IV

During the ensuing three days we saw plenty of it, and finally went

through the procedure of inspecting and testing two more Martins. By

this time the Martin factory was under heavy guard. The Martins being

vitally important--in fact, indispensable--for the conduct of the

bombing tests, the company was under a heavy forfeit clause in the

contract for twenty thereof, and the mere idea that there was dirty

work at the cross-roads struck them with panic.

Detectives were rounding up the discharged and discredited employees

little by little and each by each. So far no confession had been

third-degreed out of the men. The first lot all had alibis.

Believe me, though, we inspected the ships from stem to stern and from

rudder to nose again the next morning before we started on our way. Our

route lay over the flat Ohio fields, almost due south to McCook Field

at Dayton. There we gassed up, and set sail eastward to Boundville,

which is a West Virginia village right on the bank of the Ohio River in

that little sliver of West Virginia which hides coyly between Ohio and

Pennsylvania. At Boundville the government maintains a little

way-station on the Washington-Dayton airway. It’s just a field with a

few spare parts and some gas and oil available.

It was a nice trip.

In case you don’t know a Martin, let me elucidate a bit for thee. The

ship weighs four tons, and has about seventy feet of wingspread. On

each wing, just far enough from the cockpit to allow the propellers to

whirl without hitting anything, a Liberty motor is set in a maze of

huge, trunklike struts which hold it up and in and down; in fact, keep

it safely anchored.

The pilot’s cockpit, with two seats side by side in it, is set a bit

forward of the wings, about on a line with the two propellers in front

of the motors. Ahead of the pilot’s cockpit, in the very nose of the

ship, is an observer’s cockpit, equipped with bomb-sights, glass in the

flooring to look down through, bomb releases, and about a thousand

other things with technical names as long as your arm, or even as long

as mine, which is considerably lengthy.

Directly in back of the pilot’s cockpit, in the fore part of the huge

fuselage, is the hollow bomb compartment, with bomb racks which can

carry two tons of bombs, ranging from a swarm of little twenty-five

pounders up through three hundreds, six hundreds, two one-thousand

pounders or one two-thousand baby.

In back of this compartment, about half way to the tail surfaces, there

is a cockpit for the mechanic or radio operator. The tail surfaces

consist of elevators, vertical fin and stabilizer, each very large, but

otherwise the same as in any ship, and it has two big rudders, both

worked by the same rudder bar.

Les and I, like fleas on elephants’ backs, set our course from Dayton

to a bit south of the airline to make sure. When we sighted the wide,

sluggish-looking Ohio we simply flew up the stream until the field at

Boundville came in sight.

It’s somewhat of a trick to land a Martin, because you’ve got two

motors to handle, the ship is so heavy that it settles rapidly, and the

pilot’s cockpit is about ten feet above the ground. That makes leveling

off a foot above the ground a bit difficult, at first. I made it the

first try by bull luck in that small field, and Les did it with

nonchalant ease, of course.

Marston had been riding alongside me the whole trip looking straight

ahead and not vouchsafing me so much as a look, either dirty or

otherwise. He and I exchanged as few words as the law allowed. The cars

from town commenced to arrive immediately, of course, to look over the

huge ships which were so awe-inspiring compared to the De Havilands the

townspeople were accustomed to. There was one lonesome soldier in

charge of the gas and oil.

We were to spend the night there, there being no wild rush. We taxied

the ships up to the line in front of the gas shack, turned them around,

and climbed out after running out the motors.

“Both of you stay here until the ships are gassed and oiled, and until

dark, when the people quit coming,” I told them. “This trip you,

Marston, will spend the night out here on guard, and next trip Bailey

can take it. That suit you, Les?”

“Sure,” returned that young gentlemen. “At that, Bailey, ’d advise you

to stay out here rather than in the one hotel down there. It’s name

ought to be the ‘Bedbug’s Roost,’ and it has the first collection of

bowls and pitchers and other sanitary brica-brac I’ve seen since the

hogs ate my brother.”

Bailey, one of the clean-looking, bright youngsters who came into the

army during the war and stayed, grinned and allowed that he’d try it.

Les and I accepted a ride into town with our baggage after I’d made

arrangements with the soldier on duty to supply Marston with blankets.

George William set to work bleakly, not uttering so much as a word. He

would be out there all alone, because the field guard’s duty did not

include night work.

We saw a wild western movie called “Temptations of the Flesh,” fought

off curious questioners the whole length of the one street, and retired

early because there was nothing else to do. It was the sort of a town

I’d like to come to after a month of ribaldry, to settle down for a

week or two and do nothing but drink Pluto and watch the sun go down.

Our start was planned for seven o’clock, and we were out there right on

time. We wanted to cross the towering Cumberlands of West Virginia

early, before it got hot and the cañons and rivers and woods and rocks

made the air too bumpy.

Early as we were, however, a parade of cars followed us out. The

residents of Boundville considered eleven A. M. the middle of the

night, and four was the fashionable breakfast hour. As our Ford bumped

into the field, leading a miscellaneous collection of vehicles, I

spotted Marston reclining in his blankets under a wing.

