Bill, driving the little car which he had named the Swallow, reached the
quarters at the School of Fire in a rising cloud of dust. The wind had
risen suddenly and the fine sand whipped around the long board
buildings, driving in through every crack and crevice. All the rest of
the afternoon it blew, and at six o'clock, when the Major came in, he
was coated with the fine yellow dust. By nine o'clock, when Bill went to
bed, a small gale was singing around, and about one o'clock he was
awakened by the scream of the wind. It shrieked and howled, and the
quarters rattled and quivered.
Bill remembered the Swallow and his dad's car, both standing at the back
door. He rose and went to his mother's room. He found her curled up in a
little ball on her quartermaster's cot, looking out of the window.
"Come in, Billy," she said as she saw him at the door. "You are missing
a great sight."
They cuddled close, their arms around each other, and pressed their
faces close to the pane. The yellow sand was driven across the prairie
like a sheet of rain. The Major's big car shuddered with each fresh
blast, and the little Swallow seemed to cower close to the ground.
Continuous sheets of lightning made the night as bright as day. Over
the whine and whistle of the wind they could hear the distant rumble of
the thunder. The room was full of dust, driven through the cracks of the
window. Their throats were choked with it. The wind blew harder and
harder; the lightning grew brighter, slashing the black sky with great
gashes of blinding light.
Bill looked sober. "Gee, it is fierce!" he said in an awed tone. "Where
is dad all this time?"
"In his room sound asleep," said Mrs. Sherman. "I suppose he is used to
sights like this. Wasn't it _nice_ of Oklahoma to stage such a wonderful
sight for us? I wouldnt have missed it for anything."
"It is going to rain," said Bill, again looking out. "The thunder is
growing louder and louder. Did you ever see anything like the glare the
lightning makes?"
All at once Mrs. Sherman clutched Bill and pointed out.
"Oh, look, look!" she cried.
Bill followed the direction of her finger, and saw a small rabbit
running before the blast. He was going at a rate that caused his pop
eyes to pop worse than ever. As he skimmed along, he made the mistake of
trying to turn. In a second he was being rushed along sidewise, hopping
frantically up and down in order to keep on his feet, but unable to turn
back again or to stop. Bill and his mother laughed until they cried as
the little rabbit was hustled out of sight around the end of the
students' quarters.
The lightning grew worse and occasionally balls of flame shot earthward.
The thunder rolled in a deafening roar. Then suddenly the wind
stopped--stopped so suddenly and completely that Bill jumped and his
mother said, "Goodness me!" in a small, scared voice.
There was a long pause as though Nature was calling attention to her
freaks, and then down came the rain. It came in rivers, sheets, floods.
The roads ran yellow mud; the creek over the bluff commenced to boil.
The sparse dwarfed trees that clung to the sides of the gullies bent
under the weight of falling water.
It poured and poured and poured.
Bill had seen rain before, if not in such quantities. He found himself
growing sleepy, and kissing his mother twice, once for luck and once for
love, as he told her, he went to bed and to sleep, while the downpour
continued until almost morning.
The roads were impassable, although a hot, steamy, sunshiny day did its
best to dry things up. Bill spent most of the day putting the poor
half-drowned Swallow in shape.
Frank telephoned, but could not get over. He was excited about the
damage that had been done at the Aviation Field. One of the great
hangars had collapsed, ruining the machines inside. No planes were
allowed to fly.
Frank wanted Bill to walk over and Bill suggested the same pastime for
Frank; consequently neither one would go. The roads continued to be a
gummy, sticky mass of clay, and after four or five days Frank started to
walk across the prairie to the School of Fire.
Just before he reached the bridge crossing the glen between the New Post
and the School, he heard a joyful whoop and there was Bill running to
meet him.
"Hey there!" called Bill, as soon as he could possibly make himself
heard. "I was just starting over to see you."
"Come on back!" grinned Frank. "I am at home this morning."
"Not as much as I am," answered his friend. "Gee, it has been a long
week! Did you ever see such a storm?"
"Oklahoma can beat that any time she wants to," boasted Frank. "That was
just a _little_ one. You ought to see a real blizzard or 'sly coon' as
we call the cyclones. They are bad medicine, as the Indians say."
