VISION
Hal Dane was above the trimotor now, and was still sending out his
desperate aerial telegraph call, "T-t-t-tat tat-t-tat
t-tat--danger--keep flying--danger!"
He had raced and choked and pounded his engine till smoke fumes
discharged gassily from it. The next sputter might stall a filthy motor
to a "conk" in mid-air, might back-fire flame into the carburetor. Yet
the message must still go on. Three lives depended on that one
hairbreadth chance.
"Danger--keep flying!"
But the trimotor was going down. It swooped to five hundred--three
hundred--began to flatten at two hundred feet for the last lap of the
down glide.
"Danger! Danger! Danger!" shrieked the tortured staccato of the higher
plane. "Danger! Danger! Keep flying!"
Even as the great plane below swooped to strike earth, its pilot lifted
wings in a mighty upward dart. Higher and higher he rose. Behind him
trailed his own call in aerial telegraphy. "Danger--where--what?" roared
the staccato bellow of the trimotor.
In their brief code, Hal Dane tapped back the answer on his engine, and
urged return flight to the school aviation field before attempting the
landing.
As Raynor and Hal circled near, they could see McGinnis turn the control
over to Colonel Wiljohn. Then the boy climbed out over the side of the
plane and swung head downward to see if he could reach the broken gear
and perhaps lash it back into place.
A hopeless task, it appeared, for Fuz McGinnis slowly dragged himself
back into the cockpit. Soon the plane circled and headed back for the
Rand-Elwin grounds.
All that wild race to Clanton had taken a bare fifteen minutes. Another
quarter of an hour saw them back above the home field.
Raynor and Hal made their descent in record time, leaped from the plane
and raced for the edge of the field. Men jostled together to give these
two room. Like the rest of the waiting throng they stood, heads back,
eyes glued to the crippled sky craft.
"She's coming--now!" It was a whisper, a prayer that came from every
heart and lip in the crowd.
The plane was coming down in wide, slow circles.
"Atta boy, you're bringing her in beautifully--yet every odd's against
you!" gritted Raynor through set teeth.
"But he's got a chance, one chance," muttered Hal, gripping Rex Raynor's
arm and pointing excitedly. "If he keeps to the balance he's got--runs
on that one wheel to lose momentum, it can--"
It could.
Fuz McGinnis held his plane to angle of balance, even as he sped half a
hundred feet on the one wheel after he struck ground. Then came a
tearing, splintering crash as the plane shot sideways, dragging the down
wing into mangled wreckage. Even so, the greatest danger mark had been
passed. That one-wheel run had spent the worst of the dread momentum.
Guards held the frantic crowd back while experienced hands tore at the
wreckage, lifted out the occupants. The three of them were dazed,
bruised, cut about hands and face from flying pieces of wood and fabric.
But the miracle of it--they were alive, practically unhurt.
Fuz McGinnis stood for a long minute leaning weakly against the tilted
mass of wing debris. His face held the look of one who has been on a far
journey and is not quite sure he is really on home land once again. As
he came out of his daze, he leaned over and gripped Hal Dane in a shaky
grasp.
"B-boy," he said, "if you hadn't that message us to got--no, no, got
that message to us, I mean, we'd have been--"
"We'd have been dead," broke in Colonel Wiljohn. "But you brought the
word, in a blasted clever way. You turned some sort of tomfoolery into
lifesaving. We owe our lives to you both. I--I--we thank you." Reaching
down, Colonel Wiljohn swept his grandson into his arms, pressed the
child against his face. Then he set the little fellow down and gravely
instructed him to give a handshake of thanks to each of the young
fellows.
The crowd would be denied no longer. It broke through the guards, surged
over to the little group beside the wreck. Women laughed and sobbed in
relief as they saw the child standing unhurt, clinging to his
grandfather's hand. Men laughed huskily and tried to hide emotion in
heavy handclasps. They wanted the whole story,--how had McGinnis brought
her down without a worse wreck, where had Raynor and young Dane found
them, got the warning across to them?
It was full thirty minutes before the crowd could be dispersed so
wreckers could haul off the disabled plane, and so the aviators in this
thrilling episode could slip away to some place of quiet and rest.
That night Hal Dane and Fuz McGinnis attended their first banquet. It
was not altogether an unmixed pleasure--this the first formal festival
in the whole of their work-filled young lives. The fact that they were
seated rather high was not altogether comforting to their timidity,
either. This was the celebration that had been planned weeks ahead of
time and was staged to do honor to the school's guest, Colonel Wiljohn.
Then here at the eleventh hour, so to speak, and at the Colonel's
especial request, this couple of young aviators had been dragged in to
sit next to him.
It was comforting to feel the Colonel's kindly presence but even that
did not compensate entirely for the unmitigated terror of a startling
array of forks with varying uses staring balefully up at one from the
heavy linen of a banquet cloth. One felt conspicuous in such a dazzle of
lights, in such a gathering of notables.
"I'm not much up on banquets," hoarsely whispered Hal under cover of a
speech by one of the notables. "Y-you don't reckon anybody'll expect us
to say anything?"
"Gosh, no!" from Fuz. "Anybody could look at us and know we couldn't
talk. But something else is bothering me--"
"Bothering me, too," mumbled Hal, and subsided glumly beside a plate of
broiled chicken, green peas and mushrooms in ramekins, potatoes in some
newfangled way, a spiced jelly.
Colonel Bob Wiljohn responded to a speech of welcome. Other speeches
followed.
