HENRY HORNBONE'S ONE-MAN WAR
ByHELEN TOPPING MILLER
Author of "White Collar Stuff," "Pitch," etc.
PREJUDICES OF THE OLD-TIMERS DIE HARD. BUT A RAILROAD IS A POWERFUL THING FOR ONE OLD-TIMER TO FIGHT—AND WHEN OTHERS ENTER THE FEUD, THINGS BEGIN TO LOOK DIFFERENT
In his sooty kitchen with the coal oil lamp sending a plume of smoke aloft and four kittens rolling under the three-legged stove, Henry Hornbone sat and went through the motions of a man eating his supper.
He fished sausages out of a skillet, he cut them carefully into small bits, he smeared oleomargarine on thick slabs of baker's bread and he stirred sugar into his tea, one spoonful after another, but he did not eat.
Henry was listening. His ears were listening, straining till he could almost see them standing out batlike from his knobby old head. His whole gaunt ridiculous body was listening, and his soul, such cramped and curious sort of soul as he owned, stood stock still in a cold tremor of mingled triumph and dread.
Henry was listening for the wreck of the Oriole Limited.
While he spooned sugar into his cup, staring off into the blackness with a sort of fascinated paralysis, he was waiting for the hideous crashing, the roar and rending, the sickening upheaval, the booming rush of steam when the proud steel train should go hurtling into the frozen muck of his turnip patch. Inch by inch past block after block, he followed the Oriole Limited in his mind through the black night to her doom. Now she would be streaking through Hodges Siding; a great whooping serpent with a thousand gleaming eyes and a tongue of flame.
He took out his old silver watch, calculated the difference between sun time and railroad time—speculated. Four minutes out of Hodges now—eight minutes more. Eight minutes, and he would be even with the B. & A.!
Nothing on earth could save the Oriole Limited. Henry had fixed everything himself. He had turned the abandoned old switch that in the past had served the guano factory and spiked it himself. To be certain that nothing could prevent the destruction he planned he had put two heavy plow beams on the rails near the switch frogs and had weighted them down with rocks and brickbats. All this after dark and so near to train time that there was small chance for a prowling section hand to discover his work.
It had taken Henry eighteen years to accumulate courage enough to spike that switch. Half his queer, isolated life had been devoted to a lonely vendetta against the B. & A.—a one-man war which no onebeside himself suspected. Sixteen years since, when the spur to the guano plant was first laid, Henry had made a wedge of steel, long and sharp. Twelve years later, when the factory had yielded its malodorous ghost and its red tin roof began to sag and the old spur track to rust, he had begun a long series of abortive and secret attempts at train wrecking.
Every dark and rainy night for years he had crept out through his pie-plant row and past his humming beehives, slipped over the white fence and spiked the switch open with a few quick, practised strokes. But always about the time the Oriole Limited pulled out of Hodges Siding his courage had failed him, and he had rushed out with mallet and sledge to remove the menace he had created.
Whenever a work train pulled into Elsie, Henry always suffered a cold apprehension for fear the useless old spur would be torn up before he had screwed up enough nerve to do his work of sabotage. But for some reason the grass-grown length of abandoned spur remained. And now the switch was open, grimly spiked, waiting for the arrogant engine of the Limited to come crashing, amazed, to her tragedy.
Six minutes!
Henry tasted his tea. It was syrupy and nauseous. He spat it out nervously, turned his eyes toward the black window and wrested them away again by main force. He had purposely locked the door and hidden the key in a sack of nails and bolts where it would take half an hour to find it. The front door was locked fast also; indeed the front door had been locked fast for so many years that it was doubtful if the rusty old lock would turn at all.
He had taken off his shoes, carried them deliberately to the attic and hung them over the rafters. Every precaution against a last-minute sagging of his nerve had been taken. He had even dropped the sledge hammer in the cistern, half to guard against his own weakness and half as alibi. The wreck, he had decided, would be laid to train robbers who had been operating on the B. & A. at frequent intervals. Nobody would suspect old Henry Hornbone who fathered every deserted cat for miles around and sat always on the front seat at prayer meeting with his useless ear trumpet slung around his shoulder on a buckskin cord; because nobody ever had suspected him though he had carried on his one-man war against the road for eighteen years.