"This was big enough to start with," said Bill. "I thought the Swallow
was going to fly away. And dad's big car _reeled_ around. And you should
have seen our bath tub! It was full of sand."
"Clear up to the top?" asked Frank teasingly.
"There was a good inch in it," retorted Bill, "and it looks to me as
though that was a good deal of sand to trickle through the windows when
they all have screens and were closed besides."
"It surely does get in," granted Frank. "Hello, there comes Lee! Where
is he going, I wonder, without his fatigue suit on?"
"I suppose you mean those overall things he works in, don't you?" said
Bill. "I know that much now. Lee doesn't wear them any more. He was so
crazy over mother and so good to her and to me that dad got him
transferred to his Battery, and now he is our orderly."
"How did he manage to do that?" said Frank.
"Why, there was some fellow who wanted to leave the guns and work around
the quarters as janitor. They have an idea that it is an easy job. So
dad let him make the exchange, and I can tell you we were all about as
pleased as we could be."
"Good work!" commended Frank, but without enthusiasm. He did not want
Bill to have the fun of having Lee for orderly. He had been trying to
think up some scheme whereby the soldier would be sent over to fill that
position with his own father.
"Lee is a peach," said Bill warmly. "Look what he made me."
He fished in his pocket and drew forth a length of chain. The small,
delicate links were carved from a single piece of wood, and at the end,
like an ornamentation, hung a carved cage in which rolled a little
wooden ball. It was all very curious and delicate.
"My, but that's a peach," said Frank.
"You ought to see the one he did for mother," said Bill. "Small enough
for a bracelet almost, and the little ball smaller than a pea. The links
are all carved on the outside, and there is a sort of rose on the end of
this cage thing, and Lee painted it all up pink and green where it ought
to be like that.
"He knows all about a car too. This week he has been going over dad's
car and the Swallow, and they run like grease."
Frank fiddled with the chain. He had nothing to say. On account of his
Indian blood, his silent ways and mischievous nature, Lee had always
filled him with interest. He could tell wonderful stories too of his own
times and the times that lay long behind him, as he heard of them from
his father and grandfather.
Lee's grandfather knew a great many things that he never did tell, but
once in awhile he was willing to open his close-set old mouth and talk.
He wore black broadcloth clothes, a long coat, and a white shirt, but
never a collar. A wide black, soft-brimmed hat was set squarely on his
coal black hair. Under the hat, smooth as a piece of satin, his hair
hung in two tight braids close to each ear. They were always wound with
bright colored worsted. Grandfather Lee, the old chieftain, liked
bright colors, so he usually had red and yellow on his braids. They hung
nearly to his waist, down in front, over each coat lapel. Small gold
rings hung in his ears, and under his eyes and across each cheek bone
was a faint streak of yellow paint.
His Indian name was Bird that Flies by Night, and he lived about a
hundred miles away, on a farm given him by the Government. He had lived
there quite contentedly for many years, tilling the ground when he had
to. But now everything was changed. Oklahoma had given up her treasure,
the hidden millions that lay under her sandy stretches. Oil derricks
rose thickly everywhere, and Bird that Flies by Night found that all he
had to do was to sit on his back porch and look at the derrick that had
been raised over the well dug where his three pigs used to root. Two
hundred dollars a day that well was bringing to the old Bird and, as Lee
said, was "still going strong."
"And here _I_ am," said Lee grimly, "enlisted for three years!"
Lee's father was an Indian of a later day. He had gone through an
eastern college and had been in business in a small town when the oil
excitement broke out. He went into oil at once, and was far down in the
oil fields, Lee did not know where.
As a boy, Lee himself had refused to accept the schooling urged by his
mother and college-bred father, and had led a restless, roaming life,
filled with hairbreadth escapes, until the beginning of the war, when
he had enlisted in the hope of being sent across where the danger lay.
But like many another man as brave and as willing, he had been caught in
one of the war's backwaters, and had been stationed at Fort Sill.
Sauntering up to the quarters, the boys found Lee staring moodily at the
small and racy Swallow, now standing clean and glistening in the bright
sunlight.
