Fiction would give to the venture a hairbreadth escape or two and many
insurmountable obstacles which would, of course, be triumphantly
surmounted by the hero. But fact will have it otherwise, and the
chronicler of events must not be blamed if the hegira of John Ivan
Jewel lacked excitement.
The Thunder Bird flew high, with a steady air current behind which gave
the plane more speed than Johnny had hoped for, and brought them close
to Yuma before the gas gauge began to worry him. They descended
cautiously, circled over the town like a wild duck over a pond,
choosing their landing. They alighted without mishap and Johnny hired
a decent-looking Mexican to watch the plane and protect it from curious
meddlers while he and Bland went into town and ate their fill, and
bought gas and oil to be delivered immediately. Before the town had
fairly awakened to the fact that an airplane had descended in its
immediate vicinity, they were off again, climbing once more to the high
air lanes that made smoother going.
The motor worked smoothly, the hand of the tachometer wavering around
twelve hundred, and the altometer registering nine thousand feet, save
when they dipped and lifted to the uneven currents over the mountains.
The Thunder Bird seemed alive, glorying in her native element. The
earth slid away like a map unrolled endlessly beneath them. Desert and
little towns on the railroad like broken beads strung loosely on a taut
wire. Salton Sea was cool and tempting, though the air shimmered all
around it with heat. They flew the full length of it and on up the
valley. Then they climbed higher and so breasted the currents flowing
over the San Jacintos. And over a little town set in level country
they wheeled, descending and searching for a field. Again they landed
and filled their gas tank and went on. Always it was the distance
ahead that called them. Always they grudged the minutes lost, as
though they were racing against time and the stakes were high.
After the last stop, exaltation seized Johnny and lifted him high above
the sordid things of earth. Trouble dropped away from him; rather, it
was left behind as he flew toward the sunset, He lost the sense of
weight that clogs the bodies of human creatures plodding over the
earth's uneven surface and became as an eagle, soaring high on wings
that never tired. Never before had he remained so long in flight,
wherefore he had never attained so completely that birdlike feeling of
mastery in the air. Falling seemed impossible; as easily could his
senses have visualized falling through the earth in the old days of
crawling. There was no earth. There was only a sliding relief map far
below to guide him in his triumphant flight. Tucson, the Rolling
R--they were clouds that hovered far back on the horizon of his mind.
Mary V was a dim vision that came and went but never quite took
definite form. The roar of the motor he had long ceased to hear.
Godlike he floated with wings outspread, straight into the sunset.
The sliding map below took on strange, beautiful colors of purple and
gold and rose, with sometimes a wonderful blending of all. Before him
the sky was a gorgeous, piled radiance. The earth colors changed,
softened, deepened to a mysterious shadowy expanse, with here and there
a brightness where the sun touched a hilltop.
"We better drop a little," Bland shouted. "I gotta keep my bearings!"
Swiftly the vague outlines sharpened. Groves and groves and groves
appeared beneath them. And small islands of twinkling stars, set in
patterns and squares, with here and there a splotch of brightness. And
single stars that had somehow strayed and lay twinkling, lost in the
great squares of dark green.
"We gotta make it before dark," Bland yelled. "I been away a year. I
need daylight--"
They gave her more gas, and Johnny became conscious of the motor's
voice. Eighty miles she was doing now, on a gentle incline that lifted
the earth a little nearer. The glory before them was deepening to ruby
red that glowed and darkened. Beneath the heaped radiance lay a sea of
stars--and beyond, a smooth floor of polished purple.
"There's Los Angeles--and over beyond is the ocean!" called Bland,
turning his head a little.
Johnny sucked in his breath and nodded, forgetting that Bland could not
see the motion.
"Gimme the control--I gotta pick out a landing! I'll head for
Inglewood. They's a big field--"
Inglewood meant nothing at all to Johnny, even had he heard the name
distinctly, which he did not. It cost him an effort to yield the
control, but he pulled hands and feet away and sat passive, breathing
quickly, gazing down at the wonders spread beneath him. For this was
his first amazed sight of Los Angeles, though he had twice passed
through the city in a train that clung to dingy streets and left him an
impression of grime and lumbering trucks and clanging street cars and
more grime, and Chinese signs painted on shacks, and slinking figures.
