WINGS
When Hal Dane came to himself, lanterns and electric torches on all
sides bobbed crisscross lights above him. A dozen hands seemed pulling
and tugging to extricate him from the one-sided crash of plane wreckage.
He was laid out on the ground. A wet handkerchief mopped blood out of
his eyes. He felt broken all over. Through a mist of pain he heard
voices frantically calling, "Send for Doc! Get Doctor Joe!"
But something more than the pain and the voices beat in his brain--a
throbbing "chug-chug-chug" that stirred him out of his apathy. The
train, the eastbound that he'd raced!
"G-get me up," he croaked hoarsely. "Hold that train--mail
packet--im-m-mportant--no, no, no!" He fought away hands that strove to
hold him quiet. His struggles seemed to clear his brain, give him
strength to rise. "Don't doctor me, doctor him," pointing to Raynor,
"he's injured, bad off! Me--I--I'm not dead yet, not by a l-long shot!"
and Hal even managed a white-lipped grin.
It was pain to walk. But the urge to complete what he had undertaken
drove him on. From Raynor's coat, thrown aside by Doc Joe who was
probing the bullet wound, Hal extracted the thick envelope. After an
eternity of putting one foot before the other foot, he got it delivered
at the mail car of the long train that Mr. Tilton, the rotund little
station agent, was importantly holding.
After the train pulled out, there was still one more job to attend to.
"That airplane, Mr. Tilton," he begged of the fat little agent. "Don't
let cows get at it--or people poke around too much. And maybe you'd
better rope what's left of it to the fence. Big wind--might--come up."
The urge had spent its force. Hal Dane felt a thousand years old all at
once. He sank wearily into the spidery, yellow-painted little car of
Fuzzy McGinnis, his chum, whom all this excitement had summoned to the
scene. Fuz understood. Fuz had been in smash-ups himself. In silent
sympathy, and keeping the Yellow Spider throttled to a gentle gait, he
carted Hal the half mile from Morris Gap to Hillton.
Doc Joe, in his own car, was bringing Rex Raynor also to the Danes'
hospitable, ramshackle old house.
After his mother, Mary Dane, wild-eyed with fear, but holding to her
calm, had gone over him for broken bones, that she didn't find, and had
bound up his head better and had poured hot milk down him,--and after
Uncle Telemachus had excitedly heard the story of the air crash three
times--Hal crawled into bed and slept a round of the clock.
Next day Hal Dane's sturdy constitution asserted itself and yanked him
out from any lazy coddling between the sheets. His scalp might still
show some split skin from bucking a wire strut, and bruises the size of
plates and saucers decorate him here and there, but he'd better be
thanking his stars he wasn't disabled. And Hal did thank 'em! His work
was needing him too. The truck that earned the family living was idling
up there in the pine woods.
Need to get back to work rested heavily on Hal's shoulders, but worse
than that was a worry burden that weighted down his heart.
As Hal, cap in hand and a bag of tools thrust under one arm, tiptoed
down the long hall whose once beautifully plastered walls now gaped in
ugly cracks, he paused before the room Rex Raynor was in. The door swung
half open in the summer breeze. Hal stepped in, stood uncertain,
twisting his cap into a knot. He opened his mouth once or twice as if he
were trying to speak and couldn't. Then finally he blurted out:
"Mr. Raynor, I--it's awful that I smashed your plane--I, oh--some
day--I'll try--pay--"
"Huh!" snorted the recumbent Raynor, slightly raising his head and
glaring with fiery eyes beneath beetling brows. "Huh, come here!" His
injured left arm, grotesquely enlarged by bandages, lay on a supporting
pillow. But with his right hand, he beckoned imperiously.
Hal came to the bed.
"Did you ever fly a sky bus before?" questioned Raynor.
"Not--not a real plane," answered Hal. "I've got books and--"
"Boy," said Raynor, reaching out his good hand and pulling him close,
"boy, you're a wonder. You brought us down alive--in the night. More'n
some trained pilots can do. Wing sense must have been born in you. And
say," Raynor's brows drew up fiercely again, "get that pay idea off your
chest. I owe you more than you owe me. If you hadn't been a plucky
youngster to go up with me and bring down my wind bus by book learning,
I'd--I'd have crashed to a dead one. That's sure!" Raynor shut his eyes.
Hal eased out of the room. His head and his heart felt suddenly,
gloriously light and tingling. He hadn't known what a burden he'd
carried--until now that it had lifted. His spirit was free again.
After the crash where, in that last downward swoop, he had evidently
pulled the wrong mechanism and tipped the plane to a dangerous turn, an
obsession of distrust had oppressed him. He had begun to fear that he
lacked air sense, was not fitted for the fulfilment of his dreams of
wings and the airways.
And now with one lift of his brows, a wave of the hand, Rex Raynor had
dispelled the gloom. What was it Raynor had said--"Wing sense--born in
him!"
Hal flung himself through the front door and down the steps so excitedly
that he near toppled over his red-headed friend Fuz McGinnis, who was
rushing up the steps.
"What do you think you are--a Wright Whirlwind Motor?" Fuz fiercely
rubbed a barked shin. "Here I was thinking you an invalid, and hopped by
to say I'd take the Yellow Spider and tow in the truck from the pine
woods for you."
