ROUGH GOING IN CLOUDLAND
“We’re off,” the major informed her, but his reminder was unnecessary.
Already J. Elfreda Briggs had shrunk to almost childish proportions and
the big army truck looked like a toy express wagon. Had it been painted
red the illusion would have been nearly perfect.
“My, it’s windy up here!” shouted Grace.
“We will be out of it soon, I think,” answered the major.
The wind was roaring through the rigging and the basket was swaying
most alarmingly. It seemed to Grace as if they were in imminent danger
of being spilled out. She clung tightly to the edge of the basket, and
looked down into it rather than toward the earth. What was even more
disturbing was the way that wicker floor settled and heaved underneath
her feet. What if the bottom should drop out? What if the sides should
give way? “Captain” Grace leaned back a little so as not to bear too
much weight on the side she was clinging to.
Major Colt’s back was turned toward her and his binoculars were at
his eyes. Those confident shoulders gave Grace renewed assurance that
there was nothing unusual about their situation. Just the same she
rather envied J. Elfreda Briggs, probably at that moment lounging back
comfortably on the rear seat of the major’s automobile and making
uncomplimentary remarks about “that crazy Grace Harlowe.” “Captain”
Grace was not over-certain that Elfreda was wrong.
Going up in a captive balloon is very different from a trip in an
airplane. There is no comparison possible so far as sensations are
concerned. Flying in a plane is exhilarating, but the lurches and sways
of the basket of a balloon, have a far different effect.
They had been going up for hours, as it seemed to her, when the major
turned toward her.
“Make you dizzy?” he shouted.
Grace smiled and nodded. She wondered how pale her face was, or as much
of it as showed outside of the helmet.
“Enjoying it?”
“It is a wonderful experience,” answered Grace, forcing a smile to her
face.
“Stop at two thousand,” called the officer through his telephone. “Now
you see one of the difficulties of going eastward. The strong light
is in our faces and we cannot see clearly. After the sun passes the
meridian, visibility will be vastly improved. You will enjoy the view
then.”
Grace Harlowe fervently hoped she might.
“Look over. You will get used to it very quickly. Not so much wind at
this level. I knew we should get better weather here. Guess I spoke too
quickly,” he added as a sickening lurch heaved the basket, and for a
few seconds the bottom seemed surely to be falling out of it.
“Stopped at two thousand,” came a voice from the depth somewhere below.
“Thought you were gone that time, didn’t you?” chuckled the officer.
“That jolt was caused by the stopping of the winch at two thousand.”
“Two thousand what, sir?”
“Feet of altitude. We will loaf around here for a time until you grow
weary of it, then we will go higher in search of some new scenery. When
the light gets better I will show you the Rhine.”
For the next several minutes the officer was occupied with studying the
landscape to the eastward.
“Enemy trains moving in formation. Nothing unusual,” he called down
through the telephone. “Large body of men emerging from forest ten
kilometers to the south of the main body. Go to thirty-five. May get a
better view.”
Grace tightened her grip as the basket lurched. She knew now what the
order meant. They were going fifteen hundred feet higher than they
were. Her eardrums began to throb and her breath came in little short
gasps.
“Stop at thirty-five.”
Again that disconcerting jolt and a violent swaying back and forth of
the huge, ungainly bag over their heads.
“How do you like it now?” called the officer in a jovial voice.
Grace saw his lips move and knew he was speaking to her, though she
could not hear a word he said.
“I can’t hear you, sir.”
“I thought so. Pinch your nose and swallow hard several times,” he
shouted, himself performing the same operation on his own nose.
Grace followed his direction, faintly heard, and something snapped in
both ears. For the moment she thought she had ruptured her eardrums,
but to her amazement discovered that she could hear as well as ever.
“I think I am perfectly all right now, sir,” she said. “How queer!”
“Decreased pressure,” answered Major Colt briefly. “We will make our
weather report now if you will be good enough to remove the thermometer
from the pocket behind you and throw it overboard.”
