At last the heavily-loaded Wind Bird began to lift gallantly, then zoomed up into the sky.

A VIKING OF THE SKY

A Story of a Boy Who Gained

Success in Aeronautics

by

Hugh McAlister

Author of

“Stand By”, “The Flight of the Silver Ship”,

“Steve Holworth of the Oldham Works”,

“Conqueror of the Highroad”,

“Flaming River”.

THE SAALFIELD PUBLISHING COMPANY

AKRON, OHIO NEW YORK

A VIKING OF THE SKY

Copyright, MCMXXX

by The Saalfield Publishing Company

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

A Viking of the Sky

CHAPTER I
NIGHT HAWK

“Oh, how I wish I was up there!” muttered Hal Dane to himself as he cocked an eye upward into the far heights of the moonlit sky.

In mind, Hal Dane was already just below the stars, riding the clouds in a winged ship; before him, on imaginary instrument board, ticked the latest thing in indicator, controller, tachometer. And all the while, like the other half of a dual personality, his hands and feet mechanically guided his rattletrap old truck along the ruts of the lonesome country road. On the downgrades Hal’s left hand with skill of long practice chocked a brakeless wheel with a wooden block, and on the upgrades his right foot judiciously kicked a wire that let on extra “juice” for the pull.

In Hillton, Hal’s home village, folks laughed considerably over the Western Flyer, which a green daub of paint on the sideboards flaunted to the world as the ancient truck’s title. But folks didn’t laugh at the boy who persistently patched up the rattletrap and drove it. Anyone knew that it took genius of sorts even to hold the contraption to the straight road.

For all its decrepitude, Hal had to hang on to the old truck. It furnished his living—and a living for his mother and his great-uncle Telemachus, who was “stove-up with rheumatism.” The weeks when hauling was brisk, the truck even earned a few strange luxuries such as queer Hal Dane would want—bottles of odd-smelling glue, old wire springs and bits of metal from Kerrigan’s junk pile, and now and then a precious book full of diagrams of aeronautical engines.

Usually Hal got a chance to make at least one trip a day, hauling garden truck over the thirty-mile route from Hillton to Interborough, the nearest city. On the return trip he’d bring supplies for the little stores in his home village and other villages beyond Hillton.

Sometimes he had the luck to land a second sixty-mile round of hauling in one day—like the present occasion that was bringing him rattling homeward in the night.

Night hauling was wearisome work, and if it hadn’t been for Hal’s lively imagination he would have been tempted to doze on his job. But Hal Dane’s air-minded brain was seething with spirals and Immelmanns and three-point landings. One of the great events of his life, the State Air Meet at Interborough, had been over for a week, but every flight and entry was still fresh in the boy’s mind. He lived them over again. By twist of the imagination old man Herman’s two milk cans rhythmically banging against Grocer Kane’s crate of lard buckets seemed almost the roar of a stunt plane warming up for action. Hal could almost think himself into seeing in that empty stretch of sky above the host of planes that had formed the “flying circus” of last week. There had been Rex Raynor, famous pilot who stunted upside-down; there had been aerial rope-swingers and ladder-climbers. There had been—

“Bang—bong—scre-e-eak!”

With a snort of dismay at the clattering outspilling of his load and the scrape of his truck as it careened sideways, Hal chocked his wheel and leaped for the ground.

“Jumping catfish!” moaned the lanky, long-legged blond young trucker as he raced madly down the road he had just rattled up. “Ought to have looked back once in a while ’stead of always up at the sky—wouldn’t have happened then!” And onward he sped, chasing a runaway wheel.

This, though, was no unheard-of performance. The Western Flyer flung some piece of its anatomy to the winds on at least every other trip.

With a grunt of satisfaction young Dane fell upon his miscreant wheel as it thumped to a standstill in a ditch. Methodically he trundled it back along the road, jacked up the ancient truck on the side where its protruding axle had ploughed the ground for some forty yards, and set to work repairing damages.

An hour later the boy had his wheel cotter-pinned and hub-capped back into place. As he slid under the steering gear, he determined to keep his eyes and his mind out of the sky, and to concentrate all energies on navigating the Western Flyer safe into her garage by dawning.

But farther along the road his imagination began playing him false again. Rhythmic thump of his load of cans seemed to simulate whir and zoom of an air engine.

Imagination! Was it imagination?

