RIVER OF THE WIND
Maben kept circling. Beside him, Hal worked desperately, trying every
known and unknown device for loosing a stuck throttle. But stuck she
stayed.
And the interminable circling kept on. It seemed hours that they rode
thus, using up their precious gas in this ridiculous, passengerless
flight. Finally Hal crawled out of the cockpit and crept to the front of
the wing. He risked thrusting a hand gingerly down in the back of the
engine. Finally his searching fingers closed over the obstruction, a
slick, bottle-shaped thing with a greasy pointed neck. It was their can
of motor oil, carried for emergencies, and it had jarred under the
throttle-arm and wedged. Hal tugged and pulled but the grease-covered
can seemed to offer no grip for his fingers. He reached in for a closer
grasp, set his teeth, and yanked. The obstruction gave, zipped out with
such momentum that the force of Hal's pull nearly shot him backwards off
the plane edge. The can spun a thousand feet down through space. Rather
white around the mouth, Hal slid back into the safety of the pit.
With a freed throttle, Maben made a landing with all of his usual ease
and grace. But there was no one to watch him. The little crowd that
their ruse of the diving dummy had assembled for them had long since
departed.
So far as barnstorming aviation was concerned, East Texas seemed to be a
total loss. Hal and Maben swooped down to their camp, gathered up their
very limited assortment of housekeeping necessities, and set wing for
further westward.
Within the week they hit a line of carnivals and country fairs.
With so much competition in the way of stunt flyers and aerial circuses,
any newcomer on the scene must think up something out of the ordinary if
he expected to make a living with his sky bus. And with necessity
fostering invention, Hal's brain conjured up the something.
Even on these little half-mile country tracks, the auto racer was
replacing the old-time horse racer. Hal's agile imagination leaped a
step further. Why not race car against airplane? The one on the ground,
the one in the air, but both racing in the same limited circle in full
view of the grandstand?
It was so revolutionary an idea that at first no one would listen to
him. A laugh in the face was all he got for his explanations of how to
manage this new thrill-offering.
Then the manager of the lively carnival in swing at Repton caught Hal's
vision. On his track was staged their first auto-aero race. There was a
spice of danger to the thing--at least for the aerial part of it. To
speed a plane in a little half-mile circuit takes a master hand at the
stick. But Maben had that master hand. He could make a sky bus do almost
anything in reason.
Above the tiny circuit of the dirt track he had to bank his old plane
pretty nearly straight up and down and zoom around like a bee in a
bottle. To keep from winning too soon and ruining the show, he had to
throttle down her motor until the last lap. Then he'd let the sky bus
out and show the boys what she could do. Below him the begoggled auto
speed-fiend would let his ground ship out too and smoke his wheels on
turns, but the sky bus always won.
The auto-aero race was a success, a wow! It caught the fancy of the
crowds and gave them more thrills than they knew were left in this
thrill-worn universe. The air-earth races kept the Repton Fair open a
week longer than had been counted upon. After its closing, Hal and Maben
drifted on to other fairs and found good money waiting for them almost
everywhere they touched. Sometimes they took in twenty-five dollars a
day, but more often it was seventy-five, and now and again they reached
the hundred mark.
At Zenner, Hal had the thrill of buying himself a plane. It was an old
J-1 Standard, the type of ship the army used to train pilots before the
war. Its owner had made one flight in it and had come down to a perfect
one-point landing--straight on the nose--and smashed up everything.
Max Maben knew points though when it came to planes, and advised Hal to
buy. They made Zenner their headquarters for a while and radiated out
from it to do carnival flying. Between times they worked on the plane.
In the end they evolved a patched-up creation built with homemade spars,
a second-hand engine and rusty fittings that had to be painted over. But
she flew like a bird. The carnival season was closing in. Hal used the
old J-l Standard to double their earnings by flying races at one fair
while Max filled his schedule at other fairs.
