O
n a grassy side-street of Oakland, California, was "Jones & Ericson's Garage: Gasoline and Repairs: Motor Cycles and Bicycles for Rent: Oakland Agents for Bristow Magnetos."
It was perhaps the cleverest garage in Oakland and Berkeley for the quick repairing of motor-cycles; and newly wed owners of family runabouts swore that Carl Ericson could make a carburetor out of a tomato-can, and even be agreeable when called on for repairs at 2a.m.He had doubled old Jones's business during the nine months—February to November, 1909—that they had been associated.
Carl believed that he thought of nothing but work and the restaurants and theaters of civilization. No more rolling for him until he had gathered moss! He played that he was a confirmed business man. The game had hypnotized him for nearly a year. He whistled as he cleaned plugs, and glanced out at the eucalyptus-trees and the sunny road, without wanting to run away. But just to-day, just this glorious rain-cleansed November day, with high blue skies and sunlight on the feathery pepper-trees, he was going to sneak away from work and have a celebration all by himself.
He was going down to San Mateo to see his first flying-machine!
November, 1909. Blériot had crossed the English Channel; McCurdy had, in March, 1909, calmly pegged off sixteen miles in the "Silver Dart" biplane; Paulhan had gone eighty-one miles, and had risen to the incredibleheight of five hundred feet, to be overshadowed by Orville Wright's sixteen hundred feet; Glenn Curtiss had won the Gordon Bennett cup at Rheims.
California was promising to be in the van of aviation. She was remembering that her own Montgomery had been one of the pioneers. Los Angeles was planning a giant meet for January. A dozen cow-pasture aviators were taking credulous young reporters aside and confiding that next day, or next week, or at latest next month, they would startle the world by ascending in machines "on entirely new and revolutionary principles, on which they had been working for ten years." Sometimes it was for eight years they had been working. But always they remarked that "the model from which the machine will be built has flown perfectly in the presence of some of the most prominent men in the locality." These machines had a great deal to do with the mysterious qualities of gyroscopes and helicopters.
Now, Dr. Josiah Bagby, the San Francisco physician and oil-burning-marine-engine magnate, had really brought three genuine Blériot monoplanes from France, with Carmeau, graduate of the Blériot school and licensed French aviator, for working pilot; and was experimenting with them at San Mateo, near San Francisco, where the grandsons of the Forty-niners play polo. It had been rumored that he would open a school for pilots and build Blériot-type monoplanes for the American market.
Carl had lain awake for an hour the night before, picturing the wonder of flight that he hoped to see. He rose early, put on his politest garments, and informed grumpy old Jones that he was off for a frolic—he wasn't sure, he said, whether he would get drunk or get married. He crossed the bay, glad of the sea-gulls, the glory of Mt. Tamalpais, and San Francisco's hill behind fairy hill. He consumed a Pacific sundæ, with a feeling of holiday, and hummed "Mandalay." On the trolley toSan Mateo he read over and over the newspaper accounts of Bagby's monoplanes.
Walking through San Mateo, Carl swung his cocky green hat and scanned the sky for aircraft. He saw none. But as he tramped out on the flying-field he began to run at the sight of two wide, cambered wings, rounded at the ends like the end of one's thumb, attached to a fragile long body of open framework. Men were gathered about it. A man with a short, crisp beard and a tight woolen toboggan-cap was seated in the body, the wings stretching on either side of him. He scratched his beard and gesticulated. A mechanic revolved the propeller, and the unmuffled motor burst out with a trrrrrrrr whose music rocked Carl's heart. Black smoke hurled back along the machine. The draught tore at the hair of two men crouched on the ground holding the tail. They let go. The monoplane ran forward along the ground, and suddenly was off it, a foot up, ten feet up—really flying. Carl could see the aviator calmly staring ahead, working his arms, as the machine turned and slipped away over distant trees.
His first impression of an aeroplane in the air had nothing to do with birds or dragon-flies or the miracle of it, because he was completely absorbed in an impression of Carl Ericson, which he expressed after this wise:
"I—am—going—to—be—an—aviator!"
And later, "Yes,that'swhat I've always wanted."
He joined the group in front of the hangar-tent. Workmen were hammering on wooden sheds back of it. He recognized the owner, Dr. Bagby, from his pictures: a lean man of sixty with a sallow complexion, a gray mustache like a rat-tail, a broad, black countrified slouch-hat on the back of his head, a gray sack-suit which would have been respectable but unfashionable at any period whatsoever. He looked like a country lawyer who had served two terms in the state legislature. His shoes were black, but not blackened, and had no toe-caps—thecomfortable shoes of an oldish man. He was tapping his teeth with a thin corded forefinger and remarking in a monotonous voice to a Mexican youth plump and polite and well dressed, "Wel-l-l-l, Tony, I guess those plugs were better; I guess those plugs were better. Heh?" Bagby turned to the others, marveled at them as if trying to remember who they were, and said, slowly, "I guess those plugs were all right. Heh?"