All in a quiver of excitement, Hal Dane silenced his own engine and cocked a listening ear towards the skies.

There it was again—faint hum of a motor high in the air. An airplane was winging its way across the forest-covered hills that lay between Interborough and the railroad gap at Morris Crossing. No air mail route lay that way. This must be something out of ordinary; an important message to be dropped at the railroad crossing, perhaps.

“Gosh!” ejaculated Hal to himself. “Speaking of dreaming things till you really see ’em! Listen at her coming in!”

The plane was swooping nearer; was now practically above him. Staring upward, Hal caught a glimpse of the spotlight focused on the hills below. It was turning from side to side. The boy looked on with anguish beginning to clutch at his heart. The motor of the plane was missing in an alarming manner. It sputtered and coughed—ran smoothly for a few seconds, then sputtered again.

“Trouble!” muttered Hal. “In trouble and looking for a place to land. There’s no place—unless—”

Above him the plane slid crazily on its way. Now it seemed to hang in the air at a mere crawl, now it shot onward. At a spot which Hal judged was a couple of miles distant, the light became stationary for an instant, then tipped sharply downward and was swallowed up by the pine forests on the hills.

“A crash!” whispered Hal Dane. He shut his eyes, then opened them quickly, staring hard at the moonlit landscape to impress location on his memory. That jagged pine, that spur of the hill—it was somewhere between these that the plane had crashed.

Next moment the boy was on the ground and cranking up his old truck like one possessed. As it roared into life, he swung aboard and let her out for all she was worth. In the case of a human pinned under wreckage in horrible certainty of fire or suffocation, speed of rescue must mean the saving of life. So down the woods road shot Hal, his ancient truck gallantly riding roots and ruts and snorting to the charge with a backfire like gattling guns. A tire blew out and nearly careened Hal, truck and all into a bank. But the boy held to the wheel, wrenched her nose straight to the road and bumped onward. A second tire burst, and the bumping went on more evenly.

Then the headlights showed an opening through the trees where great white wings lay flattened to the earth.

“He made it down—in the only landing place for miles!” jubilated Hal as he leaped from the truck and raced toward the grounded plane.

As he reached the scene of the crash he saw that the plane really had made a marvelous landing, merely slightly down-tipped as to nose, and frame intact save where a sapling stub had torn a jagged hole through one wing.

Minor injuries to the plane—but the man! The aviator hung limp against the supporting belt. As the boy loosed buckles and lifted the pilot out, he felt blood dampen his hands.

Hal raced to a stream he remembered crossing. With his hat full of water, he was back and kneeling beside the aviator, splashing water in his face.

It was like a ghost rising from the dead when the prostrate man flicked open his eyes, then suddenly—as though some valiant pull of power within urged him—staggered to his feet, made a few steps and leaned heavily against his plane.

“Why—” Hal Dane’s mouth dropped open in amazement as he stared at the figure picked out whitely in the moonlight, “it’s—it’s Rex Raynor, famous—”

“Yes—yes! Don’t waste time gawking at me. Need help—got to get this—this packet on the train—at crossing!” He touched the bulge of the packet beneath his coat. His eyes were wild with pain, but somehow he forced his voice to be steady, even as he forced his body to stay upright. “Can you help—patch things—get me off—”

“Yes,” Hal Dane answered, “yes!” At first he had thought to offer the truck, but two tires were down and the back axle had steered in a strangely crooked fashion towards the end of that wild dash over stumps and boulders. It might take hours, days, to get the truck back into running order. The plane—maybe there was a chance there!

First, though, Hal slit open the bloody sleeve of Raynor’s coat and shirt. From torn strips of clothing he made bandages over a bullet wound in the lower left arm, and tightened a tourniquet above to stop further bleeding.

With iron grit Raynor held on to himself—sheer will power must have kept him from fainting a dozen times. In his harsh, steady voice he barked out his orders.

The impaling sapling was cut away below the plane wing. Then the upper length of wood was worked gently out of the jagged hole it had torn in the fabric. With quick, deft fingers Hal Dane whittled repair sticks out of pieces of pine. Wire from his tool chest slid in tight coils over wood, under wood, binding breaks together. Except for his overalls, Hal had very little clothing left. What hadn’t gone for tourniquet was now masquerading as wing fabric. Tire glue had to do duty as “dope” to lacquer smooth the patched wing.