“Throw it overboard? Do you mean it, sir?”
He nodded.
Grace thrust her hand into the pocket and, finding the instrument,
dropped it over the side. To her surprise it stopped with a jolt when
just below the level of the basket. It was attached to a slender wire.
“Please haul it in in five minutes,” the major ordered. Then he gave
through the telephone the wind velocity, which Grace was amazed to
learn was thirty-eight miles an hour; then the barometer reading, and
then he called for the temperature.
“Twenty-eight, sir.”
“Twenty-eight,” repeated the major through the telephone. “That duty
done we will now proceed to enjoy ourselves. Hungry?”
“I--I hadn’t thought about it. Now that you mention the subject I do
realize that there is a sort of gone feeling in my stomach.”
“We’ll have a bit of a bite. While I am getting it ready you see if you
can find the American Army.”
Grace studied the landscape ahead of them for a long time, and said
she couldn’t see anything that looked like an army. He demanded to know
where she was looking.
“About where those little green hills are. I do not recall having seen
those from the ground,” she said, lowering her glasses.
The major chuckled.
“Know where you are looking for the American Army? You’re hunting for
it on the other side of the Rhine. Look down at an angle of about
forty-five degrees. See anything?”
“I think I do, but what I see doesn’t look like any army that I ever
saw.”
“You’re looking at the Third American Army, just the same. Now find the
Boche army a little further out, but not too far.”
“I have them, sir.”
“What are they doing?”
“Creeping in formation.”
“Good! You are an observer already. Lean over and look down. Get used
to it. Make you dizzy?”
“A little. I get dizzy when the basket tries to lie down on its side,
and feel as if I were going to fall out.”
The major laughed and motioned to her to sit down.
“Going to have tiffin now. Don’t bother us with your family troubles
down there, at least not until after the whistle blows,” he called
through the telephone, and doubling his legs under him he sat down on
the bottom of the basket, with an appetizing-looking luncheon spread
out on a piece of paper in his lap.
They could hear the wind roaring over them now, but only breaths of it
sucked down into the basket. A thermos bottle of tea that was still hot
was handed to Grace, Major Colt producing another from “nowhere” for
his own consumption.
“Drink it down. It will put new life into you. Dip into the food too.
There’s plenty and to spare. Suppose you never sat down to tiffin
thirty-five hundred feet in the air?”
Grace said she never had.
“Were you ever shot down while on observation work?” she asked him
between mouthfuls.
“Yes, a few times.”
“What happened?”
“I came down.” He grinned.
“What else, sir?” persisted Grace, determined to get the story from him.
“Nothing except that a Boche flier took a mean advantage of me and
sneaked up on me in an Allied plane that the enemy had captured. Then
he calmly dropped a bomb on the old bag.”
“What did you do then, sir?”
“Deserted the ship and woke up in a hospital. You see I bumped my head
against a stone wall in landing. My head from infancy has been soft and
demands most delicate handling.”
Grace said she couldn’t imagine such a thing. To her the major was a
heroic figure. He reminded her of Hippy Wingate. Like Hippy he made a
joke of the desperate work he had done and was still doing. There were
no heroics about those cloudland pirates.
“What did you do before the war, if it is not an impertinent question?
You know a woman’s curiosity must be satisfied.”
“No impertinence about it at all. I had a good job, and maybe I shall
have the luck to get it back again after the war is over. I was a
floor-walker in a Newark, New Jersey, department store. I’ve been up in
the world since then. Had my ups and downs as it were.”
Grace laughed. War played strange freaks with human beings. The
officer’s confession, instead of decreasing her admiration of him,
increased it. A man who could step from department store life into the
perilous life of a wartime balloonist was a _man_! That was the way
with her wonderful Americans. But to have to return to the chattering
crowds of shoppers, directing this one to the ribbon counter, that one
to the galvanized cooking utensil sale in the basement--the thought
was too much for Grace Harlowe. She could not reconcile herself to it
nor adjust herself to seeing this hardy pirate acting in any such rôle
in the future.