But this was a magic city spread beneath him. It glowed and twinkled
behind the thin veil of dusk. There seemed no end to the lights which
overflowed the lower slopes of the cupped hills at their right and
hesitated on the very brink of the purpling ocean before them.
Bland shut off the motor and they glided, the plane silent as a great
bat. The city disclosed houses, and streets down which lighted cars
seemed to be standing still, so much greater was the speed of the
Thunder Bird. They passed the thickest sprinkle of lights and headed
for dark slopes midway between the indrawing hills. Many pairs of
bright lights crawled along a narrow black pathway. Now the ocean was
nearer, so that Johnny could see a fringe of white along its edge where
waves lapped up to the lights.
They swooped, flattened out, and glided again while Bland picked up
certain landmarks. The motor spoke, its voice increased while they
banked in a circle and swooped again. Now a long bare stretch lay just
ahead. The motor stopped, and they volplaned steeply; flattened,
dipped a little, skimmed close to earth, touched, lifted again.
"F'r cat's sake, what they went and done to this field?" Bland's
whining voice complained, and he swung the Thunder Bird away from a
long windrow of dried vines, just in time to avoid entangling the
wheels. They settled, ran along uneven surface for a space. A small
loose pile lay just ahead, and Bland veered sharply away. Another pile
to the left caught the wheels just as the tail was settling. The
Thunder Bird jerked, staggered drunkenly, wheeled over the pile and
then, with a gentle determination quite unexpected in so docile a bird,
turned itself up on its nose and with a splintering crash of the
propeller tilted on over until it lay flat on its back. Which was a
silly ending to so glorious a flight.
Johnny, hanging upside down with the strap strained tight across his
loins, with Bland dangling before him, felt even sillier than the
Thunder Bird looked. He freed himself after the first paralyzing shock
of surprise, dropped on all fours upon the upper wing covering, and
crawled out between the front braces. A minute later Bland followed,
looking extremely foolish.
"That's a hell of a way to land!" Johnny snorted. "What kinda pilot
are you, for gosh sake?"
"Aw, how was I to know they'd went and planted this field to beans? I
been away a year, almost. It was a good field when I was here before.
Come on and let's turn her back, bo, before all the cylinders is full
of oil." Then Bland added with a surprising optimism in one so given
to complaining, "We're here, and we ain't hurt, and Los Angeles is just
back there a ways. I'm satisfied."
"Yes, and we shelled the beans--that's something more," Johnny
sarcastically added to the sum of their blessings.
With some labor they turned the Thunder Bird right side up. It was too
dark to estimate the damage, and Bland suggested that they catch a
street car and ride into town. He did not inform Johnny then how far
they must walk before they would be within catching distance, and
Johnny started off willingly enough, after Bland had convinced him that
the Thunder Bird would be perfectly safe until morning. It was a quiet
neighborhood, he declared, and no one would be likely to come near the
place. If they did, they could not fly off with the Thunder Bird
unless they happened to be carrying an extra propeller around with
them. This, Johnny suspected, was Bland's best attempt at irony.
They walked and they walked, at first along a rough country road that
seemed real boulevard to Johnny, who was accustomed to the trails of
Arizona. Later they emerged upon asphalt, and trudged along the edge
of that for a time, moving aside as swift bars of light bathed them
briefly, with the swish of speeding automobiles brushing close.
Johnny's head was roaring with the remembered beat of the Thunder
Bird's motor. In the silence between automobiles it deafened him so
that Bland's drawling voice came to him dully, the words muffled.
"We'll have to get us a car," Bland repeated three times before Johnny
understood.
"Oh. I thought you meant we're getting close to a car," Johnny
grumbled. "How much farther we got to walk, for gosh sake?"
"About a mile now, bo. It's only--"
"A mile! Good golly! I thought we was flying to Los Angeles! You
never said we had to walk half the way from Tucson. What in thunder
made you fly forty miles beyond the darned place! Just so you'd have a
chance to wreck the plane? A hell of a pilot you are!"
Bland protested, trailing a step behind Johnny, whose stride had
lengthened with the bad news. Did Johnny think, f'r cat's sake, he
could light in front of the Alexandria and call a bell-hop to take the
plane? Did he think they could put the darn thing in an auto park?
What about telephone wires and electric light wires and trolley wires?
Bland would like to know. Leave it to Johnny, the crowd would now be
roped off the spot and the cops fighting to make a gangway for the
ambulance, and women would edge up and faint at the ghastly sight.