No one, not even the B. & A. officials themselves, were aware that a state of hostilities had existed between Henry and the road since the first surveyors had come dragging their numbered stakes through his little peach orchard. A few engineers had laughed when they saw the absurd old fellow in his flapping clothes standing beside the new roadbed brandishing angry fists. But when, not long since, a trio of gondolas had broken loose from a slow-crawling freight and gone bumping joyfully down to the station where they crashed through fifty feet of platform, demolished a dozen telegraph poles and a water crane, nobody so much as thought of old Henry. Henry's very appearance was an alibi. He looked like a motherless child, grown to man's stature, grizzled, bewildered, eagerly friendly.
Since his boyhood Henry had been stone deaf. Such fragments of speech as remained to him, made timorous by the vast closing in of silence, were uttered in a shrill yell which the unthinking and strangers assumed to be the babbling of a moron. The amused pity with which his attempts at conversation were received had not escaped Henry's sharp eyes, and he had grown to depend more and more upon his grin as a means of communication with the world, and upon a jerky code of signs and syllables.
No one would have believed that grisly plots were hatched behind the glow of that ingenuous grin. No one in Elsie, he knew, would ever suspect that the sharpened wedge and the plow beams were the work of a simple, grinning old mute. He was safe enough if he could just sit still.
Four minutes!
In four minutes he would be revenged for the invading of his little plot of ground, which his mother had left to him, by men who had cursed him and by steel rails and yelping engines. In four minutes he would have been paid for the dazed wretchedness which had been his when men with law at their backs had come and gabbled things which he could neither hear nor comprehend, but which, it appeared, gave to the B. & A. the little earth he had tended, gave them the right to shower his roof with hot cinders, to slay his quince bushes with sulphurous smoke, to rattlehis puttyless window panes loose with the thunder of locomotives.
Four minutes! He held his elbows in a grip that hurt. He twisted his old legs about each other till they ached. His face, with its three-day growth of sandy beard, writhed and twitched. But he sat still.
Coming! Coming! He felt the first premonitory shudder of his floor sills that told him the train had crossed the bridge below the yards. Every pulse in him spun as though a gigantic current galvanized him. His head roared. His chest hurt.
Nearer! Almost here! His grip held. His body grew numb.
Then something snapped. Some grim gripping gave way. He went limp. He retched. He was old Henry Hornbone again, simple, kindly old Henry who mothered cats.
He went through the window kicking the sash to flinders. Shoeless he leaped like a wild old warlock through his garden, over the fence, up to the right of way. The headlight of the Oriole Limited flared upon him—a dancing ghost with waving arms—as the train came to a grinding stop thirty feet from the spiked switch and the plow beams.
Charlie Sanders, who ran the Limited, sprang out of the cab. Newt Murphy, the conductor, sprinted down the cinders. To them old Henry waved wild hands and cackled unintelligible things. The flag-man, an officious person, thudded ahead and discovered the open switch.
"By George, old Henry sure saved all our lives," Charlie Sanders explained to the passengers who came swarming up. "Looka that—the way we was running old Fifteen-eighty would have turned plumb end over end when she hit that spur."
Henry Hornbone found himself the center of a crowd, and a hero. Men shook his hand, women's cold, shaking fingers clapped his own. They shouted questions at him till Newt Murphy came to his relief.
"He's deef—can't hear a thing, Henry can't. Harmless old guy, but stone deef."
Someone was moving through the crowd gathering up money, a girl with red hair and a little gray hat tipped over one eye. She brought the donation to Henry in her cupped hands—little hands—bills and silver dollars and a few quarters and halves.
"Take it," she urged, "it's for you."
Henry backed away. All his life he had been terrified in the presence of women.
"He can't hear you, lady," explained Charlie Sanders.
