MAROONED ON THE DESERT
There was nothing to be done but to accept the situation, little as
either Roy or Peggy relished the eccentric "professor" for an aerial
traveling companion. Only Peggy remarked with withering scorn:
"I think you might have waited till you were asked, don't you?"
The professor's reply was characteristic.
"My dear young lady, if I never sold anybody a bottle of my medicine
except those that really wanted it I'd have a hard time getting
along."
Roy was on the point of exclaiming "Bother your old medicine," when
he suddenly recollected that had it not been for this queer
personage they might not have been in the aeroplane at all.
Instead--but Roy didn't care to think further along those lines.
Far below them suddenly appeared a giant halo of light. It hung
above the desert, wheeling and gyrating about five feet above the
glaring white of the alkali.
"A halo," remarked Professor Wandering William gazing over the edge
of the chassis.
"A halo? Whose--Roy's?" inquired Peggy.
"No, it is one of those halos peculiar to the desert," was the
professor's rejoinder; "it is caused by heat refraction or something
of the sort. I recall I did read a lengthy explanation of it
somewhere once, but I've forgotten it now."
"Does it portend anything?" asked Roy, turning round for a moment
from his levers.
"No. not that I know of, at least--except that it's hot."
"Good gracious, we don't need a halo to tell us that," cried Peggy,
and then regarding Professor Wandering William with that frank,
straight "between the eyes" look, as Jimsy called it, Peggy
remarked, "Do you know, Professor Wandering William, that you are a
very odd person?"
"Odd, my dear young lady. How so?"
"Why at times you are quite different to--to what you are at
others," stumbled Peggy lamely. It wasn't just what she wanted to
say, but as she told herself it expressed it tolerably.
"Almost human sometimes, eh?" chuckled Professor Wandering William
with a very odd winkle of his gray eyes; "well, you are not the
first person who has said that."
To herself Peggy thought, "I'm sure that if he'd cut his hair and
take off that dreadful goatee he'd be quite good looking. And his
eyes, too, they twinkle and flash sometimes in a way very much out
of keeping with his general appearance." But Professor Wandering
William, seemingly quite oblivious to Peggy's frank gaze, was
humming "Annie Laurie" to himself and gazing down at the flying
desert as it flashed by below.
"At this rate we'll be in Blue Creek long before those other
varmints," he observed at length; "that is, if all goes right.
Wonderful things these aeroplanes. Great scheme for selling patent
medicine. Why I could scatter my advertisements over a whole county
in a day's time if I had one of these. That is unless I scattered
myself first."
There was a sudden loud hissing sound from the motor. At the same
instant the propeller ceased to revolve and the monoplane dashed
downward with fearful force.
Roy worked at his levers desperately, while Peggy, white faced but
silent, clung tightly to the sides of the chassis. Professor
Wandering William did not utter a word, but his lips moved, as, from
a pleasing rapid forward motion their course suddenly changed to
that fearful downward plunge through space.
It seemed that in the molecule of time that intervened between the
sudden stopping of the propeller and the moment that they reached
the proximity of the ground that a whole lifetime flashed in front
of Peggy. "Is this the end?" she caught herself thinking.
But it was not. Roy's skill averted that. He handled the disabled
aeroplane so that as it struck the alkali its landing wheels
sustained the shock. But even with all his skill he could not
entirely ward off the shock. The monoplane struck the alkali in a
shower of white dust that hurtled high above it like a breaking sea
wave.
Peggy and the professor managed to hold on and resist the grinding
shock, but Roy did not fare so well. Like a projectile from a
catapult the shock flung him far. He came grinding down into the
sand on one shoulder, ploughing a little furrow. Then he lay very
still, while Peggy wondered vaguely if she was going to faint.
