FLYING HOPE
Interborough got wind of the near-robbery, the wild sky-ride, the
subsequent crash of a great plane on the outskirts of Hillton. A horde
of reporters swarmed over to interview the crashees, to get pictures of
them and the wreck. For the first time in his life, Hal Dane saw himself
staring, with the usual garbled, wood-cut expression of newspaper
pictures, from the front page of a metropolitan paper. But if the
picture was poor, Harry Nevin, the young reporter for the Interborough
Star, had at least wielded a kindly pencil. In spite of the crash, he
gave Hal Dane credit for "unusual wing sense."
In reality as well as in the smeary newspaper picture the wrecked plane
showed up as a dismal mess. To the uninitiated eye, this grotesque thing
with its tail in the air and its nose in the mud had all the appearances
of having flown its last flight. But when mechanics from Interborough,
with Raynor to direct them, began to dig out the ship, it was found that
the actual damage was done only to the propeller, although the fuselage
and wings were covered with mud and some of the wing fabric would have
to be patched and "doped."
"It's that ditch that did it," consoled Raynor, going over the various
aspects of the "cracked-up" landing with Hal. "In the night that
grass-covered ditch couldn't have looked much different from the rest of
the field. But a ditch for a landing place can turn most any sky bus
into a bronco-bucking affair. Nearly every pilot mixes in with something
of the kind sooner or later. Settling in a little gully out in Texas
about seven years ago gave me a wallop in the bean that I won't be
forgetting any time soon," and Raynor ducked his head to show Hal a
jagged white scar that persistently parted his black hair unevenly at
the crown.
As soon as a new propeller could be shipped out and adjusted, one of the
flyer's friends from the air mail route was coming down to pilot off
both Raynor and his ship.
So the next day, in spite of a few rolling, murky wind clouds in the
east, Hal determined to do some gliding on his homemade apparatus. He
wanted this chance to get a real aviator's criticism and advice on the
board and cloth mechanisms with which he had to satisfy his longings for
air flight.
Hal Dane might have wing sense, but he had no money with which to buy
engine-powered wings. All he could do was patch up contrivances out of
the crude materials that lay to hand.
Long ago Hillton had ceased to throw up its hands and fall in a faint
over that "crazy Dane boy" scudding along gully edges propelled by a
pair of sheets stretched on some sticks. In fact, Hillton had grown so
used to Hal's experimenting that by now the village just accepted him
and his stunts as a matter of course.
But with the famous Rex Raynor present and evincing interest in such
things, the whole of Hillton turned out to watch this new gliding
attempt of Hal's.
Instead of rolling out the battered little glider that reposed in the
main workshop, Hal, with considerable help from all the small boys of
Hillton, pushed back a section of the opposite wall, revealing that the
barn had a second long room--the harness or storage room of the old
days. From out of this, scraping and screaking along the ground on its
keel skid, was hauled a white monstrosity--a huge thing of wood and
cloth, of wires and bars and levers.
Hilltonians who hadn't seen the latest of Hal's handicraft couldn't
resist a laugh at the ungainly monster with long, warped-looking stretch
of wing.
"Gangway, gangway!" shouted a youngster. "Here comes the
Willopus-Wallopus!"
"Willopus, your foot!" snorted Uncle Telemachus. He himself might laugh
a bit at Hal, but he wasn't going to stand for anybody else doing it. He
silenced the mouthy boy with a glare from his fiery old eyes. "Hi, don't
you know a wind bird when you see one?"
Wind bird, indeed! To the uninitiated, this cloth contraption stretched
on hay-bale wire and sprucewood sticks, hauled out of its lair on its
screakily protesting keel skid, looked more like some waddling
antediluvian from the prehistoric past.
But Rex Raynor seemed to find nothing comical in the wind bird. Her slow
progress while being dragged to the brow of Hogback Hill gave him a
chance to study her every line. To an aviator used to the exquisite
finish and polish of a modern factory-built sky boat, Hal's contraption
offered a contrast of a rather sketchy aircraft fuselage. A little
board, an upright post, some slim sprucewood longerons,--that was the
fuselage, if one could call it a fuselage! But for all its homemade
roughness, there was an interesting compactness in the way the boy had
braced his few wires and uprights down to a "V," converging at the board
seat. The one wing was a long cloth-covered affair of wood strips and
wires--streamlined after a fashion, for it was narrower at the tips than
in the center, and thinner at the back edge than at the front edge. The
longerons ended in rudimentary elevators and rudder, connected by wires
to a pair of pedals set before the board seat that was fastened at the
nose of the fuselage. A broomstick control stuck up before the seat too,
and wires hitched it to the wings.