"Oh—make him understand, somebody." The girl followed Henry with her double handful of currency, but he backed further, sidling, his lips lifted at the corners.
He was in a cold agony, a wretchedness of shaking relief and anguish of conscience. He wanted to be let alone. He wanted to creep into his old bed under the wool quilts, deep down where he could shut his ears against the penetrating jeers that clanged like sleighbells in his brain. The girl's insistence drew from him a painful burst of his rare, dreadful speech.
"I don't want any money!" he shrilled. Then, snatching away from them, he leaped the fence and tore through his tiny back garden. Inside his house he jerked the blinds shut over the outraged window and sagged down in a chair, shaking from head to foot.
"Now," he thought gloomily, "now—they'll tear up that spur. Now what you goin' to do, Henry Hornbone? You're a dad-blamed old fool."
But something seemed to warm him as he crept half-clothed into his bed.
"Gosh, that girl had little hands," he thought aloud. "Might 'a' killed her anyway. Might 'a' killed a lot of folks. Didn't kill 'em though. Didn't kill anybody."
The visitor who banged on Henry's old warped front door in the morning grew weary after a while and went around to the back. The knock on the back door meant nothing to Henry's sealed ears, but the jar came presently to his senses and he opened the closed shutters and thrust out his head. The grin was absent from his grizzled face. He glowered. He scowled till he saw that the intruder upon his doorstep was feminine and young, that she had red hair and little hands and feet that looked as though dancing were their chief mission in life. Then he grinned.
"Key's lost," he yelled suddenly, so that the girl jumped. "Can't git in."
She nodded and smiled. The smile and her dancing eyes and the glow of her hair were a combination as dazzling as winter sunshine. She had manifestly come prepared. She pulled a little pad and pencil from her pocket and wrote rapidly.
"Can you read?"
The furious disgust in Henry's eyes was answer enough. She thought him a plumb fool then!
"Sure, I can read," he shouted. "I ain't crazy. I'm just hard of hearing."
Eager apology was in her smile. She scribbled rapidly.
"You are a brave man," Henry read. "You saved the lives of eighty-four people."
He shook his head. "I ain't brave. I'm just an old fool."
She laughed at this, and it was as if the sun leaped up with a shout and a lot of nymphs and dryads and other ladies in diaphanous veils whirled in a mad dance on a hilltop.
"I am the new operator at Elsie." ran her next missive. "I have a pass for you from the president of the road. You can ride anywhere you want any time you like."
"Don't want to ride," grumbled Henry. "Don't want to go no place. Don't want nothing to do with your railroad—no time."
He remembered then that he had neglected to put on his outer shirt and that his red flannel undergarment was informal even for morning wear. So he pulled in his head like a sulky old turtle.
"Don't want nothing to do with your railroad," he repeated. "Never. No time!"
He clapped the shutters fast and locked them with a wooden pin. Presently he felt the pattering passage of her heels on the porch. She was going off and leaving him alone. Let 'em all go off and leave him alone.
He dressed slowly, climbing to the cold attic for his shoes. From the mail sack he rummaged the key and opened the back door. As it swung back, shrieking, a dozen vari-colored cats suddenly appeared from different places of waiting and streaked eagerly into the house. Henry clumped back, sopped bread in the sausage grease, congealed from the night before, soaked it in sweetened tea and set out half a dozen plates which instantly became the centers for a petal-like array of flashing pink tongues.
Then he trudged through the brief strip of garden left to him, tossed a handful of corn to a charging troup of guineas, and arrived at the fence. Down the track he could see a line of blue-clad laborers. The lift of their sledges and their flashing fall came to him soundlessly. They were tearing up the old spur.