The monoplane was returning, for a time apparently not moving, like a black mark painted on the great blue sky; then soaring overhead, the sharply cut outlines clear as a pen-and-ink drawing; then landing, bouncing on the slightly uneven ground.
As the French aviator climbed out, Dr. Bagby's sad face brightened and he suggested: "Those plugs went better, Munseer. Heh? I've been thinking. Maybe you been giving her too rich a mixture."
While they were wiping the Gnôme engine Carl shyly approached Dr. Bagby. He felt frightfully an outsider; wondered if he could ever be intimate with the magician as was the plump Mexican youth they called "Tony." He said "Uh" once or twice, and blurted, "I want to be an aviator."
"Yes, yes," said Dr. Bagby, gently, glancing away from Carl to the machine. He went over, twanged a supporting-wire, and seemed to remember that some one had spoken to him. He returned to the fevered Carl, walking sidewise, staring all the while at the resting monoplane, so efficient, yet so quiet now and slender and feminine. "Yes, yes. So you'd like to be an aviator. So you'd like—like——(Hey, boy, don't touch that!)——to be an aviator. Yes, yes. They all would, m' boy. They all would. Well, maybe you can be, some day. Maybe you can be.... Some day."
"I mean now. Right away. Heard you were going t' start a school. Want to join."
"Hm, hm," sighed Dr. Bagby, tapping his teeth,jingling his heavy gold watch-chain, brushing a trail of cigar-ashes from a lapel, then staring abstractedly at Carl, who was turning his hat swiftly round and round, so flushed of cheek, so excited of eye, that he seemed twenty instead of twenty-four. "Yes, yes, so you'd like to join. Tst. But that would cost you five hundred dollars, you know."
"Right!"
"Well, you go talk to Munseer about it; Munseer Carmeau. He is a very good aviator. He is a licensed aviator. He knows Henry Farman. He studied under Blériot. He is the boss here. I'm just the poor old fellow that stands around. Sometimes Munseer takes me up for a little ride in our machine; sometimes he takes me up; but he is the boss. He is the boss, my friend; you'll have to see him." And Dr. Bagby walked away, apparently much discouraged about life.
Carl was not discouraged about life. He swore that now he would be an aviator even if he had to go to Dayton or Hammondsport or France.
He returned to Oakland. He sold his share in the garage for $1,150.
Before the end of January he was enrolled as a student in the Bagby School of Aviation and Monoplane Building.
On an impulse he wrote of his wondrous happiness to Gertie Cowles, but he tore up the letter. Then proudly he wrote to his father that the lost boy had found himself. For the first time in all his desultory writing of home-letters he did not feel impelled to defend himself.
C
rude were the surroundings where Carmeau turned out some of the best monoplane pilots America will ever see. There were two rude shed-hangars in which they kept the three imported Blériots—a single-seat racer of the latest type, a Blériot XII. passenger-carrying machine with the seat under the plane, and "P'tite Marie," the school machine, which they usually kept throttled down to four hundred or five hundred, but in which Carmeau made such spirited flights as the one Carl had first witnessed. Back of the hangars was the workshop, which had little architecture, but much machinery. Here the pupils were building two Blériot-type machines, and trying to build an eight-cylinder V motor. All these things had Bagby given for the good of the game, expecting no profit in return. He was one of the real martyrs of aviation, this sapless, oldish man, never knowing the joy of the air, yet devoting a lifetime of ability to helping man sprout wings and become superman.
His generosity did not extend to living-quarters. Most of the students lived at the hangars and dined on Hamburg sandwiches, fried eggs, and Mexicanenchiladas, served at a lunch-wagon anchored near the field. That lunch-wagon was their club. Here, squatted on high stools, treating one another to ginger-ale, they argued over torque and angles of incidence and monoplanesvs.biplanes. Except for two unpopular aristocrats who found boarding-houses in San Mateo, they slept in the hangars, in their overalls, sprawled on mattresses covered with horse-blankets. It was bed at eight-thirty. At four or five Carmeau would crawl out, scratch his beard, starta motor, and set every neighborhood dog howling. The students would gloomily clump over to the lunch-wagon for a ham-and-egg breakfast. The first flights began at dawn, if the day was clear. At eight, when the wind was coming up, they would be heard in the workshop, adjusting and readjusting, machining down bearings, testing wing strength, humming and laughing and busy; a life of gasoline and hammers and straining attempts to get balance exactly right; a happy life of good fellows and the achievements of machinery and preparation for daring the upper air; a life of very ordinary mechanics and of sheer romance!