"She knocks," he said, knitting his fierce black brows. "All morning I
have been working over that car, and I can't find that knock."
The boys came close and listened.
"I don't hear any knock," said Frank.
They all listened.
"Don't you hear it now?" said Lee, speeding the engine.
"Seems as though I hear something," said Bill, partly to please Lee.
They all listened closely.
Lee commenced to pry about in the engine. "I have it, I think," he
exclaimed triumphantly as he took out a small piece of the machinery.
Frank motioned Bill one side, and they wandered around the end of the
building.
"Don't you feel sort of afraid to let Lee tinker with your car?" he
asked with a show of carelessness.
"Not a bit! Dad says he is a born mechanic and he trusts him with all
the care of his car. If dad thinks he can fix that, why, I guess it is
safe to let him do anything he wants to do with the Swallow."
"Do you ever let anybody else drive the Swallow?" asked Frank. "I
wouldn't mind taking it some day if you don't care."
Bill looked embarrassed.
"I would let you take her in a minute," He said, "but dad made me
promise that I would never loan the Swallow to anyone. It is not that he
wants me to be selfish, but he says if anything should happen, if the
car should be broken, or if there should be an accident and some other
boy hurt, I would sort of feel that it was my fault."
"I don't see it that way at all," said Frank, who was crazy to get hold
of the pretty car and show it off to some boys and girls he knew in
Lawton. He didn't want to drive with Bill. He was the sort of a boy who
always wants all the glory for himself. That car was quite the most
perfect thing; the sort a fellow sees in his dreams. Frank knew that he
could never hope to own such a car, and the fact that Bill was always
willing to take him wherever he wanted to go was not enough. Bill had
never driven to Lawton, the town nearest the Post. He had told Frank
that he would take him with him the first time. Frank had thought it
would be pretty fine to go humming up the main street past all the
people from the Post and the ranches, and the old Indians and the
crowds of Indian boys his own age who always came in on Saturday from
the Indian school near by. He had been anticipating that trip ever since
Bill had appeared with the Swallow; but now he felt that it would be far
nicer if Bill would or could be made to loan him the car. Of course he
couldn't run it, but he could run an airplane engine, and he was
perfectly willing to try running the little Swallow.
Frank had a great trick of getting his own way about things, and he
reflected with satisfaction that as long as the roads to Lawton were
almost impossible for traffic after the rainfall, there would be a few
days in which to scheme for his plan. Nothing of this, however, appeared
in his face. He turned and shrugged his shoulders.
"Well, if you and your dad think Lee can handle a car all right, it's
all the same to me," he laughed. "My father says you never can trust an
Indian anyhow."
"Well, we would trust Lee with anything in the world," reiterated Bill.
"That's all right, too, if you think so," said Frank, trying slyly to
breed distrust in Bill's heart. "I guess you never heard my father tell
some of his Indian stories. You would feel different if you had."
"But anybody would just _have_ to trust Lee," said Bill. "Why, he is as
good as gold! And he hates a lie, and he has such nice people--two of
the prettiest little sisters. One of them plays the harp. It's one of
those big gold ones, and she is so little that Lee says she has to trot
clear round the harp to play some of the notes, because her arms are too
short to reach."
"He's half Indian just the same," insisted Frank. He warmed to the
subject as he went on. He couldn't forgive Lee, quite the most thrilling
and amusing soldier he knew, for _letting_ himself be made Major
Sherman's orderly.
"Well, I am for Lee every time," said Bill, "and I would wager anything
I have that he is just as true blue as--as--well, as my dad!" Bill could
pay no greater compliment, and the words rang out clear and honest. The
boys stood beside the quarters, staring idly across the bluff as they
talked. They were so interested in their conversation that they were not
aware of a listener. Lee, with a part of the Swallow in his hand to show
Bill, had followed them in time to overhear the conversation concerning
himself, but he quickly drew back and returned to the automobile.
"Good boy, Billy!" he said softly to himself. Then with a dark look
coming into his face, "So you can't trust an Indian, can you? Ha ha! I
wonder what we had better do about that?"