Then Hal Dane and Fuz McGinnis became redly aware that Mr. Rand,
standing very erect beside the table, was talking in a serious voice and
mentioning their names considerably.
"The blow's going to fall now," Hal's lips silently sent a message to
his chum.
"We have here an extraordinary case." Mr. Rand's voice was stern. "It
concerns two of our most brilliant pupils in aviation--and on the eve of
their graduation. Although under a sentence of suspended judgment
already, they have now risked locking the doors of graduation on
themselves forever by flagrant disobedience of strict orders--"
"I protest--" Colonel Wiljohn was on his feet, gray eyes flashing. "Your
words give the wrong impression. You mean two boys entered a risk to
save a valuable plane if possible, to save human lives--"
"Wait, wait! And I accept your protest, Colonel." Mr. Rand's eyes also
held a flash, a high enthusiasm, his stern mouth relaxed into a smile.
"I want to state further that we, the board of officers of this
institution, had already decided--against all past precedent and
rules--to ignore said flagrant act of disobedience, and to graduate
these two young men--with honors!"
Waves of hand-clapping and cheers broke over a couple of dazed young
aviators.
"So the--" Fuz muttered.
"The 'Benzine Board' didn't get us after all," finished Hal.
That very night Colonel Wiljohn had a long talk with the boys and
offered them work. He could use them well. They had both displayed an
uncanny aptitude for flying, and he needed plane demonstrators. Hal's
instructors, Raynor and Major Weston, had told him enough about the
boy's unusual grasp of engine mechanics to arouse his interest. This
keen, successful business man got up and walked the floor in his
excitement as he and Hal delved further into the boy's future-looking
ideas for invention in harnessing piston power for landing planes gently
and with a lessening of landing dangers. His factories, he said, were
willing to pay well for brains, needed young fellows with vision, both
in the flying and in the invention departments. Would they consider
coming with him?
Would they?
Young McGinnis quite emphatically mixed his words hind-part-before in
the fervor of assuring Colonel Wiljohn of his willingness to go.
For the space of a minute Hal Dane sat perfectly still, eyes wide open,
but in them the look of a man in a dream. He was in a dream; this was
the beginning of visions about to come true. It couldn't be real. He'd
wake up--
"I'm counting on you." Colonel Wiljohn's strong, friendly hand grasped
his shoulder.
"I--yes, sir--I'll be on hand," Hal finally got out.
Leaving the Rand-Elwin Flying School seemed to Hal like turning over one
of the busiest, happiest pages of his life. He parted from his splendid,
true friends here with real regret. Yet, like all youth, he was eager to
turn the next page of life.
Before he entered upon his new work, there was time for a brief visit
with his home folks. He found the old house still uprearing its
makeshift patchwork roof among the tree tops. Within, though, the money
that he'd managed to save and send home in carnival days had wrought
some comfortable changes. There were rugs, dainty curtains, a piece or
two of new furniture. He found his mother and Uncle Tel not so ground
down with toil these days. In his mind, Hal was already looking forward.
to other changes--a roof, and a coat of creamy white paint for the
house, a little car so the folks could get around--just wait till he
began making some real money!
* * * * *
For Hal Dane, life at the Wiljohn Works promised to be the greatest
thrill he had ever known. Up till now he had not realized the vast
extent, both in space and operations, of a modern aviation factory. It
was not one factory, but many. There was a bewildering variety to the
output.
Hal had thought the Works concentrated on some special type of plane.
Instead, he found them manufacturing about everything from a small, neat
sky boat for private use up to giant craft for freight and passenger
airliners. There were air boats with wings that folded up so one could
trundle them into the family garage instead of into a hangar.
Over in the invention department tests of all kinds were being
continually conducted. With his keen gray eyes looking well to the
future, Colonel Wiljohn was willing to try out in his laboratories
things which to more conservative men seemed mere schemes and
addle-pated ideas. If a scheme failed in the testing, it was just
another visionary mechanism to be set aside. If one idea out of ten, out
of a hundred even, proved to have worth, aviation had made a forward
step!
In the parachute department strange weaves of silk were being tested for
qualities and purposes that silk makers of fifty years ago never dreamed
would ever be demanded of their products. According to laboratory
decision, the habutai silk in present use for parachutes would soon be
displaced by a new weave, the basket-mesh type. And why? Because the
basket-weave oscillated less than the old habutai type, it absorbed
shock better, it lowered more slowly and allowed for better landings.
Silk that once fulfilled its purpose if it had a sheen and gloss to
catch milady's eye! And now it was demanded that it have a strength to
lower man ten thousand feet through the air without a jostle and land
him on earth without a bruise!
In the engine room, motors were being tried out for streamlines and
cooling systems, for weight reduction and elimination of fire hazards,
for burning new high-powered fuel oils.
Where the prevailing wing material had formerly been wood and fabric,
tests were now being made to prove the worth of all-metal construction.
For new purposes the old-time metallic standbys were found unusable.
Light metals crystallized and snapped into brittle pieces. The old
strong metals possessed of endurance were too heavy for aircraft. A new
metal, light as aluminum and strong as steel, must be produced.
And so the experimenting and testing went on.
As Hal Dane became familiar with some of the scientific revolution and
evolution going on at the huge Wiljohn Works, he caught again something
of the high splendid vision of following the river of the wind on a
great exploration. If ever he were to go as sky viking, here in this
vast plant were being riveted and welded aircraft suitable to bear him
on that journey.