Rex Raynor, flyer, was too pain-dazed for his mind to give even passing thought to the strangeness of his finding, out here in the pine woods, a long-legged youth whose nimble fingers seemed expert at splicing framework and patching wing fabric. The trouble he was in tensed his nerves to breaking point. His one idea was, “The packet must go on—the packet must reach the safety of railroad officials at Morris Crossing.”

In between directions for repair work and frantic urgings for haste, Raynor muttered broken details of the disaster that had befallen him.

Blue prints—aerial engine designs for the Nevo-Avilly contest—finished too late to submit even by air mail—rushing to get packet aboard mail car at crossing. Nobody supposed to know of his engine designs. As Raynor crossed level by forest ranger’s hut, a red rocket, distress signal, had shot into the sky, signaling him to a landing. Knowing that the ranger, a former flying pal, had been disabled by illness, Raynor had answered the silent call by gliding to earth to render aid in some emergency. Instead of the ranger, a masked bandit had leaped upon the aviator, demanding the packet, even before switch could be cut or motor throttled. In the ensuing fight Raynor had got winged in the arm by a close range bullet, but had managed to shake off his assailant, and had risen to the safety of the airways in his plane.

Knowing that one such daredevil attack would likely mean further pursuit, Raynor fought off bodily pain and strove to keep his mind fixed to one purpose—getting the packet aboard the U. S. mail train.

The flyer completed examination by electric torch of landing-gear, engine, wings, Hal’s last improvised piece of patchwork that was hardening miraculously under its spread of tire glue.

“You have done well—it is good!” exulted Raynor, as with the boy’s help he trundled the plane backwards to get room for the take-off. “We have twenty minutes—we will make it.” He motioned Hal to climb into the front cockpit.

For a breath Hal Dane stood rigid. At last it had come—his chance to ride in a real plane! But he stood motionless. This man Raynor—fever burned like delirium in his eyes, he fairly staggered from weakness. A risky pilot to ride with! And yet the courage in that iron set of jaw, the determination that drove a pain-weakened body to serve the will! Raynor had come this far—Raynor would carry on to the end. And Hal Dane would be in at that ending.

A thrill shot through the boy as he made his lightning-quick decision and climbed breathlessly aboard.

Raynor cranked the motor with his one good hand, kicked aside a wood chunk that had blocked the wheels, and scrambled heavily into the rear cockpit. With a roar the plane moved across the clearing, gathered speed, lifted within two hundred yards of the tree line. They were up and off, a thousand feet above earth!

Hal Dane’s blood pounded, he gasped for breath. Then he relaxed into a feeling of keen delight.

Hal Dane actually flying! The boy knew instinctively that from now on flying was to be his real life. He had managed this one time to skim the clouds. Somehow he would manage it again and again.

Raynor had ascended rapidly. Two thousand feet below them the pine forests lay like flat dark carpets. Little rivers and streams were like silver threads reflecting the moonlight. In the distance a row of small, swift-moving lights must be the east-bound mail train they were racing.

Looking earthward from the heights stirred no qualm, no dizziness in the boy. He felt at ease, in his own peculiar element. Turning his mind backward, it seemed that every event in his life had culminated in this engine-powered flight with wings.

Even as Hal’s serene gaze sought the pinpoints of trees and the silver dots of water on the earth below, the great plane shot higher, looped downward, aimed her nose at the stars again. After that came a sensation of falling, then a careening, tipping of wings from side to side.

Rise, fall, dip—all consumed mere space of a breath.

Hal Dane whirled around from his earth gazing, to steal a glance at the pilot behind him.

There was reason for those wing-dips. Rex Raynor hung in a fainting huddle across his strap. Almost at the glorious end of his race for time, the flyer’s iron will had lost its fight against pain.

Raynor’s ship was a teaching boat, outfitted with dual controls. Between Hal’s knees rose a stick, mate to the control from which the pilot’s hand had fallen.

Instinctively Hal Dane’s hand shot out to grasp this lever. His one desire was to shove with all his power on the gear,—forward—back—anywhere, to steady this awful tipping, skidding roll that was hurling the boat downward. But even as Hal’s hand touched the knob of the stick, reason surged through his brain like a shout of “Wait, wait! Death lies that way!”