But for all her sweet flying, the Standard wasn't altogether a lucky
plane. Some nemesis of mischance seemed to dog her flights more often
than not. Once when the two flyers had her out for a pleasure spin that
took them hedgehopping over mountain tops and skimming the warm air
softness of the desert edge, the false darkness of a windstorm swooped
around them and sent them earthward for a forced landing. In the dimness
they took to ground between the cactus and Spanish dagger covering old
fields. And here they stayed the better part of a week. As they landed,
a villain of a Spanish dagger plant had slashed through the front spar
of a wing. It took half a day to patch the ten-inch gap in the spar and
to sew up a dozen rips in the wing fabric. It took half a week of
cutting sagebrush and cactus to clear enough space for a take-off
runway.
But whether the old J-l Standard was a lucky bird or not, possession of
it began to stir in Hal Dane a slow, subtle change. Ownership of a plane
of his own awoke in him vast longings and hopes. In spare moments he was
always tinkering lovingly around the old bus, seeing if a wire tightened
here didn't make her wing edge better, or if a heavier wire coil above
the landing gear didn't make her taxi along sweet. Now and again when he
had a spell off from carnival work, he took the "J" up on long, high
solo flights.
On one of these lonely air journeys he pushed higher than ever before.
The vast altitudes were always luring the boy, held a fascination for
him. Zooming up into the ether till from land he might seem some mere
speck in the sky had long since ceased to awake in him any nervous
terrors. Instead, he reveled in the sense of space and freedom the
heights gave him. Aerial intuition showed him that, within limits, the
higher he was, the safer he was. An engine break a hundred feet above
ground, where room for soaring tactics was limited and the parachute of
no account, was a much more terrible danger than a similar accident two
miles high. The heights meant safety from rough ground air; ten or
fifteen thousand feet often meant safety from storms.
Up and up Hal pushed his rough-built, patched-winged old army relic,
reveling wildly in the freedom of the skies, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen
thousand feet up. Intense cold froze him to the marrow, chattered his
teeth. Air pressure weighted his brain, reeled his head dizzily. If only
he had some protecting, oxygen-piped helmet to protect him from air
heights, as a diver had helmet to save him from water pressure! If--if!
Then he could explore the great unknown of the air! But even at a puny
sixteen-thousand-foot height, the sky had revelations for one that
soared its spaces knowingly.
Once in his high flying, Hal was swept into the vast power of a great
westward flowing current of air. A veritable river of the wind. It swept
him on fast and faster. Exhilaration shot through the boy's being.
Speed! Power! Here was power waiting to be harnessed by man. Westward on
a river of the wind!
A thousand years ago his Norse ancestors had swept westward on ocean
currents, the rivers of the sea, to find a new land. Some day, he, Hal
Dane must sweep westward on a river of the wind to discover--what?
He longed to fly onward forever as he was now, with a speed wind under
his wings. But the cold was devouring him, the awesome pressure was
roaring into his brain. Anger at his puny man's impotence in the face of
such power shook him. He could bear no more, the air weights were
smothering him. Downward he began to drop in long swoops.
As altitude had plunged him into a baptism of ice, so earth, as he
swooped downward, seemed to have prepared for him a baptism of fire.
Below him, in great gusts, yellow-edged billows of black smoke clouds
poured up. Funnels of sparks blasted up on the winds and scattered to
shower back into an inferno of flames.
Hal swerved aside, but sent his plane in a huge circuit nearer earth, so
that without danger he could inform himself concerning this disaster.
It was a barn in flames--the great red barn of some lonely ranch place.
Crammed as it must be with hay and wheat shocks, it had become a roaring
furnace, spouting flames up into the very skies.
Disastrously near to the doomed barn was the house. The little white
farmhouse seemed to crouch pitiably, seemed almost a human thing,
earth-bound and with fire-death sweeping against it.
As Hal circled nearer, he could see little frantic specks that were
human beings running back and forth with futile buckets of water. From
experience out here, Hal had come to know something of the water dearth
of the plains. What avail were the few hundred gallons of water in a
little cistern against this raging fire monster?