He swung a leg over the fence and tramped on to the village, nodding to people whom he met. Women smiled at him, men gave him friendly nods. He was a personage. He had saved the Limited from a wreck. Something which survived in Henry's queer, cramped old soul laughed aloud. He was safe. Nobody in Elsie would suspect him. His war could go on. But now he would have to think of something new—now that they were tearing up the spur. He felt lost and empty. For eighteen years he had comforted the thwarted vindictiveness in him with plans for that colossal wreck. Now it was all ended. Days of toil which had gone into the sharpening of that wedge were wasted. Nobody had been killed though. That was something. He had never thought much about the people being killed. He was glad that there were no awful bloody bodies lying around in Elsie. Henry hated blood. He kept his chickens till they died of old age because he could not slay them.
At the station he surveyed the new length of platform with grim satisfaction. He had made the B. & A. a little trouble, anyway—paid them back a trifle for the outraging of his bit of garden. He tramped across the new planks marked the oozing pitch and the shining nail heads with the avidness of lonely people for inconsequential things. Then he felt eyes on his back. Deafness had made him supersensitive. He turned quickly, and in the window of the little bay where the telegraph instruments lurked under the green light, he saw the girl—the red-headed girl.
She was smiling at him. Something in Henry's twisted old nature warmed and thrilled. Women smiled at him often, the same smile they gave to lame dogs or harmless half-wits. But the girl's eyes were different. They held a frank friendliness which had no pity or evasion in it. Shewaved a hand at him. She was bending over a table and her hair was bound down by the elastic of a green eye-shade.
A freight pulled in then, and Henry moved off sullenly. But in the afternoon he came shambling back, a votive offering in his pocket. Grinning diffidently he laid this gift on the window sill, soothing its protests with swift, stubby old fingers—a yellow kitten with rascally circles of black about its eyes, a comical clown of a kitten which until this hour had been the cherished member of Henry's huge feline family.
"This here one's yours," he yelled, as the girl came hurrying to the window. "If he gets the fits you lemme know and I'll fetch you some catnip."
And he turned and sped away, his shoulders hunched, without a backward look.
Began for old Henry Hornbone an amazing friendship.
Every morning he shambled down to the station at Elsie with some sort of a present in his pocket. Sometimes it was a speckled guinea egg, warm from the nest. Sometimes a brown twig softly threaded with new pussy willows, and as spring warmed and the frost went out of the land he brought little wild strawberry blooms like gold beaded stars, now a single violet, once a white snail shell scoured to brilliance. And at dusk, when the night trick came on, the girl operator, whose name was Mary Hill, came often to the old house beside the track. Sometimes she carried a paper bag warm and greasy with hot doughnuts. Sometimes her offering was a piece of kidney for the cats. Often she brought only her smile, which became the one bit of glow in old Henry's drab, baffled existence.
She mended his socks, she impelled him by her frowns to scour his floors, to shave every day in his eagerness to please, to keep the cats off the table and his boots off his bed. He even bought a black necktie and a new hat to replace the greasy old relic which had served him for twenty years. Mary Hill, with her red head and her dancing eyes, which penetrated the frozen barrier of the silence which had so long kept the old man in desolate isolation, became to him a little of the mother that he missed and something of the daughter he had never had. There were people in Elsie who laughed. There were young men at Mary Hill's boarding-house who teased her about old Henry Hornbone. But most people understood. And Henry, toiling to make a cherry tree bloom beside the fence, forgot in his present content, his vengeful war on the B. & A.
And then came the strike.
To Henry the strike meant little. He sensed a little of it, through the things that he read in the badly printed weekly paper at Elsie, he understood the guards who tramped up and down the right of way warning him back whenever he threw a leg over the fence. But as the trouble grew more tense, as bridges went up in horrific explosions, as trains were wrecked mysteriously and engineers intimidated, Henry saw the strain of it reflected in the harassed eyes of Mary Hill. There was a young marine in the station now, whenever he tramped down in the mornings—a cocky youth with dark eyes and a proud scowl.
A day or two after that, Henry bought a heavy calibered revolver from the black-smith. That night he nailed a tobacco can on his woodshed, and when Mary Hill came by, he haled her in and made her practise shooting at the can till she could hit it three times out of six—till the palm of her hand was blistered by the heavy stock.