It is a grievous heresy that aviation is most romantic when the aviator is portrayed as a young god of noble rank and a collar high and spotless, carelessly driving a transatlantic machine of perfect efficiency. The real romance is that a perfectly ordinary young man, the sort of young man who cleans your car at the garage, a prosaically real young man wearing overalls faded to a thin blue, splitting his infinitives, and frequently having for idol a bouncing ingénue, should, in a rickety structure of wood and percale, be able to soar miles in the air and fulfil the dream of all the creeping ages.
In English and American fiction there are now nearly as many aeroplanes as rapiers or roses. The fictional aviators are society amateurs, wearers of evening clothes, frequenters of The Club, journalists and civil engineers and lordlings and international agents and gentlemen detectives, who drawl, "Oh yes, I fly a bit—new sensation, y' know—tired of polo"; and immediately thereafter use the aeroplane to raid arsenals, rescue a maiden from robbers or a large ruby from its lawful but heathenish possessors, or prevent a Zeppelin from raiding the coast. But they never by any chance fly these machines before gum-chewing thousands for hire. In England they absolutely must motor from The Club to the flying-field in a "powerful Rolls-Royce car." The British aviators of fictionare usually from Oxford and Eton. They are splendidly languid and modest and smartly dressed in society, but when they condescend to an adventure or to a coincidence, they are very devils, six feet of steel and sinew, boys of the bulldog breed with a strong trace of humming-bird. Like their English kindred, the Americans take up aviation only for gentlemanly sport. And they do go about rescuing things. Nothing is safe from their rescuing. But they do not have Rolls-Royce cars.
Carl and his class at Bagby's were not of this gilded race. Carl's flying was as sordidly real as laying brick for a one-story laundry in a mill-town. Therefore, being real, it was romantic and miraculous.
Among Carl's class was Hank Odell, the senior student, tall, thin, hopelessly plain of face; a drawling, rough-haired, eagle-nosed Yankee, who grinned shyly and whose Adam's apple worked slowly up and down when you spoke to him; an unimaginative lover of dogs and machinery; the descendant of Lexington and Gettysburg and a flinty Vermont farm; an ex-fireman, ex-sergeant of the army, and ex-teamster. He always wore a khaki shirt—the wrinkles of which caught the grease in black lines, like veins—with black trousers, blunt-toed shoes, and a pipe, the most important part of his costume.
There was the round, anxious, polite Mexican, Tony Beanno, called "Tony Bean"—wealthy, simple, fond of the violin and of fast motoring. There was the "school grouch," surly Jack Ryan, the chunky ex-chauffeur. There were seven nondescripts—a clever Jew from Seattle, two college youngsters, an apricot-rancher's son, a circus acrobat who wanted a new line of tricks, a dull ensign detailed by the navy, and an earnest student of aerodynamics, aged forty, who had written marvelously dull books on air-currents and had shrinkingly made himself a fair balloon pilot. The navy ensign and the student were the snobs who lived away from the hangars, in boarding-houses.
There was Lieutenant Forrest Haviland, detailed by the army—Haviland the perfect gentle knight, the well-beloved, the nearest approach to the gracious fiction aviator of them all, yet never drawling in affected modesty, never afraid of grease; smiling and industrious and reticent; smooth of hair and cameo of face; wearing khaki riding-breeches and tan puttees instead of overalls; always a gentleman, even when he tried to appear a workman. He pretended to be enthusiastic about the lunch-wagon, and never referred to his three generations of army officers. But most of the others were shy of him, and Jack Ryan, the "school grouch," was always trying to get him into a fight.
Finally, there was Carl Ericson, who slowly emerged as star of them all. He knew less of aerodynamics than the timid specialist, less of practical mechanics than Hank Odell; but he loved the fun of daring more. He was less ferocious in competition than was Jack Ryan, but he wasted less of his nerve. He was less agile than the circus acrobat, but knew more of motors. He was less compactly easy than Lieutenant Haviland, but he took better to overalls and sleeping in hangars and mucking in grease—he whistled ragtime while Forrest Haviland hummed MacDowell.
Carl's earliest flights were in the school machine, "P'tite Marie," behind Carmeau, the instructor. Reporters were always about, talking of "impressions," and Carl felt that he ought to note his impressions on his first ascent, but all that he actually did notice was that it was hard to tell at what instant they left the ground; that when they were up, the wind threatened to crush his ribs and burst his nostrils; that there must be something perilously wrong, because the machine climbed so swiftly; and, when they were down, that it had been worth waiting a whole lifetime for the flight.
For days he merely flew with the instructor, till he washimself managing the controls. At last, his first flight by himself.