But the human specks fought on madly. The barn was doomed. They were
fighting for the house. Up went the buckets of precious water to wet
down the roof. Now they were spreading sopping blankets. And to what
use? The wind was veering more, the sparks were showering continuously.
For one flaming shingle stamped out, two more leaped into blaze.
Like one fascinated by danger, Hal circled nearer. It was madness. A
spark on his wing, curl of flame bursting out of the inflammable lacquer
pigment--then the death crash.
But this little white house was somebody's home--his all!
The boy flung caution from him. He dropped low, aimed his plane straight
out. With a zoom of the mighty wind-makers of his wings, he drove
forward down the air lane between the flaming hell of the barn and the
little crouching house in its imminent doom.
In his wake swept vast air currents swirled upward by the speed of his
passage, a wind wall that turned back spark and flames from showering on
the house roof.
His own wings had dodged sparks somehow, run the fire gauntlet unscathed
this one time. It was risking fate, but Hal Dane wheeled his aircraft
and shot again down the dangers of that fire-fenced air lane.
Hal Dane was using his plane like a gigantic fan to combat the fire's
spread. His very speed must have shed the falling dangers of sparks from
his own wings.
Full forty times he drove his ship back and forth between the little
house and the flaming barn, making mighty air currents that turned back
the peril like a shield of the wind.
The fire-riddled structure collapsed, shooting flames enormously high,
then settled into a smouldering mass. This might burn on for days, but
its real menace to the farmhouse was ended.
With danger conquered, Hal Dane, like some crusader of the air, whirled
skyward, incognito. Those he had saved would never know who had saved
them.
But flame and danger had strangely stirred the boy's heart, had fired
his ambition into a steady glow that henceforth was to flinch at
nothing.
Emotion--inspiration--a medley of feelings surged up in him as he
swirled high into the sky. Higher, higher, back again into the mighty
rushing currents of the rivers of the winds! To what did that current
flow westward? Some day he must explore it--must know.
High, and higher, till the air pressure sang heavily against his brain.
Here in the heights the lure of still another adventure was calling
him--the adventure of invention. The world was waiting for that--waiting
for man to pit his brain against the dangers of the great ethereal upper
strata. Man must conquer air heights as he had conquered earth heights.
It was a new Hal Dane that came down from this sky flight. He was no
longer a boy, satisfied with clowning above a carnival in an air
machine. In his mind burned a definite desire to master aeronautics
instead of merely drifting aimlessly, satisfied to dabble in air flying.
Along with ambition he had the hard common sense to know that he must go
back and begin at the bottom, lay his foundations right if he meant to
climb high.
That night he mailed a letter to the Rand-Elwin Flying School. Days
later the answer came, stating that he could still have the work and the
tuition in that organization that he had applied for once before. Hal
was both surprised and pleased to read that Rex Raynor was now one of
the flying instructors in the school.
With the chill of winter beginning to creep over the great southern
stretches of Texas, the season of country fairs and carnivals came to a
close. Maben was anxious now to get home for a short visit with his
family. After that he meant to try for some practical, year-around
work--the air mail, or forest ranger air service. And Hal had his own
ambitious plans burning within him.
At the Louisiana-Texas border town of Aldon, he and Maben parted
company. It was a wrench for both of them. But then they could cheer
their hearts with the knowledge that the science of flying was making
the world smaller every day. All through life, he and Maben would likely
enough be meeting at various landing fields--to "ground fly" and joke
about their lurid carnival past.
Barnstorming might have been the slap-stick life, but both Hal and Maben
could be thankful for their period of buzzing a plane above country
fairs--their work had brought them in enough money to keep their
families comfortable for some months to come.
Hal was also ahead an additional five hundred from the sale of his old
plane. He could embark with an easy mind on what promised to be the
greatest adventure, so far, in his life.