"They blew the bridge at Alapaha last night," she told him, as he rubbed melted resin on the blisters. Henry could understand much that she said by this time, if she spoke slowly and distinctly. He nodded.
"You keep this here and use it," he ordered, oiling the cylinder and loading it deftly. "Gun ain't no good if you're scart of it. And if that soldier down there gives you any sass you pop him over, too. I don't like the look of him, no time—he's too blame' smart."
A slow color crept over Mary Hill's face at this, and with it a crawling chill was communicated to old Henry's heart. There was a rift—tiny, almost imperceptible, yet appalling to the lonely old man to whom the friendship of this girl had come to be such a tremendous thing. Her eyes avoided his for an instant, then the dancing laughter came into them again. She laid the grim gun down on the back steps and snatched at the old man's hand. Henry knew what she wanted—to see that cherry tree. She had bought it for him from a fruit tree peddler and they had watched the opening of every bud. It ought to be in bloom today—every flower open. They hurried past the pie-plant row and the humming beehives. At the fence oldHenry Hornbone halted, aghast. He wavered a bit, and then black, militant wrath darkened his face.
The little cherry tree was bent sideways, half stripped of its bark, wilted, trampled. And beside it, driven grimly into the ground was a very new white post, very blatantly lettered in black—"B. & A. RAILROAD. RIGHT OF WAY."
Henry had not sworn an oath since his closing ears had shut from him the sound of his own voice. But now he swore, shrilly, horribly. He sprang at the white post, wrenching and tugging at it, but it had been sledged into the soil by strong men. It did not budge a fraction. The girl's face was a pained mask of wretchedness. She had known that they were condemning a new right of way; that eventually, when the menace of the strike was removed, that the division was to be double-tracked, but she had not thought that it would mean this—the destruction of an old man's pitiful little interest, the ruthless slaughtering of the few simple things that made up life to old Henry, who was denied so much of life.
"Oh—shame! Shame!" she cried aloud. But old Henry did not hear. He was fairly dancing in his rage, he shook his fist at the blinking lines of track, he breathed dreadful threats. War was on again—relentless war against the B. & A. He hardly saw Mary Hill. He scarcely knew when she went away. He was busy with mallet and sledge battering that intruding post out of the ground. By dark he had loosened it and flung it over the fence on the right of way. And next morning he did not go down to the station. He worked doggedly all day, building a high barrier of barbed wire across the back of his place.
The road's lawyer battered at his front door in vain. The postman brought a letter containing a condemnation notice and a check, but the letter lay under the front door for three days before Henry found it. Then he dropped it in the kitchen stove without opening it, and renewed his grim vendetta.
The night the bridge at Hodges was destroyed he felt a gleeful satisfaction, as though he himself had planted the charge under the pillars. He tramped out to the wrecked bridge in the morning, avoiding the right of way cannily, gloating over every twisted rail and fallen cross-tie, grinning his grin which had taken on a warped and sinister grimness. When he came back the fence he had built so laboriously was down, flung carelessly over the beehives and against the shed. In his garden—what little the road had left to him—stood a tall, narrow, yellow building.
It was a block signal tower—two stories high, flashing red and green target lights from its gables, looped about with wires, with glass windows and a locked door and about its base a wide area of piled cinders.
There was a tower like it at Hodges—but here—here in his garden! Henry stared at it in incredible amazement, made numb by baffled wrath. There was a light in the top of the yellow tower, which had manifestly been built intact elsewhere, and set down on his ground by a maintenance crew. At the bottom, slumped on the threshold, smoking a cigarette, bulked the young guard whom he had seen in the station at Elsie—the sleek-haired, insolent lad who had brought a shy, warm blush into Mary Hill's face.
As Henry approached, this young soldier motioned him away, jauntily, with the butt of an Army Colt. Henry burst into a shrill, cackling invective. The young soldier laughed. Henry retreated, presently, a long procession of cats trailing after. But for once he was too troubled, too tremulous with fury to heed the purring friendliness of his yellow-eyed family. The cats lingered in astonishment, but Henry, sagged forward on his doorstep, his eyes fixed on that tall, sulphur-hued intruder with the red and green eye in his garden, paid no attention to them. For once a pampered tribe of feline pensioners went supperless, offended and aloof.