He had been ordered to try a flight three times about the aerodrome at a height of sixty feet, and to land carefully, without pancaking—"and be sure, Monsieur, be veree sure you do not cut off too high from the ground," said Carmeau.
It was a day when five reporters had gathered, and Carl felt very much in the limelight, waiting in the nacelle of the machine for the time to start. The propeller was revolved, Carl drew a long breath and stuck up his hand—and the engine stopped. He was relieved. It had seemed a terrific responsibility to go up alone. He wouldn't, now, not for a minute or two. He knew that he had been afraid. The engine was turned over once more—and once more stopped. Carl raged, and never again, in all his flying, did real fear return to him. "What the deuce is the matter?" he snarled. Again the propeller was revolved, and this time the engine hummed sweet. The monoplane ran along the ground, its tail lifting in the blast, till the whole machine seemed delicately poised on its tiptoes. He was off the ground, his rage leaving him as his fear had left him.
He exulted at the swiftness with which a distant group of trees shot at him, under him. He turned, and the machine mounted a little on the turn, which was against the rules. But he brought her to even keel so easily that he felt all the mastery of the man who has finally learned to be natural on a bicycle. He tilted up the elevator slightly and shot across a series of fields, climbing. It was perfectly easy. He would go up—up. It was all automatic now—cloche toward him for climbing; away from him for descent; toward the wing that tipped up, in order to bring it down to level. The machine obeyed perfectly. And the foot-bar, for steering to right and left, responded to such light motions of his foot. He grinned exultantly. He wanted to shout.
He glanced at the barometer and discovered that he was up to two hundred feet. Why not go on?
He sailed out across San Mateo, and the sense of people below, running and waving their hands, increased his exultation. He curved about at the end, somewhat afraid of his ability to turn, but having all the air there was to make the turn in, and headed back toward the aerodrome. Already he had flown five miles.
Half a mile from the aerodrome he realized that his motor was slackening, missing fire; that he did not know what was the matter; that his knowledge had left him stranded there, two hundred feet above ground; that he had to come down at once, with no chance to choose a landing-place and no experience in gliding. The motor stopped altogether.
The ground was coming up at him too quickly.
He tilted the elevator, and rose. But, as he was volplaning, this cut down the speed, and from a height of ten feet above a field the machine dropped to the ground with a flat plop. Something gave way—but Carl sat safe, with the machine canted to one side.
He climbed out, cold about the spine, and discovered that he had broken one wheel of the landing-chassis.
All the crowd from the flying-field were running toward him, yelling. He grinned at the foolish sight they made with their legs and arms strewn about in the air as they galloped over the rough ground. Lieutenant Haviland came up, panting: "All right, o' man? Good!" He seized Carl's hand and wrung it. Carl knew that he had a new friend.
Three reporters poured questions on him. How far had he flown? Was this really his first ascent by himself? What were his sensations? How had his motor stopped? Was it true he was a mining engineer, a wealthy motorist?
Hank Odell, the shy, eagle-nosed Yankee, running up as jerkily as a cow in a plowed field, silently patted Carlon the shoulder and began to examine the fractured landing-wheel. At last the instructor, M. Carmeau.
Carl had awaited M. Carmeau's praise as the crown of his long flight. But Carmeau pulled his beard, opened his mouth once or twice, then shrieked: "What the davil you t'ink you are? A millionaire that we build machines for you to smash them? I tole you to fly t'ree time around—you fly to Algiers an' back—you t'ink you are another Farman brother—you are a damn fool! Suppose your motor he stop while you fly over San Mateo? Where you land? In a well? In a chimney?Hein?You know naut'ing yet. Next time you do what I tal' you.Zut!That was a flight, a flight, you make a flight, that was fine, fine, you make the heart to swell. But nex' time you break the chassis and keel yourself,nom d'un tonnerre, I scol' you!"
Carl was humble. But theCourierreporter spread upon the front page the story of "Marvelous first flight by Bagby student," and predicted that a new Curtiss was coming out of California. Under a half-tone ran the caption, "Ericson, the New Hawk of the Birdmen."
The camp promptly nicknamed him "Hawk." They used it for plaguing him at first, but it survived as an expression of fondness—Hawk Ericson, the cheeriest man in the school, and the coolest flier.
N
ot all their days were spent in work. There were mornings when the wind would not permit an ascent and when there was nothing to do in the workshop. They sat about the lunch-wagon wrangling endlessly, or, like Carl and Forrest Haviland, wandered through fields which were all one flame with poppies.
Lieutenant Haviland had given up trying to feel comfortable with the naval ensign student, who was one of the solemn worthies who clear their throats before speaking, and then speak in measured terms of brands of cigars and weather. Gradually, working side by side with Carl, Haviland seemed to find him a friend in whom to confide. Once or twice they went by trolley to San Francisco, to explore Chinatown or drop in on soldier friends of Haviland at the Presidio.
