DON FLIES THE MAIL
Taking off into the July south-wind, Don waited only long enough to
observe the regulation compelling an airplane to be well beyond the
airport limits before turning. Then he began a turning climb to nose
into the East, crossing Long Island.
Although their course did not take them near the swamps which had been
so closely connected with their mystery--or mysteries!--Don glanced in
that direction.
Garry, behind him, busy adjusting the tube of the student's
communication helmet by which he could talk to Don, did not see what
the pilot noted. Don shook the ship gently. Garry looked up.
Chick, behind them, getting a life belt inflated from an air bottle,
because this would be a part of the mail flight requiring him to run a
slight risk of immersion in the sea, looked up at the same time.
Don's hand, waved toward the swamps at the left wingtip, as they came
around, saw a curious object over the swamps.
They were too far away to note it with much certainty; but Garry was
sure that the queer, ungainly thing rising steadily into the air was
one of the aircraft whose horizontal blades, above the fuselage,
enabled it to take off and rise without first attaining the flying
speed required by an ordinary airplane. Its huge propeller blades acted
both as power and support surfaces.
"An auto-gyro," Garry said into the helmet communication tube.
Don shook his head.
"What did you tell him?" Chick bent far forward to shout to Garry.
"Said it was an auto-gyro!"
"No!" Chick had sharp eyes. "It isn't the modern kind, anyhow. It's
what they call a 'helicopter,' Garry."
Garry looked a second time, carefully.
"Chick's right," he murmured to Don. "He says it's a helicopter--it has
the lifting blades that let it rise straight upward and then it has a
'tractor' propeller forward that sends it through the air horizontally.
It can go higher by giving the horizontal blades more speed, stay
almost stationary by adjusting speed, or settle lower by slowing the
blades. The tractor prop gives it forward speed. Chick's right."
Don nodded. That had been the reason he shook his head, to correct
Garry's terminology, because all the more modern auto-gyros he had seen
employed an adjustable-angle horizontal set of blades for both upward
and forward speed, and had refined the tractor propeller at the nose.
"But what is a helicopter doing over the swamp?" he wondered, "and
where did it come from?"
With a meeting arranged between the amphibian Dragonfly and the big
trans-Atlantic liner, there was no time to investigate.
"Does that helicopter have anything to do with the mystery?" Garry
spoke through the Gossport tube.
Don could not give an answer.
"It might," Garry continued. "Only I don't see just how. The spook
ships we saw come together in the sky were old-fashioned biplanes. They
weren't real, either, because you flew right into the cloud, Don."
The pilot nodded. Their speed rapidly took them Eastward, and away from
the swamp; but as he set his course, bearing slightly North, crossing
one of the Island's flying fields at a good altitude and with Barren
Island's new Bennett field back of the right wing's trailing edge, he
puzzled his brain a great deal about that strange ship rising from the
swamps. Why was it there at all? Had it been forced to settle there?
Or--did someone keep it there? If so, he thought, for what purpose?
"With the airport so handy, nobody would store a helicopter anywhere in
a mucky swamp," he decided. "It must have been a compulsory landing."
With the lights of Coney Island, far to the right, and of Long Beach,
and the Rockaways showing their Summer activities more nearly under the
trucks, Don nosed out over the sea.
There he opened the throttle almost full-gun.
They must meet the liner as far out as possible. The fuel supply had
been calculated to take them a hundred and thirty miles out and back
with the essential safety reserve; Don had a notion to stretch that
distance a trifle, because every mile the airplane saved the ship
before the return would mean that much more rapidity in bringing in the
mail.
Many ships came up over the horizon, were passed, and receded behind
the tail.
Chick's sharp eyes first discerned the special signal carried for the
occasion by the liner they sought to meet.
"Good work," Garry commended as Chick poked him three times and
indicated the tiny trio of white lights set above a blue one on the
masthead of the approaching boat, just coming up, it seemed, over the
horizon line.
He gave Don the position. The youthful pilot shifted rudder and altered
the course somewhat, gunning up to full speed.
"We will meet her ten miles further out then we expected to," he
murmured, pleased. That would mean faster time back for ten miles more
of the distance from shore, and ten miles at their speed as contrasted
to ten miles at the liner's best, compensated for the difference in
rapidity of flight between the Dragonfly and the faster Dart that could
not make the flight.
They bade fair to establish a mail ship-to-shore record.
Chick sent over the flash-rocket that signalized their approach.
The vessel's searchlight leaped to life, probed for and touched their
wings, darting swiftly aside to avoid blinding the pilot.
The liner came on at full speed. Don dropped the nose, cut the gun and
approached at an angle calculated to bring down the amphibian to the
water at a point near, to one side of, and just ahead of the course the
liner pursued.
The vessel's lights looked beautiful, seen from the air. Chick and
Garry thrilled to the wonderful spectacle. Don's elation came more from
the precision movements with which the mail pouches, buoyed with a
self-igniting water flare on the buoy, went over side in the glare of
the liner's searchlight.
Calculated with skill, favored by good control, Don's line of descent
set the amphibian's pontoons on the fairly smooth sea in a line that
sent the liner sweeping by his wingtip with not a dozen yards to spare.
Tossing by in her wake, the buoyed pouches, accentuated by their
marking light, were in a direct line with the airplane's course.
Garry motioned to Chick.
His part was to clamber to the strut, cling to a bracing wire, catch up
the light buoy.
Garry's office was that of observer, to align Don's maneuvers with
Chick's activity. Don had done well, so far: Garry would give him all
the aid he could to complete the maneuver.
Seeing them safely past, though shaken by the ship's turbulent wake,
the man at the searchlight swung it onto their tail, to give Chick all
the light possible.
Chick saw the buoy bobbing closer.
"A point to the right, Don!" Garry called into his tube. "He can't
quite reach--that's better!"
An instant later he spoke again.
"Cut the gun, Don!"
The Dragonfly, skittering along on the top of the moiling wake began to
settle into it, more shaken than before by the immersion into a swirl
of cross-currents; but the instant of delayed speed was all that Chick
required.
His outreaching hand stretched on straining muscles.
Fingers alert and agile gripped the rope bound around the buoy.
"Full-gun, Don!"
Up, and out of the danger of an upset, with engine roaring, they rose.
Chick, clinging to the mail pouches, held on.
Garry, stretching out his arm, as Chick swung inboard, caught the buoy
and gave Chick the use of both hands to cling in the increasing blast
of air caused by the climb.
Almost, for an instant, Chick's heart fell into his flying boots:
spray-wet, a wire slipped in his grasp!
"Cut!" Garry called to Don.
Leveled, with power reduced, the ship, for an instant, lost its climb
and barely held safe margins of forward momentum.
In that instant Chick mended his grip, catching a strut.
With the mail pouches drawn to the cockpit floor, with Garry, his hands
free, aiding, Chick got quickly and safely back to his place.
"Oh-kay!" he shrilled, delightedly, as he snapped on his safety belt.
Gunning up at Garry's relayed signal, Don made his climbing turn.
They were pointing straight for the airport when he revved up to his
full power.
The mail flight would be a success.
All they had to do was to fly straight, top speed, set down and be
applauded. They need not cross the swamps of so much mystery and fear.
They could come in from the East, landing sidewise to the wind. Don
flew the distance to the point where they sighted the airport with his
heart singing to the tune of singing wires, laughing with the purr of
the motor. The successful termination of the mail flight was in sight.
Then the mystery helicopter struck!