"The boy's worked out something, eh?" grunted Uncle Tel, shuffling
rheumatically alongside of Raynor, who seemed bent on studying every
inch of the curious, lumbering craft. "Got some technique all his own,
eh?"
"Cat's back!" snorted the flyer, "but I'll say the kid's got technique!"
He laid a hand on one of the hinged sections that formed the back of
each wing tip. "Look at those ailerons he worked out on the wings! He's
combined the idea of the German Taube and the French Nomet in that wing
lift. Where did he get it?"
"Got it out of his head--and from watching birds fly, too, I reckon,"
said Uncle Tel. "That boy, he's always snatching time to sit out here on
the top of old Hogback Hill, watching buzzards sail, crows flap, and how
the lark gives a little spring when she sails up into the sky. Looky
here, see that sort of spring, set there where the glider rests on its
skid? That's what Buddy calls his 'lark spring up.' It helps him get
gliding in a shorter run than he could before he put it there."
The glider and its escort had about reached the crest of the hill now.
Raynor stepped a little apart and stood looking down over the lay of the
land below him.
"Um--valleys and bare rolling hills," he muttered to himself. "The sort
of terrain below to make air currents that rise and flow. The kid's a
good picker of gliding country. Reckon though he's been experimenting
and studying out this air current business for himself. He's not exactly
the kind to leave everything to mere blind chance."
Hal Dane jammed his old cap down on his head nearly to the ears, stood a
moment beside his glider. He was a tall, fair boy--fair at least if he
hadn't been so outrageously tanned. His eyes had the Norse hint of "blue
fire" to them, like the blue fire of the ice glint of the far north. For
a fact, the boy had more than a hint of the old Norse Viking look to him
as he stood there beside his wind ship.
His mother, in the fore-edge of the crowd, hands nervously twisting but
chin up and eyes steady, might have been the mother of a Viking. Only,
instead of watching a son take boat for unknown sea currents, this
mother was watching a son mount the even more unknown air currents.
Ducking down to get in under the overhanging wing, Hal seated himself on
the board, rammed his back against the upright post that formed the main
member of his skeleton fuselage, then doubled up his long legs to set
feet on the pair of pedals.
It was rather good sport, this starting Hal off on a flight. The Hillton
youngsters had plenty of experience in their end of the matter--which
was the pushing and pulling off. On this occasion, when there were so
many onlookers, it was a matter to be fought over. Fuz McGinnis, acting
as master of ground ceremonies, straightened affairs out and selected
those that had already had some experience in pulling off.
At a signal from Hal, half a dozen fellows, three to the left and three
to the right, walked away with the ends of a rope that led back in a "V"
to the front of the wind bird. At the tip of one wing a tall boy trotted
along to hold the wings level. Behind the wind bird, Fuz and another
fellow came ambling along, pulling back slightly on a tail rope.
At twenty steps down the hill, Hal shouted, "Run!"
The contraption, which had been slipping along the ground on its keel
skid, rose a few feet as the runners picked up speed.
Ten paces more, and the pilot crouching up there under the wing yelled,
"Turn loose! Let her go!"
Already the fellow at the wing had stood away. At the yell "Let her go!"
the others dropped ropes, which fell free from the down-pointed hooks
they had been merely held against by pressure. Now with the back pull
relaxed, the glider shot upward and forward like a stone hurled from a
catapult.
Wedged between some spruce sticks under a stretch of cloth, Hal was off
on his motorless flight.
When on the ground this contraption of wood and wires had seemed an
ungainly, waddling freak. But now as it soared upward on air currents in
its sky-element, it swooped with a marvel of grace.
Instead of a short flight and a mere slide down a wind hill, the boy
began to twist and turn to take advantage of every rising current of air
so as to ascend to a greater height than that from which he had started.
Though he couldn't hear it, the crowd below him let out a gasp of
admiration. Rex Raynor stood, head bent back so as not to miss a
movement of the rider of the wind.
Already the wind bird had climbed a hundred feet above the take-off; it
banked again for another climb. Now it circled, swept in a series of
loops, and began to drift easily down a landing at the foot of the
starting hill.
Then through the valley swept a gust from the wind clouds that had been
rolling up all day. Like a leaf the lazily dropping wind machine was
caught up in the blast, swept high again, hurled this way and that,
dipping crazily.
"Gosh!" shrieked Fuz McGinnis in a bleat of terror. "Oh, my gosh! He's
going to head on his stand!" Fuz always said his words hind part before
when he got excited.