From the porch of a studio on Telegraph Hill, in San Francisco, they were looking down on the islands of the bay, waiting for the return of an artist whom Haviland knew. Inarticulate dreamers both, they expressed in monosyllables the glory of bluewater before them, the tradition of R. L. S. and Frank Norris, the future of aviation. They gave up the attempt to explain the magic of San Francisco—that city-personality which transcends the opal hills and rare amber sunlight, festivals, and the transplanted Italian hill-town of Telegraph Hill, liners sailing out for Japan, and memories of the Forty-niners. It was too subtle a spirit, too much of it lay in human life with the passion of the Riviera linked to the strengthof the North, for them to be able to comprehend its spell.... But regarding their own ambitions to do, they became eloquent.
"I say," hesitated Haviland, "why is it I can't get in with most of the fellows at the camp the way you can? I've always been chummy enough with the fellows at the Point and at posts."
"Because you've been brought up to be afraid to be anything but a gentleman."
"Oh, I don't think it's that. I can get fond as the deuce of some of the commonest common soldiers—and, Lord! some of them come from the Bowery and all sorts of impossible places."
"Yes, but you always think of them as 'common.' They don't think of each other that way. Suppose I'd worked——Well, just suppose I'd been a Bowery bartender. Could you be loafing around here with me? Could you go off on a bat with Jack Ryan?"
"Well, maybe not. Maybe working with Jack Ryan is a good thing for me. I'm getting now so I can almost stand his stories! I envy you, knocking around with all sorts of people. Oh, IwishI could call Ryan 'Jack' and feel easy about it. I can't. Perhaps I've got a little of the subaltern snob some place in me."
"You? You're a prince."
"If you've elevated me to a princedom, the least I can do is to invite you down home for a week-end—down to the San Spirito Presidio. My father's commandant there."
"Oh, I'd like to, but——I haven't got a dress-suit."
"Buy one."
"Yes, I could do that, but——Oh, rats! Forrest, I've been knocking around so long I feel shy about my table manners and everything. I'd probably eat pie with my fingers."
"You make me so darn tired, Hawk. You talk about my having to learn to chum with people in overalls. You've got to learn not to let people in evening clothesput anything over on you. That's your difficulty from having lived in the back-country these last two or three years. You have an instinct for manners. But I did notice that as soon as you found out I was in the army you spent half the time disliking me as a militarist, and the other half expecting me to be haughty—Lord knows what over. It took you two weeks to think of me as Forrest Haviland. I'm ashamed of you! If you're a socialist you ought to think that anything you like belongs to you."
"That's a new kind of socialism."
"So much the better. Me and Karl Marx, the economic inventors.... But I was saying: if you act as though things belong to you people will apologize to you for having borrowed them from you. And you'vegotto do that, Hawk. You're going to be one of the best-known fliers in the country, and you'll have to meet all sorts of big guns—generals and Senators and female climbers that work the peace societies for social position, and so on, and you've got to know how to meet them.... Anyway, I want you to come to San Spirito."
To San Spirito they went. During the three days preceding, Carl was agonized at the thought of having to be polite in the presence of ladies. No matter how brusquely he told himself, "I'm as good as anybody," he was uneasy about forks and slang and finger-nails, and looked forward to the ordeal with as much pleasure as a man about to be hanged, hanged in a good cause, but thoroughly.
Yet when Colonel Haviland met them at San Spirito station, and Carl heard the kindly salutation of the gracious, fat, old Indian-fighter, he knew that he had at last come home to his own people—an impression that was the stronger because the house of Oscar Ericson had been so much house and so little home. The colonel was a widower, and for his only son he showed a proud affection which included Carl. The three of them sat in state, after dinner, on the porch of Quarters No. 1, smokingcigars and looking down to a spur of the Santa Lucia Mountains, where it plunged into the foam of the Pacific. They talked of aviation and eugenics and the Benét-Mercier gun, of the post doctor's sister who had come from the East on a visit, and of a riding-test, but their hearts spoke of affection.... Usually it is a man and a woman that make home; but three men, a stranger one of them, talking of motors on a porch in the enveloping dusk, made for one another a home to remember always.
They stayed over Monday night, for a hop, and Carl found that the officers and their wives were as approachable as Hank Odell. They did not seem to be waiting for young Ericson to make social errors. When he confessed that he had forgotten what little dancing he knew, the sister of the post doctor took him in hand, retaught him the waltz, and asked with patent admiration: "How does it feel to fly? Don't you get frightened? I'm terribly in awe of you and Mr. Haviland. I know I should be frightened to death, because it always makes me dizzy just to look down from a high building."