That made me pretty sore. He knew the hour we were to start, and we had

sent a man out to him with a vacuum bottle full of coffee and half a

dozen buttered rolls for his breakfast. The messenger was standing

alongside his car, smoking a cigaret.

I galloped over to George William, followed in order by Les and Bailey.

Marston should have had the canvas covers off motors and cockpits, and

everything ready for the warmup.

“Sorry to disturb your rest, Marston,” I told him as we came within a

few feet of him. “It’s a shame to get you up before noon, but you can

get your beauty sleep back at Langham.”

By that time I was right over him, and as I looked down at him I saw

that his face was a curious greenish color. His eyes glared up into

mine with that non-stop hatred in them. Then, without a word, he

staggered to his feet and over to one side of the field, where he had

what looked like a paroxysm of coughing; apparently trying to vomit,

but couldn’t. Then he walked back to us, and seemed to be all right,

temporarily.

“Sick?” I asked him, while curious onlookers gathered close.

“Get back where you belong!” yelled Les, and herded them away.

“I never was sicker in my life,” stated Marston, mumbling his words.

“Any idea what made you so?”

“No, sir. Late last night a couple of fellows came out and gabbed a

while, and finally went to town and got some sandwiches and coffee and

we ate ’em. They beat it away, and I went to sleep a while and woke up

sick as a dog. And I’ve been sick ever since.”

“Haven’t been drinking any of this moonshine?”

“No,” he barked savagely, as if I was inferring that he was responsible

for the war or something.

“Well, are you up to the trip?”

“Sure.”

“The ---- he is,” stated Fernald. “He’d better find a doctor and lay up

here a few days and meet us in Cleveland again for the next trip. He’s

as green as a drafted mountaineer, and----”

He was interrupted by another paroxysm on the part of George William.

It was horrible to see his body wracked and wrenched around, without

relieving the terrible nausea.

“Climb in one of those cars and get to a doctor as soon as we leave,” I

told him. “The next Martins’ll be ready in five days. Meet us in

Cleveland then.”

He made no answer, but walked weakly over to the side of the field, and

sat there numbly. Bailey primed both motors, and then Les in his ship

and I in mine pressed the self-starter buttons, and soon the four great

Libertys were roaring a diapason of power. I watched the maze of

instruments--just double as many as in a single-motored ship, of

course--and then idled my left motor while I gave the right one full

gun, tried it on either switch of the double-ignition system, and

listened carefully.

Everything was sweet as a nut, and the same procedure was gone through

with the other motor. My ship was r’arin’ to go, and so was Fernald’s.

The field guard pulled the blocks and tossed them into the rear

cockpit, and I turned my ship on a dime by using only the left-hand

motor, which pulled the ship around to the right. Then followed

Fernald’s huge Martin, like a house on wheels, up the field for the

take-off.

* * * * *

The field lay practically east and west, and the western edge went

right to the edge of the river. The wind was from the west. There was a

screen of trees and undergrowth between the edge and the Ohio, the tops

of the trees some fifteen feet above the level of the field. The growth

was on the banks of the river, which sloped down from the field to the

water.

As I was turning for the take-off Les, with Bailey beside him, gave his

ship the guns. It roared away across the field, and in a moment his

steady pressure on the wheel had the tail up. I waited, in order to

give the air, which would be badly scrambled by the wash of two

propellers, a chance to clear a bit. I set my goggles, jazzed each

motor a bit, and shoved the two throttles all the way on just as Les

left the ground.

In a Martin there is no obstruction to your view, the motors being to

each side of you. It took all my strength, pushing against the wheel,

to get the tail up. As my big bomber picked up speed Les was circling

over the river.

Then two things happened simultaneously. I heard a wild mixture of

yells, screams and shrieks from the cars drawn up on the edges of the

field at the same moment that the tail of my ship hit the ground again

with a terrific crunch and the wheel under my hands suddenly became

free, as easily movable as if it was attached to nothing whatever. I

took a split-second to look up, and saw Fernald’s Martin, in a

half-spin, drop below the edge of the trees. The next second a reversed

Niagara of water rose above the foliage.

My brain, none too hardy an instrument at best, was literally as numb

as a piece of sausage. But I could not think of Les then. My elevators

were no more--that was why the wheel had become free in my hand and the

tail back on the ground. I was within a hundred feet of the trees,

traveling at more than fifty miles an hour, with no chance of taking

off. In a flash my hand dropped to the throttles. By cutting one, the

other motor would drag the ship around, probably wrecking a wing, but

saving me.

Even as I did so, I knew I could not do it. For those ---- cars had

lined each edge of the field, and my ship would probably plow through

them, killing every fool spectator in the bunch.

There was nothing to do but let it go straight ahead. It was slowing

up, but four tons which has been going close to sixty miles an hour

can’t stop as quick as a motorless Ford going up Pike’s Peak when the

brakes are applied. As inevitably as fate itself, I was trundling

swiftly toward those trees, with only a frail cockpit between myself

and them, and two props to hem me in and keep me from jumping.