"Don't believe my famous vehicle needs any towing-in," answered Hal,
"but I'll be thankful to have you haul my carcass and these tools out
there, and apply some of your manly strength to helping me jack the old
bus up." And linking arms with Fuz, Hal strode off toward the yellow
roadster.
For Rex Raynor, his week's stay in the shabby old Dane home was a period
of mixed pain and pleasure. At first his arm wound throbbed
irritatingly, and added to it was the anxiety for the condition of his
crashed plane. But these pleasant, kindly people among whom Fate had
dropped him were an interesting compensation.
There was Mother Mary Dane. She was a little woman with blue eyes and
lots of soft brown hair that was usually wound into a firm, tight knot,
because there was never any time to primp it up and do it fluffily. When
the fever pains let the aviator up from his bed and allowed him the run
of the place, he marveled at the amount of work a slip of a woman like
Mary Dane could "turn off." He seemed to find her always churning, or
stooped over everlasting "taken-in" sewing, or on her knees with garden
trowel in her hand. Her mouth would be a stubborn line combating the
weariness of her eyes, offsetting the whiteness of her face--only folks
didn't often catch her like that. When she saw Raynor or Hal or Uncle
Tel coming, she could usually produce a smile.
When the sun shone warm and bright, from a big room at the end of the
hall would arise snatches of quavery whistling, thump of hammering. That
would be Uncle Telemachus Harrison enjoying a "good day." Uncle Tel was
Hal's great-uncle. When the sunshine eased his rheumatism, he pounded
away at chair repairing and odd jobs to help along with the very limited
family exchequer. Uncle Tel Harrison was a curiosity--a fiery little man
with bright blue eyes and a bristling, bushy mustache.
As great a curiosity as Uncle Tel was the old house. Hal's mother was a
Harrison and had inherited the ancient dwelling from her people.
The Harrison house had been two-storied. Then the roof fell in. Hal and
Uncle Tel, with very little outside help, had cobbled up some sort of
roof over the remaining lower story. In the bleakness of winter, the
makeshift, curling shingles and the warped walls must have looked their
pitifulness. But now in the summer, when the cudzu vine was in its
swathing glory, the old cobbled-up house looked rather quaint and cool
under its dress of vines.
Back of the tumbledown dwelling was a tumbledown barn that had once
housed the high-stepping Harrison horses. Now it housed some strange
contraptions beneath its sagging roof.
When Rex Raynor went out to that old stable under the voluble and
excited escort of Uncle Telemachus, he was amazed at the variety and
perfection of things aeronautical that he found there.
"Just look at 'em," chortled Uncle Tel, waving a gnarled hand about the
barn workshop to include little models of gliders, models of planes in
paper and wood, some tattered books on aviation mechanics, and a crude
man-sized glider made of wood strips and cloth.
"Looks like this one's seen real usage." Raynor's eyes lighted up with
interest as he laid a hand on various splicings of the wood and huge
patches on the fabric.
"My sakes alive," sputtered Uncle Tel, "I'll say it's been used! That
crazy boy's always rigging himself up in something like this, and having
the kids from the village pull him off down that bare slope of old
Hogback Hill. Sometimes he'd achieve a pretty good float before he'd
drift to the plain at the hill bottom. He achieved his head bumped, too,
a score of times, a shoulder wrenched, arms and legs knocked up--but
dang it, he keeps on trying the thing!" Uncle Tel's voluble complaining
was belied by the prideful glint in his old blue eyes.
"And what does Mother Mary Dane think of all this gliding and head
bumping?" laughed the flyer, turning to Mrs. Dane who had just come in.
She stood there, a hand resting on the glider wing. The eyes she lifted
held a glow of pride, but around those eyes anxiety had etched its own
lines too.
"Umph, Mary, she's got sense--if I do say it," grunted Uncle Telemachus.
"She knows it ain't any more use to try to keep an air-minded boy out of
the air than it is to try to keep a water-minded duck out of the water.
Mary, she's shed tears over his busted head and banged-up shoulders
considerable times. But shedding tears didn't keep Mary from giving her
wing-sprouting offspring all ten of the linen sheets she heired off her
Grandma Harrison. Real linen sheets and a silver spoon or two was all
there was left to descend to Mary. Grandma Harrison would turn over in
her grave if she knew just what an end her good hand-woven cloth had
come to. A whole sheet ragged up on a hawthorn bush where Glider Number
One went gefluey in a gulley and spilled Hal for a row of head wallops.
Another burned to a crisp when some invention of wing lacquer
combustulated and liked to have fired us all out of house and home.
There's four on that glider contraption, and the rest of 'em--the rest
of 'em--" With a guilty look, Uncle Tel clapped a hand to mouth and went
off into a hasty fit of coughing. He turned away and stamped down the
length of the shop where he began to putter with some spruce sticks and
a lathe.
When he rejoined the others, Raynor was saying:
"Didn't Hal drop a few hints that he was going to do some gliding for my
benefit to-morrow?"
"I fear so." Mary Dane's lips quirked up in a smile, but her hand was
flung out nervously. "And just look at that innocent little wind cloud
lazying out there on the horizon! It could roll up into anything. I tell
Hal that every time he even plans a glide, his subconscious mind stirs
up a wind somewhere."
"What's he going to take off in--this?" Raynor touched the battered
glider.
"Gosh, no--er-r--" Uncle Tel joined the conversation, then sputtered off
distractedly, "er-r--well, you just wait and see!"