Reason was right. Hal’s fingers clenched into palm to keep from seizing the gear. He must think it out, know what he must do before he ever shoved that lever a hair’s breadth. With cold sweat bursting out to drench him, and his brain prickling to the terror of falling, falling,—yet Hal Dane held himself rigid, eyes closed, while in his mind’s eye he made himself see again the paper diagram of a Wright motor’s control board. In his own cluttered old workshop at home he had memorized every movement of manipulating ailerons, elevators, rudder. Memory must save his and another’s life now.

When Hal opened his eyes again, his stiff lips were muttering, “Stick pushed forward, manipulates elevators—plane descends; pulled back, plane rises; pushed to right, operates ailerons for right wing bank; left, for left bank—”

To the boy mere moments had seemed hours of hurling earthward. He felt that the very tree tops must soon be dragging at the landing gear, crippling the plane for its crash. He longed desperately to look, to see just what space lay between him and death.

Instead, for two dreadful seconds, he forced calm eyes to study the control board, forced his hand to hold the fat knob of the stick in a firm grip, to pull back—gently, gently.

And gently the ship lifted. Descent changed to ascent.

A sob of relief tore through the boy’s throat. They were going up, up! The waving octopus arms of the tree tops could not snare them to death now.

It seemed he could never get enough of going up. He was above the clouds now. The ship answered beautifully to every touch on the controls. A slight pressure on the stick to the right operated ailerons and the right wing dropped to form a right bank that drifted the ship in a wide, lazy circle.

The response of the mechanism was wonderful. It was like a living thing that moved at a touch. Hal Dane felt lifted on wings of his own.

Then he passed beyond the bank of clouds. Two thousand feet below him on the earth crawled a tiny earthworm thing strung with lights—the mail train, the crossing!

Elation ebbed from young Dane’s mind.

In the sky heights was safety. On the ground below lurked death, awaiting the slightest mischance in landing.

And yet Hal Dane must come down to a forced landing—now—immediately. He was not here to skim the clouds for exhilarating joy. He must rush a wounded man and an important packet to the train crossing.

Slowly young Dane circled earthward. And each downdrift laid a chill of terror on his heart. Now that he was coming to earth, earth looked most unnatural. Morris Crossing should be familiar ground; yet viewed in the white moonlight from over a plane edge, all things took on monstrously strange proportions. In his terror Hal began to feel that he could not distinguish a field from a forest, a road from a river. He might smash across housetops, might hurl himself, plane and all, into the moving train before he could stop. No, he could not do this thing, could not! If gasoline held out, he could drift in mid-air till morning.

In answer to his sudden tense pressure, the elevator was pulled so hard that the machine all but stalled, then fortunately cleared off and zoomed upward at intense speed.

High air—safety again!

But Hal Dane was no coward. Up in the heights, his brain seemed to cool. The train was coming in. It was a matter of seconds. And he must meet that train with the packet.

Coolly he began to map in his mind the lay of the ground close to Morris Crossing. There was the group of small houses, the improvised box-car waiting-room, a storehouse, behind that an empty, rolling stretch of field. That was his chance. He must somehow land in that field.

A week ago, at the Air Meet in Interborough, Hal had watched innumerable airplanes cut motors and circle down. He had studied and read everything on aviation he could lay hands on—he knew exactly what he ought to do. But actually to do it! A terror chill quivered up the boy’s spine.

Then he set teeth, coolly stopped the motor, pressed into a bank that began to drop the plane in great circles. Dane tried to remember everything at once—best to volplane down in spirals of a certain size—must flatten off to save a nose dive—must—

Then the black earth came up to meet Hal Dane.

CHAPTER II
WINGS

When Hal Dane came to himself, lanterns and electric torches on all sides bobbed crisscross lights above him. A dozen hands seemed pulling and tugging to extricate him from the one-sided crash of plane wreckage.

He was laid out on the ground. A wet handkerchief mopped blood out of his eyes. He felt broken all over. Through a mist of pain he heard voices frantically calling, “Send for Doc! Get Doctor Joe!”

But something more than the pain and the voices beat in his brain—a throbbing “chug-chug-chug” that stirred him out of his apathy. The train, the eastbound that he’d raced!

“G-get me up,” he croaked hoarsely. “Hold that train—mail packet—im-m-mportant—no, no, no!” He fought away hands that strove to hold him quiet. His struggles seemed to clear his brain, give him strength to rise. “Don’t doctor me, doctor him,” pointing to Raynor, “he’s injured, bad off! Me—I—I’m not dead yet, not by a l-long shot!” and Hal even managed a white-lipped grin.