Half the night, while the spring frogs came out and fiddled and the switch-engines hooted up and down, unheard, Henry Hornbone sat at his back door smoldering. Then a reckless idea leaped at him out of the dark, making his slow blood tingle by its very audacity. The sight of the switch engine, panting idly like a fat old hippopotamus with one eye, on the siding beyond his outraged fence inspired a wild scheme for vengeance which drove every vestige of sleep from his tired brain.
"I'll learn 'em," he said aloud. "I'll learn 'em so they'll stay learnt! I got toget me a chain. I got to have a long chain and a wire cable. And I've got to get that feller away from there. I've got to—if I have to knock him in the head."
He remembered then where he had seen a tangled length of cable—down at Hodges where the bridge had been destroyed. It would be risky business getting it; there would be guards and they were touchy and apt to shoot. But somehow he'd work it. A stout wire cable, fastened swiftly around that block tower, a chain reaching to the tender of the switch engine—and the B. & A. would move that offending building from his land themselves!
It was a wild, fantastic plan, but the very difficulties it involved served to rouse old Henry from his lethargy of shocked rage. He pulled his hat low over his ears and slipped out the front way, following the right of way toward Hodges. He knew where the cable lay, tangled in the bottom of a ravine, where it was dark and propitious. Getting the young soldier away from the tower would be the problem. Henry considered various expedients, from setting his own house on fire to cold-blooded murder. He neared the scene of the wreck, where he could see the dangling ruin of the bridge bristling like a ship with lanterns. He could feel the down thud of hammers, as the hastily drafted maintenance crews attacked the wreckage. He crept close through a damp tangle of last year's grass, and it was then that he discovered the two men who, like himself approached cautiously. They kept just ahead of him, heads down, bodies low in the weeds.
He crawled after them, keeping back out of hearing, watching in the darkness to discover what they were up to. Strikers, he decided, since his over sensitive nose brought him no evidence that they were common, unwashed hoboes. They smelled clean—like tobacco and soap. A bit greasy, but without offense. Henry wriggled through the dry grass on their trail. They were making for a tool chest, set beside the track, he noted, and one of them presently stood boldly upright, walked to the chest, lifted something out of it, walked casually toward a group working about a flare, while the other waited, hidden.
In a few minutes the first marauder came sliding back, prone, and Henry lifted his head to see what it was they had pilfered. From the gingerly way they handled it, the caution with which they wormed back to the road, he knew—dynamite!
Forgetting his own errand, avid with childish curiosity, he followed the pair, keeping always out of sight, trailing them back to Elsie—back to his own street, back to his own house!
And here an amazing melodrama was enacted before his staring eyes, almost before he could think. He saw the sinister two slink through his garden, saw them hurl themselves upon the young guard, beheld a waving chaos of arms and legs, heard a thrown pistol clink upon the cinders—heard with his tense nerves and his straining faculties, though his sealed ears denied him tidings of the fight. Then he saw that one of the strikers held the guard prone, and that the other was burrowing swiftly under the yellow tower. It was at that moment that Henry saw another sight which turned him cold and numb and made him forget every grievance he had ever known against the B. & A. He saw a glint of red hair at the upper window of that block tower. He saw Mary Hill standing there—her body poised in terror. In one hand she held the pistol he had given her. In the other she clutched a frightened yellow kitten.
Like a wild old warlock Henry Hornbone hurled himself into the mélée. The dynamiters were strong men; they were desperate and they were armed with deadly brass knuckles and coupling pins. But Henry was armed with primitive rage, which goes a long way in a pitched battle. His head was barked, a fist had crashed into his teeth, a knee had found his stomach and he was feeling a strange lightness in his head—a sort of airiness which persisted in lifting him into the ether, persisted in weakening the dogged grip he had on a tough, whiskery neck. He felt himself giving in; he rallied and snatched great, aching breaths into his bursting lungs, pounding monotonously on a confusion of struggling legs with his stout old hobnailed boots, when he realized that another force had entered into the fray. A red-headed harpy, screaming and dancing, brandishing a big black pistol was circling the fight, dragging at the vindictive person who was endeavoring to choke the young soldier's breath out, battering futile fists upon unfeeling backs, sobbing in impotent wrath.