Leave it to Johnny--
"Leave it to me," Johnny cut in acrimoniously, "and we'd have landed
right side up, anyway. I wouldn't have lit in the middle of a mess of
beans. Beans! Good gosh! For half a cent I'd go back and make camp
there. That's what we ought to do, anyway, instead of walking all
night, getting to town. We've got grub enough--and there's _beans_!"
"Aw, now, bo, have a heart! You wait till I lead you into the Frolic,
and you won't say beans no more. You wait till you git your knees
pushed under the mahogany and the head waiter scatters the glasses
around your plate, and you lamp the dames--"
He stopped abruptly, his jaw going slack with dismay. "Only we ain't
got the scenery for no such place as the Frolic," he mourned. "Lookin'
the way we do, we'd be eyed suspicious if we went to grab a tray in
Boos Brothers! Some Main Street waffle joint is about our number,
unless--"
"A waffle joint sounds good to me," Johnny said. "I didn't come out
here to spend money. I'm here to make it."
"That's all right, bo. I ain't going to hit any flowery path either.
But listen, old top. We've had a hard day, and before that a bunch of
'em. We've earned one good meal, ain't we? That ain't going to hurt
nobody, bo. Just to celebrate our arrival and git the taste of the
desert out of our mouths. I'll say we've earned it. And it needn't
cost so much. And listen here, bo. I know a place on Main where we
can rent the scenery. Lots of fellers do that, and nobody the wiser.
I don't mean open-face coats, neither. Just some good clothes that
have got class will do fine. And we can git a shave there, and go to
the Frolic and have some regular chow, bo, and listen to the tra-la-la
girlies warble whilst we eat. Come on. Be a regular guy for oncet!"
"Do regular guys wear borrowed clothes? Not where I come from, they
don't."
"Aw, them hicks! Well, you can buy what you want, if that suits you
better. I'll take you to a place that keeps open evenings. There'll
be time enough. The Frolic don't hardly git woke up till ten or
'leven, anyway."
"At that it will be closed for the night before we arrive," Johnny
stated morosely. "It's a wonder to me you let the ocean stop you,
Bland.
"Why didn't you go on and light in Japan? We could have caught a boat
back then, instead of walking."
Once more Bland protested and explained and defended himself. But
Johnny had already drifted off into troubled meditation rendered
somewhat vague and inconsequential by his rapid changes of financial
condition, moods, environment--the brief ecstasy of his triumphant
flight that had so ridiculous a climax. Small wonder that Bland's
whining voice failed to register anything but a dreary monotone of
meaningless words in Johnny's ears. Small wonder that Johnny's
thoughts dwelt upon little worries that could have no possible bearing
upon the big things he meant to do.
How much would a new propeller cost? Would all the barber shops be
closed when they reached town? He needed a haircut and a hot bath
before he would feel fit to walk the streets. Should he take at once
the position he meant to maintain, and stop at the best hotel in town,
as an aviator who owned the plane he flew and had a roll of money in
his pocket might be expected to do? Or should he go to some cheap
rooming house and save a few dollars, and sink into obscurity among the
city's strange thousands?
He remembered the headlines concerning him--front-page headlines that
crowded Europe's war into second place! He had not seen anything much
about himself lately, though the jailer had brought him a paper every
morning. Certainly his misfortune had not been given the prominence
accorded to his disappearance. If he should go to some good hotel and
register as John Ivan Jewel, Tucson, Arizona, the reporters might
remember the name. Probably they would, and his arrival would be
announced--
What would they think, if he walked in just as he was; leather coat,
aviator's cap with the ear-tabs flapping, corduroy breeches tucked into
riding boots that needed a shine and the heels straightened? Would
they put him out, or would they think he was so rich and famous he
didn't give a darn?
He wondered what Mary V would think, if she knew that he was here in
Los Angeles. Would she care whether she ever saw him again? Or could
girls forget a fellow all at once? Were they still engaged, so long as
she did not return his ring? He wished he knew what was the rule in
cases like this. Then it struck him that Mary V could not return the
ring now if she wanted to. She would not know where to send it. She
might have sent it to him while he was in jail--but probably she feared
that the reporters might hear about it. How much would a propeller
cost, any way? There would probably be more than that broken--the
Thunder Bird had turned over with quite a jolt.