It was pain to walk. But the urge to complete what he had undertaken drove him on. From Raynor’s coat, thrown aside by Doc Joe who was probing the bullet wound, Hal extracted the thick envelope. After an eternity of putting one foot before the other foot, he got it delivered at the mail car of the long train that Mr. Tilton, the rotund little station agent, was importantly holding.

After the train pulled out, there was still one more job to attend to. “That airplane, Mr. Tilton,” he begged of the fat little agent. “Don’t let cows get at it—or people poke around too much. And maybe you’d better rope what’s left of it to the fence. Big wind—might—come up.”

The urge had spent its force. Hal Dane felt a thousand years old all at once. He sank wearily into the spidery, yellow-painted little car of Fuzzy McGinnis, his chum, whom all this excitement had summoned to the scene. Fuz understood. Fuz had been in smash-ups himself. In silent sympathy, and keeping the Yellow Spider throttled to a gentle gait, he carted Hal the half mile from Morris Gap to Hillton.

Doc Joe, in his own car, was bringing Rex Raynor also to the Danes’ hospitable, ramshackle old house.

After his mother, Mary Dane, wild-eyed with fear, but holding to her calm, had gone over him for broken bones, that she didn’t find, and had bound up his head better and had poured hot milk down him,—and after Uncle Telemachus had excitedly heard the story of the air crash three times—Hal crawled into bed and slept a round of the clock.

Next day Hal Dane’s sturdy constitution asserted itself and yanked him out from any lazy coddling between the sheets. His scalp might still show some split skin from bucking a wire strut, and bruises the size of plates and saucers decorate him here and there, but he’d better be thanking his stars he wasn’t disabled. And Hal did thank ’em! His work was needing him too. The truck that earned the family living was idling up there in the pine woods.

Need to get back to work rested heavily on Hal’s shoulders, but worse than that was a worry burden that weighted down his heart.

As Hal, cap in hand and a bag of tools thrust under one arm, tiptoed down the long hall whose once beautifully plastered walls now gaped in ugly cracks, he paused before the room Rex Raynor was in. The door swung half open in the summer breeze. Hal stepped in, stood uncertain, twisting his cap into a knot. He opened his mouth once or twice as if he were trying to speak and couldn’t. Then finally he blurted out:

“Mr. Raynor, I—it’s awful that I smashed your plane—I, oh—some day—I’ll try—pay—”

“Huh!” snorted the recumbent Raynor, slightly raising his head and glaring with fiery eyes beneath beetling brows. “Huh, come here!” His injured left arm, grotesquely enlarged by bandages, lay on a supporting pillow. But with his right hand, he beckoned imperiously.

Hal came to the bed.

“Did you ever fly a sky bus before?” questioned Raynor.

“Not—not a real plane,” answered Hal. “I’ve got books and—”

“Boy,” said Raynor, reaching out his good hand and pulling him close, “boy, you’re a wonder. You brought us down alive—in the night. More’n some trained pilots can do. Wing sense must have been born in you. And say,” Raynor’s brows drew up fiercely again, “get that pay idea off your chest. I owe you more than you owe me. If you hadn’t been a plucky youngster to go up with me and bring down my wind bus by book learning, I’d—I’d have crashed to a dead one. That’s sure!” Raynor shut his eyes.

Hal eased out of the room. His head and his heart felt suddenly, gloriously light and tingling. He hadn’t known what a burden he’d carried—until now that it had lifted. His spirit was free again.

After the crash where, in that last downward swoop, he had evidently pulled the wrong mechanism and tipped the plane to a dangerous turn, an obsession of distrust had oppressed him. He had begun to fear that he lacked air sense, was not fitted for the fulfilment of his dreams of wings and the airways.

And now with one lift of his brows, a wave of the hand, Rex Raynor had dispelled the gloom. What was it Raynor had said—“Wing sense—born in him!”

Hal flung himself through the front door and down the steps so excitedly that he near toppled over his red-headed friend Fuz McGinnis, who was rushing up the steps.

“What do you think you are—a Wright Whirlwind Motor?” Fuz fiercely rubbed a barked shin. “Here I was thinking you an invalid, and hopped by to say I’d take the Yellow Spider and tow in the truck from the pine woods for you.”

