An Awful Note
“Preserve us a’! It’s coming down. Coming down—a fire-tail! Driftin’
doomward—down’ard—an’ afire!”
Andrew’s hoarse exclamations tore at the reddened air, even as sharp
horns of flame gored it, springing out from a biplane’s slipping side.
“Willa-woo! It’s side-slippin’—side-slippin’ down—afire!”
Old Andrew’s hand went to his head. The girl sank to her knees beside
her waking flower clock. For her the end of the world had come, heralded
by that mysterious pitch pipe in the woods.
The chauffeur looked, too, as if he heard the Big Trump.
Drifting down, a fire-tail, the aëroplane truly was; a long, thin tail
feather of brightest flame streaming out from it to the little leaden
fish, two-pound fish, that held its radio antenna steady in the air,
kept it away from the controls—flipper and rudder controls!
[Illustration: Drifting down, a fire-tail, the aëroplane truly was.]
Those controls were useless now. The burning plane was side-slipping
from five hundred feet aloft—in spite of the efforts of the one aviator
to right it before it landed.
It was but for a moment—an eternal moment—that the man and the kneeling
girl watched it, before it roosted, bird of thunder, in a tree top, a
noble white ash, over fifty feet tall, growing upon this side of the
garden wall.
The startled tree seemed rolling up the whites of its eyes in
terror—rustling the pale undersides of its crown of leaves—as the
burning plane landed and stuck upon a topmost branch; and, a second
earlier, the aviator, finding that he could not make a better landing
before the gasolene tank blew up, jumped.
As the dark, helmeted streak shot downward, it just grazed the old
sundial, which now counted one flaming hour amid its many sunny ones—and
landed right in the middle of the blooming flower clock.
“Dog out!” groaned Andrew and, with the hoarse exclamation on his lips,
sprang forward to catch it—break the fall.
But his long arms, his strong breast missed it.
With a soft, reverberating thud it landed in the dial-bed, right on the
head of pale Miss Poppy, garden beauty, who got the flattening shock of
her life at the moment.
One leg of the figure, rebounding, hit its owner, the half-stunned
aviator, below the waist line, after which he, too, drooped over, lay,
huddled, amid the flattened flowers.
“Treff! _Oh-h!_ my cousin Treff. Coming to take Pemrose—up!... Is
he—dead?” It seemed to Una to be the ghost of herself that put the
question.
“Dead—no! My paley lamb!” Even at this moment the elderly chauffeur shot
a glance of fatherly concern and tenderness at the white-lipped girl—she
was to him a symbol of the daughter he had lost.
“Dead—not by a hand’s-breadth!” Andrew was kneeling by the unconscious
figure, straightening it out. “But his right leg’s broke, I fear—poor
lad. Hit him in the stomach, too, that blamed leg, knocked his wind
out—knocked him into as-far-land! Water-r, lassie! Water! A stream
near-hand there, by the wood!”
“The—w-wood!” Una stared at him feebly, making no motion to pick up the
little metal cup, blistered by heat, which he unhooked from the
aviator’s belt and flung towards her.
“Yes, the wood! Air ‘ye jacky-witted’? Oh! shame fer a lassie to be
ginge’-bread at sech a time. Well, deil-mak’-matter! I’ll go meself.”
But it was at that moment that the “deil”, called upon, seemed to make
the matter in question his own.
It was at that moment that the world went quite to perdition with a roar
as, aloft in the tree top, the gasolene tank blew up.
Flaming fragments, bits of wing that seemed wrenched from imps, red
imps, blazing splinters, scraps of wire and red-hot metal rained all
around the girl in the terrified grass—still blanched with dew.
“Warry!” shrieked Andrew. “Down, lassie—down flat, ere the fiery
off-fall hit ye!”
But that “fiery off-fall” dropped a curtain between Una and her visions
of the wood. In a delirium she picked up the cup—and fled, not back to
the wood, but to the nearest garden hydrant.
A fragment of linen wing, aëroplane wing, treated with the preparation
that was so inflammable, swept her cheek—a scarlet butterfly. But she
managed to fetch the water, her brief dizziness shriveled, like that
doped wing, into a frenzy—red frenzy.
As cool drops fell upon his face, moistened his blistered lips, the boy
aviator opened his eyes.
“Gosh! but this is an aw-ful note.” He blinked mockingly at motes of his
wings swimming before him in the red glare, at his aëroplane fast being
reduced to a blackened motor and a few twisted wires in the tree top.
“Aw-ful note!” He grinned.
“Aye, it is—my cock-o’-pluck!” gurgled Andrew.
“‘Pulled a bone,’ up there—a blunder,” went on the freakish voice. “New
radio outfit, shoved the power plug into wrong groove, short
circuit—wires red-hot in a jiffy—spaghetti all blazing—”
“Aye, the inflam’ble, insulating clothie around the bit wires,” put in
Andrew.
“Reached over for my chemicals to right of seat—” an amber-brown speck
in one of the boy’s stone-gray eyes flashed—“unbalanced plane, she
side-slipped, and now ... it’s three thousand for a new ‘bus’ and I
can’t take a girl up this morning.”
“Pemrose,” breathed Una.
“Yes, Pemrose. Pretty—Pem!”
“Easy there—easy there, with that right leg—my cock-o’-the-clouds!”
Andrew was muttering. “You’ve ‘pulled a bone’ in that, I’m thinking.”
“Ouch! Have I? _You_ look as if I had broken every bone in your body by
falling a few hundred feet.”
The aviator glared at Una—then winked his mischievous brown spot.
She could not wink back. Behind the red note of misfortune was, still,
for her, the note of mystery: an echo that seemed borne from that
hum-haunted wood, the tear in the violet’s eye—a nettle where no nettle
was.
She lifted her stung fingers, where the prickle had faded, and looked at
them.
Still—still she was “sparrow-blasted” as Andrew’s queer figure put it,
blighted to the core by a trifle—kicked by a paltry sparrow, as it were.
And she had not been able to come back with even one little kick of
spirit—not even so far as to venture to the safe skirts of the wood
again—to the spring not fifty yards away—in the face of another’s need.
Her head drooped shamefacedly, her dark head.
There was a sudden rush of figures running, wildly running across the
garden, where a patch of grass and a tree top were now ablaze: her
father’s, half clad, old Sods’, others—a girl with blue dilated eyes.
“Pemrose!” She stretched out her arms, in a fair flutter as Andrew saw,
then drooped over and fainted, a lily-heart, beside her flower clock.