No, certainly he should not spend money on high-priced hotels until he
had things moving again. There would be no more money coming in until
the plane was repaired--darn it, there was always that big hump in the
trail; always something in the way, something to postpone his grasping
at success! Now he'd have to sleep in some hot, frowsy little room for
about four bits, instead of luxuriating in a suite as he would like to
do.
They reached the little suburban village and the street car. Johnny
had an impulse to stop there for the night and leave the city to a more
propitious time, but Bland was already licking lips in anticipation of
the joys of Spring Street, and made such vehement protest that Johnny
yielded. If he stayed in Inglewood Bland would go on without him, and
Johnny did not want that, for Bland might not come back. And whatever
his mental and moral shortcomings, Bland was somebody whom Johnny knew;
if not a friend, yet a familiar personality in a city filled with
strangers.
Perhaps it was the night that veiled the city's big human workaday side
and showed only the cold, blue-white residence streets palm-shaded and
remote, and the inhospitable closed stores and shops of the business
district, that gave Johnny a lost, lonesome feeling of utter
homelessness. For the matter of that, Johnny could not remember when
he was not homeless--but he did not often feel depressed by the fact.
He followed Bland down the car steps at Fifth Street, walked with him
past a delicatessen store whence apartment dwellers were trickling,
their hands full of small paper bags and packages. They looked pale
and sickly and harassed to Johnny, to whom desert-browned faces were a
standard by which he measured all others.
A barber shop reminded him of grime and untrimmed hair, and he halted
so abruptly that Bland forged several paces ahead before he missed him.
He turned back grumbling, just as Johnny went in at the door, and
followed grudgingly. He had wanted a glass of beer first of all, but
yielded the point and took his shave resignedly.
Johnny spent a full hour in that shop, and when he emerged he was worth
the second glance he got from the girls hurrying homeward. Tubbed,
shaven, trimmed, a fresh shine on boots that still showed the marks of
spurs worn from dawn to dark when those boots were new, he towered
above Bland Halliday, who looked dingier and more down-at-heel than
ever by contrast. It would take more than shaven jowls to make a
gentleman of Bland.
They went on to Broadway, crossed it precariously, and reached the
pavement by what Johnny considered a hair's-breadth of safety as a big
car slid past his heels. They passed lighted plate-glass windows
wherein silver and gold gleamed richly. Then Bland unwittingly pushed
Johnny Jewel from the edge of obscurity into the bright light of
notoriety again.
Bland said, "I know a joint where we can git a good room for fifty
cents--and no questions asked, bo."
They happened at that moment to be nearing the immaculate white-gloved
doorman who stands ward over the entrance to the Alexandria. Johnny
looked at him, saw what exclusive hostelry was named upon his cap band,
and stopped. "You can go to your joint where they don't ask
questions," he said somewhat loftily to Bland. "I'll stop here where
they don't have to."
Bland gasped, but Johnny was already turning in past the immaculate
white-gloved one who bowed as Johnny brushed him by. Bland had only
time enough to mutter, "I'll wait here till you register," before
Johnny disappeared into the subdued elegance where Bland would not
venture. "Till they throw yuh out, you boob," Bland amended his
parting sentence. "Stoppin' at the Alexandria--hnm!"
Johnny, secure in his fresh cleanness and his ignorance of the
traditions of the place, strode through the onyx-pillared lobby peopled
with well-fed, modish human beings who conversed in modulated voices or
bustled in and out, engrossed with affairs which might or might not be
of national importance. At the desk a perfectly groomed, worldly wise
aristocrat proffered a pen well inked and gave Johnny what Bland would
have termed the double O.
Before he had finished pressing blotter upon "John Ivan Jewel, Tucson,
Arizona", his brain had registered certain details and his smile had
attained a certain quality of deference.
"We are glad to have you with us, Mr. Jewel. Ah--a room and bath, say
on the sixth floor? Ah--did you have a good flight, Mr. Jewel?"
Oh, the adaptability of American youth! "Made it in seven hours
continuous flight," Johnny informed him carelessly. "Nothing to it.
Yes, the sixth floor will be all right. Didn't bring any
baggage--didn't want to load the plane down."
And that clerk, to whom baggageless guests are ever objects of
suspicion, smiled understandingly and called his favorite boy, and when
Johnny's back was turned, immediately whispered the news that that
Arizona flyer who had been so much in the public eye lately, was a
guest of the hotel, having flown over in five hours.