed eyes, “she’d have taken a long while to get over it. Might as well cut everything off clean, show her what I am all at once, and blackjack her into hating me. Make it easier all around.”
For a moment his eyes met mine, and the mask was off. I don’t get sentimental as a rule, but I was looking at a man whose whole life had come up to torture him, and who was going through an accumulation of suffering.
“By the way, Peewee, I’m resigning, of course, and leaving tomorrow on the five o’clock. Probably’ll have to borrow some dough. I’d like to take a last ride, so keep things quiet until I get it, eh?”
Penoch nodded wordlessly. Cocky as he was ordinarily, and sure of himself, he was nonplussed now. Kennedy had turned into a strange species of animal to him, and he couldn’t believe it.
“And now,” grinned Kennedy, keeping up his bluff to the last, “will you two get the hell out of here and let a gentleman and a scholar get drunk in peace and quiet?”
“Don’t want any company?” Penoch asked him, and there was real pleading in his tone.
For the first time in our acquaintance I saw actual softness in Kennedy’s eyes, as he looked at the man he had liked and admired as much as it had been possible for him to feel those emotions for anybody.
“Nope. Let’s shuck the past, eh what? What the hell? And I’ve got to do a little high-powered thinking. ’Night.”
We walked thoughtfully out into the starlight. Then I made a profound remark.
“I’ve heard of the miracles that love is supposed to work, but this is the first one I’ve seen. I think the combination of you risking your life for him, and a real unselfish feeling for a girl, has sort of opened up a new world to Kennedy. He’s got guts, hasn’t he?”
“Never lacked those,” boomed Penoch. “At that, you may be right. I guess he’s always figured every hand was against him—and now that he’s found out there’s a little white in the world he doesn’t know what to make of it. He proved himself, all right, tonight, but if he’d told me that this afternoon I’d have laughed as hard as I would over a romantic yarn about the honeymoon of a salmon.”
“’Night. I don’t feel much like talking.”
To tell the truth, I didn’t either. I wandered around the field, smoking a few reflective cigarets, and finally called up the sheriff. I told him the whole story, and he was satisfied that everything pointed to the fact that if he didn’t make a move everything was all right. I figured it was better, and so did he, that Shirley should never know the inside. Consequently, the Currans were not called up, and have not had the real dope to this day.
I finally went to sleep, but in the morning I was, of course, still thinking about one Ralph Kennedy. And for some funny reason I wasn’t sure of him—his sincerity, I mean. I was wondering whether there wasn’t some trick connected with his gesture of the night before. However, I thought it best, at breakfast—to which meal he did not lend his presence—to tell the boys the entire yarn, simply to offset the gossip that would run wild around McMullen. Mr. Curran, of course, would eventually spill the beans, and I wanted the gang to speak up, knowing the facts, and say whatever they deemed best. Furthermore, I had a funny idea that when Kennedy left, I didn’t want him to go in disgrace.
As the day wore on, I came to think more and more of this last flight stuff. All flyers are more or less superstitious about that. As a matter of fact, there have been a few, from Hobey Baker down, who’ve met their Waterloo on the last hop before they kissed the Air Service good-by. I had a sort of premonition that it shouldn’t be taken.
Consequently, when Kennedy ate bacon and eggs at lunch, with his eyes red, a hang-over sticking out all over him, I said:
“Listen, big boy, you’ve said you were leaving tonight and likewise that you were going to take a last jazz flight. You were drunk as a hoot owl last night, and I don’t think you’ll be in such good shape to fly this afternoon. Why not douse the idea of a hop?”
“Maybe you’ve got a good idea there,” he said with a grin that didn’t change the suffering eyes. “In fact, it’s probably the good old logic. Say, Peewee, how about you taking me for a ride, so nothing’ll happen?”
“Sure. I’ll go with you.”
I just happened to switch my gaze from one to the other, and I saw something. There were many experiences that they had gone through together in the past, which, naturally, had generated a certain feeling between them. But now each of them had discerned something in the other that transcended anything that they had previously known.
In short, I saw a man’s affection for another man shining from each pair of eyes.
The rest of the gang, knowing the entire situation, chimed in with a lot of Air Service kidding, about that last ride, as for instance, Sleepy Spears’ remark:
“Any hop is foolish, and a last one is suicide. You’ve made it sure death by letting Penoch fly you.”
“In fact,” Tex MacDowell chimed in, in his soft southern drawl, “I’ve had a shovel all ready to pick Penoch up with, for a long time. I’d pick a hang-over in preference to Penoch any time.”
I guess nobody outside of the men who fly understand what air kidding is. Probably I don’t myself. But in my dumb way I think that it’s like a kid’s whistling when he passes a graveyard, or, perhaps, laughing at the worst that could happen, so that, when it does happen, it won’t mean anything.