To scramble from the stranded machine was the work of an instant for
the erratic professor, and he extended his hand to Peggy. With a
supreme effort she pulled herself together and accepted his
proffered help. But agitated as she: was, she did not fail to
notice a surprising fact, and that was that the professor's hair was
on one side! The next instant he caught the girl's startled eyes
fixed upon it, but in that space of time he readjusted it, so that
he appeared exactly as usual. But to Peggy the recollection of that
deranged hair was unforgettable.
"It's--it's a wig!" she gasped to herself, and then, casting all
other thoughts aside, sped to Roy's side.
"Roy! Roy! are you badly hurt, dear?" she breathed, going down on
her knees in the rough surface of the desert.
The boy stirred uneasily and his eyes opened.
"Oh, is it you, Peggy? I guess I was knocked out for a minute.
It's my shoulder. Ouch! Don't touch it."
The boy winced as Peggy's soft hand touched the injured member.
"Allow me. I've got a little skill at surgery."'
It was Professor Wandering William's voice, and Peggy caught herself
wondering that he didn't make some reference to his infallible bone
set or wonder-working liniment. But he didn't. Instead, he knelt
by Roy's side, and with a few deft strokes of his knife had cut away
the boy's shirt and bared a shoulder that was rapidly turning a deep
blue.
Tenderly as a woman might have, Wandering William felt the wound.
"Hurt?" he asked, as Roy winced, biting his lips to keep from crying
out under the agony.
"Hurt?" echoed Peggy indignantly; "of course it does."
Professor Wandering William looked up with an odd air of authority
in his keen eyes.
"Please fetch me some water from the aeroplane," he said, and Peggy
had no choice but to obey.
Professor Wandering William, picking Roy up in his arms as if he
were a baby, instead of a 165-pound boy, carried him after her and
laid the injured lad out in the scant strip of shade afforded by the
aeroplane. Then, with bits of canvas ripped from the cover which
had served to conceal him when he entered the aerial vehicle, the
strange wanderer skillfully bathed and then bandaged the wound.
"Nothing more than a bad sprain," he announced.
Roy groaned.
"And just as I was going ahead at such tiptop speed, too," he
complained. "I won't be able to use this arm for a month the way it
feels."
"Never mind, Roy, I can drive the aeroplane," comforted Peggy. But
Roy was fretful from pain.
"What can a girl do?" he demanded; "this is a man's work. Oh, it's
too bad! It's--"
Suddenly the pain-crazed lad realized what he was saying and broke
off abruptly:
"Don't mind me, sis. I'm all worked up, I guess. But if it hadn't
been for this delay we'd have beaten them out. And now--"
"And now the first thing to do is to see what ails this old
machine," said Professor Wandering William briskly. "Let me lift
you into the what-you-may-call-um, my boy, and make you as
comfortable as possible on this canvas."
The professor skillfully arranged the canvas from which he had cut
the bandages, and making a pillow for Roy out of his own coat, he
lifted the lad into the chassis.
"There now, you'll do," he said, as his ministrations were
completed. "And now, young lady, as you know more about this thing
than I do let's have a look at it and see what particular brand of
illness it is suffering from."
A brief examination showed Peggy that the radiator--the intricate
mesh-work of pipes in which the circulating water for cooling the
cylinders is kept at a low temperature--was leaking, and that almost
all their supply of water had leaked out. This had caused the
cylinders of the motor to overheat and had stopped the aeroplane in
midair.
"Bad--is it?"'
Professor Wandering William noted the despairing look on Peggy's
face as she discovered the cause of the stoppage.
"As bad as bad can be," the girl rejoined seriously; "it means if we
can't get water and something to stop that leak with that we can't
go on or go back. We're stuck right here."
"Phew!" Wandering William's lips puckered in a whistle. "I should
just say that is bad."
He looked about him. On every side stretched the dazzling white
alkali, with here and there a little dust devil dancing as if in
mockery at their plight.
On all that vast expanse they seemed the only living things, and
Wandering William knew the desert well enough to realize that it is
not good to linger on its treacherous sands.