I cut the switches fifty feet from the trees. Up went my goggles, and

off went my belt. I got to my feet on the seat the second before the

ship plunged over the embankment. The trees were ten feet ahead. As it

crashed over the lip of the field toward them I crouched, and leaped

like a kangaroo. And by the seven thousand sweethearts of King Solomon

I got my hands around a limb that swayed underneath me, and there I

clung, like a monkey by its tail, thirty feet above the base of the

tree.

Had I gone down with the ship all that would have remained of Slim

Evans would have been an over-sized pancake. The four-ton ship crashed

against the sturdy trees, and the observer’s cockpit crumpled like an

eggshell. The trees swept half through both wings, and at the finish

one great oak was the exclusive occupant of the cockpit which had once

been mine. I’d have been wrapped around it in loving embrace, never to

leave it until they scraped me off.

I scrambled on this swaying reed of a limb, and worked my way back

toward the trunk of the tree. I had no time for the fainting,

screaming, yelling and generally hysterical bunch of nitwits on the

field, but safe in a crotch of the tree gazed down upon the river.

There was Fernald’s Martin, half-submerged, and on the upflung tail was

Mr. Fernald himself, accompanied by Mr. Bailey.

I was so relieved I let out a loud yelp. If I could talk as loud as

that habitually we wouldn’t have had to wire Washington at all.

Fernald, squatting like a frog on a lily pad, waved airily to me,

clinging pensively to my perch in a tree.

“Don’t mind if I leave this here for a while, do you Slim?” he inquired

in his placid way. “Hurt?”

“Nope. How about you?”

“Bailey’s got a broken rib, or maybe two or three or four,” yelled

Fernald. “Otherwise all present and accounted for. Looks to me as

though there was dirty work along the river.”

“I’ll see about a boat for you,” I told him, and started to climb down

the tree toward the surging mob beneath me.

I oiled up the mental machinery and had it whirring away at a great

rate before I got down. While still ten feet up I gave orders.

“Get back on the field and stay there,” I told the crowd. “And I mean

it. Beat it--fast! All but Marston! Wait a minute. Who’s got a boat or

knows of one?”

“I--I got one!” stuttered one red-faced man with a gray mustache of the

vintage of 1850.

“Get at it quick?”

“Y-Yes.”

“Get it and get out after the two men on the river--quick! Rest of you

back on the field.”

They obeyed pronto, talking to each other continuously and with no one

listening to anybody else. I had a sort of a kind of a plan of

procedure staked out by the time I got down and faced the scaredest,

whitest, most shaken-up sergeant in the American or any other army.

“You’re sicker now, I presume,” I told him grimly.

Marston could not speak. His tongue seemed stuck to the roof of his

mouth, and he was a truly pitiful sight, I suppose, had I had room for

any pity in my mind.

I was about to launch forth on something, when one of the occasional

sensible ideas I get seized the opportunity to make itself known to me.

So I folded up my tongue and said curtly:

“My elevator controls went bad on the take-off. Looks to me like

Fernald’s went bad in the air, and it was just the grace of ---- he was

over the water, and only a few feet high. Help me with this fuselage.”

Marston, as I said, was like a man in a trance. His weakness seemed to

have been effectually scared out of him, and he didn’t try to vomit

once. Which gave me pause for thought, in itself. _He_ hadn’t been in

my ship.

* * * * *

We looked at the elevators, which were absolutely undamaged. The

control wires were attached to the little cabane struts above and below

the great linen fins--but they hung loosely. Then I broke through the

fuselage carefully, so that patching would be all that was necessary to

repair it, and took a look inside. The tail-control cables go through

the fuselage, and are not visible from the outside except at either

end.

In a very few minutes the evidence was all before me. The cables had

been filed inside. Not completely through, but nearly. The object was

clear. The few unfiled strands of the cables were sufficiently strong

to hold and work the elevators when the ship was on the ground. But

when it picked up speed, and one commenced to use the things with all

the force of the propeller blast, plus the speed of the ship, acting

against the surfaces, the cable was not strong enough to hold.

I had been lucky, in a way, in that mine had been filed a bit too much

and had broken before I was going at full speed. Les’ had given way

over the river. It was my guess that the perpetrator of the thing had

hoped that the cables would hold for a while, and give way during the

trip some time when the ship was going at an unusually fast pace,

getting underneath a cloud or something like that. It didn’t seem

likely that he or they would want the wrecks to happen on the field.

Marston saw it, and he was a broken man. For a moment, that is. My eyes

must have shown what was in my mind as they finally met his. He

straightened like a shot, and his sullen, strained face suddenly

flushed as red as fire. He stood there, daring me to say something, and

hating me worse than ever because of what had happened. And as I stood

there I was utterly convinced that I was looking at as low and rotten a

murderer as one would meet in a tour of the United States, where most

of the murderers are.