Carl slipped away, to be happy by himself, and hid in the shadow of palms on the porch, lapped in the flutter of pepper-trees. The orchestra began a waltz that set his heart singing. He heard a girl cry: "Oh, goody! the 'Blue Danube'! We must go in and dance that."
"The Blue Danube." The name brought back the novels of General Charles King, as he had read them in high-school days; flashed the picture of a lonely post, yellow-lighted, like a topaz on the night-swathed desert; a rude ball-room, a young officer dancing to the "Blue Danube's" intoxication; a hot-riding, dusty courier, hurling in with news of an Apache outbreak; a few minutes later a troop of cavalry slanting out through the gate on horseback, with a farewell burning the young officer's lips.... He was in just such an army story, now!
The scent of royal climbing-roses enveloped Carl as that picture changed into others. San Spirito Presidio becamea vast military encampment over which Hawk Ericson was flying.... From his monoplane he saw a fairy town, with red roofs rising to a tower of fantastic turrets. (That was doubtless the memory of a magazine-cover painted by Maxfield Parrish.)... He was wandering through a poppy-field with a girl dusky of eyes, soft black of hair, ready for any jaunt.... Pictures bright and various as tropic shells, born of music and peace and his affection for the Havilands; pictures which promised him the world. For the first time Hawk Ericson realized that he might be a Personage instead of a back-yard boy.... The girl with twilight eyes was smiling.
The Bagby camp broke up on the first of May, with all of them, except one of the nondescript collegians and the air-current student, more or less trained aviators. Carl was going out to tour small cities, for the George Flying Corporation. Lieutenant Haviland was detailed to the army flying-camp.
Parting with Haviland and kindly Hank Odell, with Carmeau and anxiously polite Tony Bean, was as wistful as the last night of senior year. Till the old moon rose, sad behind tulip-trees, they sat on packing-boxes by the larger hangar, singing in close harmony "Sweet Adeline," "Teasing," "I've Been Working on the Railroad."... "Hay-ride classics, with barber-shop chords," the songs are called, but tears were in Carl's eyes as the minors sobbed from the group of comrades who made fun of one another and were prosaic and pounded their heels on the packing-boxes—and knew that they were parting to face death. Carl felt Forrest Haviland's hand on one shoulder, then an awkward pat from tough Jack Ryan's paw, as Tony Bean's violin turned the plaintive half-light into music, and broke its heart in the "Moonlight Sonata."
"Y
uh, piston-ring burnt off and put the exhaust-valve on the blink. That means one cylinder out of business," growled Hawk Ericson. "I could fly, maybe, but I don't like to risk it in this wind. It was bad enough this morning when I tried it."
"Oh, this hick town 's going to be the death of us, all right—and Riverport to-morrow, with a contract nice as pie, if we can only get there," groaned his manager, Dick George, a fat man with much muscle and more diamonds. "Listen to that crowd. Yelling for blood. Sounds like a bunch of lumber-jacks with the circus slow in starting."
The head-line feature of the Onamwaska County spring fair was "Hawk Ericson, showing the most marvelous aerial feats of the ages with the scientific marvels of aviation, in his famous French Blériot flying-machine, the first flying-machine ever seen in this state, no balloon or fake, come to Onamwaska by the St. L. & N." The spring fair was usually a small gathering of farmers to witness races and new agricultural implements, but this time every road for thirty-five miles was dust-fogged with buggies and democrat wagons and small motor-cars. Ten thousand people were packed about the race-track.
It was Carl's third aviation event. A neat, though not imposing figure, in a snug blue flannel suit, with his cap turned round on his head, he went to the flap of the rickety tent which served as his hangar. A fierce cry of "Fly! Fly! Why don't he fly?" was coming from the long black lines edging the track, and from the mound of people on the small grand stand; the pink blur of theirfaces turned toward him—him, Carl Ericson; all of them demandinghim! The five meek police of Onamwaska were trotting back and forth, keeping them behind the barriers. Carl was apprehensive lest this ten-thousandfold demand drag him out, make him fly, despite a wind that was blowing the flags out straight, and whisking up the litter of newspapers and cracker-jack boxes and pink programs. While he stared out, an official crossing the track fairly leaned up against the wind, which seized his hat and sailed it to the end of the track.
"Some wind!" Carl grunted, stolidly, and went to the back of the silent tent, to reread the local papers' accounts of his arrival at Onamwaska. It was a picturesque narrative of the cheering mob following him down the street ("Gee! that wasmethey followed!"), crowding into the office of the Astor House and making him autograph hundreds of cards; of girls throwing roses ("Humph! geraniums is more like it!") from the windows.
"A young man," wrote an enthusiastic female reporter, "handsome as a Greek god, but honestly I believe he is still in his twenties; and he is as slim and straight as a soldier, flaxen-haired and rosy-cheeked—the birdman, the god of the air."