When lunch was over, and we were all drifting out of the mess-hall, I suddenly realized that I would like to share, a little bit, those last hours. I’d been so close to the thing that I wanted to hang around the outskirts of it, until Kennedy left. In other words, I was sentimental, and I thought quite a lot of Penoch, at that. So I said casually—“I think I’ll take a little private hop for myself when you do—a sort of chaser for the poker game, eh?”
Kennedy, I think, bewildered as he was at the world that had been opened to him so recently, appreciated the impulse behind my suggestion.
“Sort of be my guard of honor, eh?” he said. But those cold eyes were soft. “In fact, we’ll be glad to have company, won’t we Peewee?”
And so it happened that a half-hour later the three of us were on the line. Our two ships were being warmed up, and the mechanics, satisfied, had brought them down to idling.
“I’ll sit in the back seat, big boy,” Penoch told Kennedy, “but don’t think that I won’t take the stick away from you any time!”
You know, of course, that De Havilands are dual-control ships, but all the instruments are in the front cockpit, and that, in a manner of speaking, is the driver’s seat.
I got into my own plane and, as I taxied out for the take-off, I couldn’t exactly analyze my reason for being there. I guess it was a sort of vague tribute to Kennedy, and yet I had a funny feeling that something might happen—so much so that as I turned the motor full on and pushed the stick forward I was so absent-minded that I nearly broke the propeller, because I had the nose of the plane down so far.
Kennedy and Penoch had taken off first, and I just followed them as they circled the field for altitude. When we got to the tremendous height of fifteen hundred feet, Kennedy, who was doing the piloting, started due west for Laredo.
I’ll swear that we were not a thousand yards from the airdrome when it happened. I was flying possibly a hundred yards back of them, and almost the same distance to the right. All of a sudden I saw their ship go into a dive.
That meant something. When Kennedy started turning back toward the field I knew that the motor had cut out. Then, as I noticed the propeller, I knew that the motor had not only cut out, but had cut dead. The stick was revolving slower and slower. There was no motor power behind it.
The next second their ship was blanketed in fire. The motor was a mass of blue flame. Kennedy had not cocked the ship up into a side-slip soon enough. That blows the flames upward, away from the pilot. The left wing was afire before he started slipping, and that second of backward draught, because they were in a dive when the fire started, had caused the fuselage to catch fire in a dozen places.
My body and brain were numb. Even so, I subconsciously knew what had happened. The gas line had broken, and the gas, sprayed over the hot motor, had ignited.
They had gone into the slip—too late—before I started toward them. I was diving my ship, motor full on. There was nothing I could do—Penoch and Kennedy burned to death before my eyes—I was just getting nearer for no reason.
I suppose that it registered on me at the time, because I remember it so vividly now. Penoch told me what was said. Anyway, I saw Kennedy, bearing the brunt of the fire in the front cockpit, turn and gesture. He was talking. I could see through the smoke and fire his lips moving. Penoch told me that what he said was:
“Get out on the wing! I’m not leaving the ship— Let me jump! If Slim sees you, he’ll get close. God! I can’t last long! It’ll just be two instead of one—”
What I saw was Penoch getting out of the back cockpit, hanging by his hands from the cowling. He hauled himself along the side of the ship, his feet dangling over space. His head was turned backward, to protect his eyes, and his clothing was charring, because he was out where the air-stream could reach him, and no flame could get a real start. But Kennedy, in the cockpit—
I was going through the most horrible nightmare that can be conceived. And yet, I instinctively sensed the possibility of saving Penoch, as he reached the right wing and started crawling along it.
Then Ralph brought the burning ship level; that blew the fire right back on him. I was close, and for that horrible minute I guess I ceased to think of my own safety. I knew that there was one desperate chance to save one of the two, and Penoch, of course, was the one, because Kennedy had willed it so.
Penoch was out of the fire now, at the edge of the right wing. He was hanging from the edge of it by his hands as I flew my ship up into position, my left wing underneath the other’s right one. And Kennedy—I don’t know by what transcendent power he was able to do it, as he burned to death—kept his ship level. Penoch dropped—his only chance for life—and he landed on my left wing. He grabbed the cabane strut, the little metal horn at the edge of the wing to which the control wires for the ailerons are attached, and passed out.
An instant later, Kennedy, a human bonfire, leaped from his burning ship. He fell out—blessed surcease from pain. And the ship, like a flaming coffin, seemed to follow his body down.
Penoch eventually got back into the rear cockpit, of course, and we’re both here to tell the tale.
Sometime I hope that a burning ship will cease to trace a crimson path across my dreams. Probably it won’t.
Anyway, if Ralph is a spook in some spiritual village, teaching the Twelve Apostles how to play poker, I hope he has time to tip his halo in acknowledgment of the salute of Slim Evans to a crook and a hero, a scoundrel and a man.
THE END
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the November 1, 1927 issue of Adventure magazine.
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the November 1, 1927 issue of Adventure magazine.