It was then that Henry dragged out of the tortured thinness of his throat a terrible, curdling scream.
"Bean him!" he yodeled, the yell cutting the air like a knife, "Bean both of 'em—with the gun."
And Mary Hill obeyed.
She beaned both of them with such efficiency that when the young soldier had struggled up and spit out his broken teeth and righted his outrageously disarranged apparel and found his gun, the whiskery pair of malcontents were still sprawled, unconsciously content, in the damp gloom of Henry's pie-plant row.
Henry himself sat up, conscious that certain very vital localities on his person had been woefully maltreated, sure that he would never be able to get a whole breath again, and if by chance he did, it would sure jolt his tortured ribs loose. But he grinned. The grin was jagged and a bit gory, but it persisted. And Mary Hill gave him a wavery, slightly tremulous smile. She still held the pistol, but Henry saw with admiration that she held it muzzle down, harmless but ready. She was a good one! And she might have been killed—blown to pieces like those ragged cross ties at Hodges! Henry struggled up.
"You better fetch somebody," he shouted at the young soldier, who was still a trifle bewildered. "You better fetch a gang to look after them two. I'll stay here till you get back."
The guard departed, having first carefully tied the dynamiters with Henry's clothesline. Mary Hill sat down beside Henry, the big gun balanced on her knee. Her cold, small fingers crept into his palm. She was little and dear, she might have been the mother that he missed or the daughter he had never had. The old man patted her wrist gently and a slow ache swelled within him, made up of loneliness and weariness. Then a new thought comforted him. She'd be there every day—in that tower, in his garden, the green eye-shade binding down her rebellious hair. He gave a tremendous sigh and his age-old war against the B. & A. perished in lusty middle age.
At this minute two-thirds of the village of Elsie surged into his garden.
Henry shambled up, jerked his suspenders straight, hunted his hat. Men were crowding round him—he saw mouths moving excitedly, hands waving. They beat him on the back, they shook his hand. But Henry pulled away.
"Lemme alone," he yelled at the curious who milled about him. "You lemme alone. I've gotta feed my cats!"
Investigators for the Carnegie Institution of Washington have reported some interesting discoveries about the depth to which food plants send their roots. Trees and other perennials send tap-roots to a great distance into the earth, but that cereals, which start new from the seed each season, do the same, has not been generally understood. Professor John E. Weaver reports that in Nebraska wheat and oats were found to send roots down to a depth of from six to eight feet, while corn roots were found eight feet deep. New agricultural methods may result from these investigations.
The next big forward step in aviation will be the helicopter. Run to your Greek dictionary and look it up. "Helicon" means spiral or screw and "pteron" means wing. Get it? Orville Wright invented the word and predicted years ago that someone would invent the machine. An airplane—though it wouldn't be a "plane" at all and we'd have to call it a "flying machine" or something like that—which was able to rise into the air by means of "screw-wings" or devices like electric fans placed horizontally, could ascend from a space no bigger than the spread of its wings, and descend, if the machinery worked properly, in a similar space. Instead of a big landing field away out in the country, such machines could start out from a city roof or a suburban back yard. Both the British and the French governments, which pay much more attention to aviation than does ours, have offered prizes for helicopters capable of doing certain "stunts." The British specifications call for a machine that will rise 2,000 feet, carrying a pilot and fuel for an hour's flight; hover stationary in the air for half an hour, and fly horizontally at 60 miles an hour. Louis Brennan, the monorail inventor, claims to have built a machine covering these requirements. Pescara, an Argentine inventor, made a helicopter that would rise six feet carrying a passenger, and sold it to the French government.