"Handsome as a Greek——" Carl commented. "I look like a Minnesota Norwegian, and that ain't so bad, but handsome——Urrrrrg!... Sure they love me, all right. Hear 'em yell. Oh, they love me like a dog does a bone.... Saint Jemima! talk about football rooting.... Come on, Greek god, buck up."
He glanced wearily about the tent, its flooring of long, dry grass stained with ugly dark-blue lubricating-oil, under the tan light coming through the canvas. His manager was sitting on a suit-case, pretending to read a newspaper, but pinching his lower lip and consulting his watch, jogging his foot ceaselessly. Their temporary mechanic, who had given up trying to repair the lame valve, squatted with bent head, biting his lip, harkeningto the blood-hungry mob. Carl's own nerves grew tauter and tauter as he saw the manager's restless foot and the mechanic's tension. He strolled to the monoplane, his back to the tent-opening.
He started as the manager exclaimed: "Here they come! After us!"
Outside the tent a sound of running.
The secretary of the fair, a German hardware-dealer with an automobile-cap like a yachting-cap, panted in, gasping: "Come quick! They won't wait any longer! I been trying to calm 'em down, but they say you got to fly. They're breaking over the barriers into the track. The p'lice can't keep 'em back."
Behind the secretary came the chairman of the entertainment committee, a popular dairyman, who was pale as he demanded: "You got to play ball, Mr. Ericson. I won't guarantee what 'll happen if you don't play ball, Mr. Ericson. You got to make him fly, Mr. George. The crowd 's breaking——"
Behind him charged a black press of people. They packed before the tent, trying to peer in through the half-closed tent-opening, like a crowd about a house where a policeman is making an arrest. Furiously:
"Where's the coward? Fake! Bring 'im out! Why don't he fly? He's a fake! His flying-machine's never been off the ground! He's a four-flusher! Run 'im out of town! Fake! Fake! Fake!"
The secretary and chairman stuck out deprecatory heads and coaxed the mob. Carl's manager was an old circus-man. He had removed his collar, tie, and flashy diamond pin, and was diligently wrapping the thong of a black-jack about his wrist. Their mechanic was crawling under the side of the tent. Carl caught him by the seat of his overalls and jerked him back.
As Carl turned to face the tent door again the manager ranged up beside him, trying to conceal the black-jack in his hand, and casually murmuring, "Scared, Hawk?"
"Nope. Too mad to be scared."
The tent-flap was pulled back. Tossing hands came through. The secretary and chairman were brushed aside. The mob-leader, a red-faced, loud-voiced town sport, very drunk, shouted, "Come out and fly or we'll tar and feather you!"
"Yuh, come on, you fake, you four-flusher!" echoed the voices.
The secretary and chairman were edging back into the tent, beside Carl's cowering mechanic.
Something broke in Carl's hold on himself. With his arm drawn back, his fist aimed at the point of the mob-leader's jaw, he snarled: "You can't make me fly. You stick that ugly mug of yours any farther in and I'll bust it. I'll fly when the wind goes down——You would, would you?"
As the mob-leader started to advance, Carl jabbed at him. It was not a very good jab. But the leader stopped. The manager, black-jack in hand, caught Carl's arm, and ordered: "Don't start anything! They can lick us. Just look ready. Don't say anything. We'll hold 'em till the cops come. But nix on the punch."
"Right, Cap'n," said Carl.
It was a strain to stand motionless, facing the crowd, not answering their taunts, but he held himself in, and in two minutes the yell came: "Cheese it! The cops!" The mob unwillingly swayed back as Onamwaska's heroic little band of five policemen wriggled through it, requesting their neighbors to desist.... They entered the tent and, after accepting cigars from Carl's manager, coldly told him that Carl was a fake, and lucky to escape; that Carl would better "jump right out and fly if he knew what was good for him." Also, they nearly arrested the manager for possessing a black-jack, and warned him that he'd better not assault any of the peaceable citizens of beautiful Onamwaska....
When they had coaxed the mob behind the barriers, byannouncing that Ericson would now go up, Carl swore: "I won't move! They can't make me!"
The secretary of the fair, who had regained most of his courage, spoke up, pertly, "Then you better return the five hundred advance, pretty quick sudden, or I'll get an attachment on your fake flying-machine!"
"You go——Nix, nix, Hawk, don't hit him; he ain't worth it. You go to hell, brother," said the manager, mechanically. But he took Carl aside, and groaned: "Gosh! we got to do something! It's worth two thousand dollars to us, you know. Besides, we haven't got enough cash in our jeans to get out of town, and we'll miss the big Riverport purse.... Still, suit yourself, old man. Maybe I can get some money by wiring to Chicago."