“You do not think so, eh?” he demanded shrewdly. “Watch me. One day you
will step up to me, without recognizing me, and say, ‘Floor-walker,
will you please direct me to the cosmetics?’”
“I will not,” declared Grace Harlowe. “I never use them.”
Both laughed heartily.
“You may be right--I may be right, who knows?” he muttered. “I shall
miss this wonderful life, of course, and it will be difficult to settle
down and have to look up again rather than down on a world of pigmies.
Had I to do it over again I should go into aviation. Those fellows
are free as the birds of the air, while I am anchored to a tree or
truck. I prefer to be free, to soar the heavens without having a string
attached--What!”
The major sprang up, scattering the remainder of their tiffin on
the floor of the basket. The basket had given a terrific lurch and,
glancing up with a frightened expression on her face, Grace saw the
huge bag heaving, swelling and plunging, the basket twisting, lurching
and jolting under her.
The girl staggered to her feet and grasped the side of the basket. Her
head was spinning and her diaphragm seemed to be seeking to emulate the
erratic movements of the ship.
“Wind-storm!” shouted Major Colt. “Going to have some real sport.”
Grace did not know what his idea of sport was, but she was quite
positive that if this were sport she was not a sportsman.
“Haul in, you idiots!” bellowed the officer through the telephone.
“Can’t you see we’re trying to stand on our heads?”
“Waiting for orders, sir,” came back the answer. “Hauling down now till
ordered to stop.”
“You’d better,” growled the major. “Hang on so you don’t get thrown
out!” he called to Grace.
The Overton girl needed no advice in that direction. She was clinging
to the basket’s edge with all her might. The balloon adopted new
tactics. The instant the winch down there began to wind in, the
balloon, as if resentful of this interference with its “sport,” began
to buck and dive. At one time the wicker basket was actually lying on
its side, and as Grace lay on her stomach against it she found herself
gazing straight down three-and-a-half thousand feet.
“Captain” Grace closed her eyes to shut out the sight. It was just a
little more than she could stand. A few seconds later she was on her
feet again, for the balloon had righted. Now the bag began to whip the
air.
“Let go!” she heard the balloonist call through the telephone. “Trying
to crack the whip with us? Not ready to bump our heads on the ground
just yet. Up five hundred more. Maybe we’ll find a better streak there.
Anyway we’ll ride it out, wind or no wind.”
The balloon eased a little, and while it still bucked there was less
kick, so to speak, in its movements.
The respite, however, was a brief one, and again those fearsome tactics
were resumed.
Major Colt glanced at Grace during a brief lull. She nodded and forced
a smile to her face.
“Are we in great danger?” she shouted.
“It might be worse,” was the comforting response. “We are good so long
as the bag holds, but the wind is growing stronger and no telling what
may turn up. Keep cool. I’ll get you out of it, wind or no wind.”
A blast that threatened to rend the bag struck them, and the balloon
lay down on its side. It was up with a bound, then down again, until
Grace Harlowe could not decide for a certainty whether she was standing
on her head or on her feet. As a matter of fact she was practically
doing both.
Then suddenly peace, delicious peace and quiet, settled over the
troubled ship. It righted, the wind stopped blowing and the balloon
floated gently on an even keel.
“Oh, isn’t this fine!” cried Grace happily.
“Rotten fine, thank you, as the Englishman would say. Know what’s
happened?”
“No, sir, but whatever it is I feel greatly relieved to know that the
wind has died down as suddenly as it broke loose.”
“My dear woman, something other than the wind has broken loose. The
wind is blowing just as hard as before, but we do not feel it because
we are going with it. We’re adrift!”
“Meaning?”
“That the balloon has snapped its cable and is now traveling toward
the Rhine at a high rate of speed. From present indications I should
say that you and I will arrive there considerably in advance of the
Third American Army.” Trying to appear undisturbed, though he was more
troubled than he cared to admit to his passenger, Major Colt possessed
a pretty clear idea of what was before them.