"Oh, let's get it over!" Carl sighed. "I'd love to disappoint Onamwaska. We'll make fifteen thousand dollars this month and next, anyway, and we can afford to spit 'em in the eye. But I don't want to leave you in a hole.... Here you, mechanic, open up that tent-flap. All the way across.... No, not likethat, you boob!... So.... Come on, now, help me push out the machine. Here you, Mr. Secretary, hustle me a couple of men to hold her tail."
The crowd rose, the fickle crowd, scenting the promised blood, and applauded as the monoplane was wheeled upon the track and turned to face the wind. The mechanic and two assistants had to hold it as a dust-filled gust caught it beneath the wings. As Carl climbed into the seat and the mechanic went forward to start the engine, another squall hit the machine and she almost turned over sidewise.
As the machine righted, the manager ran up and begged: "You never in the world can make it in this wind, Hawk. Better not try it. I'll wire for some money to get out of town with, and Onamwaska can go soak its head."
"Nope. I'm gettin' sore now, Dick.... Hey you,mechanic: hurt that wing when she tipped?... All right. Start her. Quick. While it's calm."
The engine whirred. The assistants let go the tail. The machine labored forward, but once it left the ground it shot up quickly. The head-wind came in a terrific gust. The machine hung poised in air for a moment, driven back by the gale nearly as fast as it was urged forward by its frantically revolving propeller.
Carl was as yet too doubtful of his skill to try to climb above the worst of the wind. If he could only keep a level course——
He fought his way up one side of the race-track. He crouched in his seat, meeting the sandy blast with bent head. The parted lips which permitted him to catch his breath were stubborn and hard about his teeth. His hands played swiftly, incessantly, over the control as he brought her back to even keel. He warped the wings so quickly that he balanced like an acrobat sitting rockingly on a tight-wire. He was too busy to be afraid or to remember that there was a throng of people below him. But he was conscious that the grand stand, at the side of the track, half-way down, was creeping toward him.
More every instant did he hate the clamor of the gale and the stream of minute drops of oil, blown back from the engine, that spattered his face. His ears strained for misfire of the engine, if it stopped he would be hurled to earth. And one cylinder was not working. He forgot that; kept the cloche moving; fought the wind with his will as with his body.
Now, he was aware of the grand stand below him. Now, of the people at the end of the track. He flew beyond the track, and turned. The whole force of the gale was thrown behind him, and he shot back along the other side of the race-track at eighty or ninety miles an hour. Instantly he was at the end; then a quarter of a mile beyond the track, over plowed fields, where upwardcurrents of warm air increased the pitching of the machine as he struggled to turn her again and face the wind.
The following breeze was suddenly retarded and he dropped forty feet, tail down.
He was only forty feet from the ground, falling straight, when he got back to even keel and shot ahead. How safe the nest of the nacelle where he sat seemed then! Almost gaily he swung her in a great wavering circle—and the wind was again in his face, hating him, pounding him, trying to get under the wings and turn the machine turtle.
Twice more he worked his way about the track. The conscience of the beginner made him perform a diffident Dutch roll before the grand stand, but he was growling, "And that's all they're going to get. See?"
As he soared to earth he looked at the crowd for the first time. His vision was so blurred with oil and wind-soreness that he saw the people only as a mass and he fancied that the stretch of slouch-hats and derbies was a field of mushrooms swaying and tilted back. He was curiously unconscious of the presence of women; he felt all the spectators as men who had bawled for his death and whom he wanted to hammer as he had hammered the wind.
He was almost down. He cut off his motor, glided horizontally three feet above the ground, and landed, while the cheers cloaked even the honking of the parked automobiles.
Carl's manager, fatly galloping up, shrilled, "How was it, old man?"
"Oh, it was pretty windy," said Carl, crawling down and rubbing the kinks out of his arms. "But I think the wind 's going down. Tell the announcer to tell our dear neighbors that I'll fly again at five."
"But weren't you scared when she dropped? You went down so far that the fence plumb hid you. Couldn't see you at all. Ugh! Sure thought the wind had you. Weren't you scared then? You don't look it."
"Then? Oh! Then. Oh yes, sure, I guess I was scared, all right!... Say, we got that seat padded so she's darn comfortable now."
The crowd was collecting. Carl's manager chuckled to the president of the fair association, "Well, that was some flight, eh?"
"Oh, he went down the opposite side of the track pretty fast, but why the dickens was he so slow going up my side? My eyes ain't so good now that it does me any good if a fellow speeds up when he's a thousand miles away. And where's all these tricks in the air——"
"That," murmured Carl to his manager, "is the i-den-ti-cal man that stole the blind cripple's crutch to make himself a toothpick."