“Don’t believe my famous vehicle needs any towing-in,” answered Hal, “but I’ll be thankful to have you haul my carcass and these tools out there, and apply some of your manly strength to helping me jack the old bus up.” And linking arms with Fuz, Hal strode off toward the yellow roadster.

For Rex Raynor, his week’s stay in the shabby old Dane home was a period of mixed pain and pleasure. At first his arm wound throbbed irritatingly, and added to it was the anxiety for the condition of his crashed plane. But these pleasant, kindly people among whom Fate had dropped him were an interesting compensation.

There was Mother Mary Dane. She was a little woman with blue eyes and lots of soft brown hair that was usually wound into a firm, tight knot, because there was never any time to primp it up and do it fluffily. When the fever pains let the aviator up from his bed and allowed him the run of the place, he marveled at the amount of work a slip of a woman like Mary Dane could “turn off.” He seemed to find her always churning, or stooped over everlasting “taken-in” sewing, or on her knees with garden trowel in her hand. Her mouth would be a stubborn line combating the weariness of her eyes, offsetting the whiteness of her face—only folks didn’t often catch her like that. When she saw Raynor or Hal or Uncle Tel coming, she could usually produce a smile.

When the sun shone warm and bright, from a big room at the end of the hall would arise snatches of quavery whistling, thump of hammering. That would be Uncle Telemachus Harrison enjoying a “good day.” Uncle Tel was Hal’s great-uncle. When the sunshine eased his rheumatism, he pounded away at chair repairing and odd jobs to help along with the very limited family exchequer. Uncle Tel Harrison was a curiosity—a fiery little man with bright blue eyes and a bristling, bushy mustache.

As great a curiosity as Uncle Tel was the old house. Hal’s mother was a Harrison and had inherited the ancient dwelling from her people.

The Harrison house had been two-storied. Then the roof fell in. Hal and Uncle Tel, with very little outside help, had cobbled up some sort of roof over the remaining lower story. In the bleakness of winter, the makeshift, curling shingles and the warped walls must have looked their pitifulness. But now in the summer, when the cudzu vine was in its swathing glory, the old cobbled-up house looked rather quaint and cool under its dress of vines.

Back of the tumbledown dwelling was a tumbledown barn that had once housed the high-stepping Harrison horses. Now it housed some strange contraptions beneath its sagging roof.

When Rex Raynor went out to that old stable under the voluble and excited escort of Uncle Telemachus, he was amazed at the variety and perfection of things aeronautical that he found there.

“Just look at ’em,” chortled Uncle Tel, waving a gnarled hand about the barn workshop to include little models of gliders, models of planes in paper and wood, some tattered books on aviation mechanics, and a crude man-sized glider made of wood strips and cloth.

“Looks like this one’s seen real usage.” Raynor’s eyes lighted up with interest as he laid a hand on various splicings of the wood and huge patches on the fabric.

“My sakes alive,” sputtered Uncle Tel, “I’ll say it’s been used! That crazy boy’s always rigging himself up in something like this, and having the kids from the village pull him off down that bare slope of old Hogback Hill. Sometimes he’d achieve a pretty good float before he’d drift to the plain at the hill bottom. He achieved his head bumped, too, a score of times, a shoulder wrenched, arms and legs knocked up—but dang it, he keeps on trying the thing!” Uncle Tel’s voluble complaining was belied by the prideful glint in his old blue eyes.

“And what does Mother Mary Dane think of all this gliding and head bumping?” laughed the flyer, turning to Mrs. Dane who had just come in.

She stood there, a hand resting on the glider wing. The eyes she lifted held a glow of pride, but around those eyes anxiety had etched its own lines too.

“Umph, Mary, she’s got sense—if I do say it,” grunted Uncle Telemachus. “She knows it ain’t any more use to try to keep an air-minded boy out of the air than it is to try to keep a water-minded duck out of the water. Mary, she’s shed tears over his busted head and banged-up shoulders considerable times. But shedding tears didn’t keep Mary from giving her wing-sprouting offspring all ten of the linen sheets she heired off her Grandma Harrison. Real linen sheets and a silver spoon or two was all there was left to descend to Mary. Grandma Harrison would turn over in her grave if she knew just what an end her good hand-woven cloth had come to. A whole sheet ragged up on a hawthorn bush where Glider Number One went gefluey in a gulley and spilled Hal for a row of head wallops. Another burned to a crisp when some invention of wing lacquer combustulated and liked to have fired us all out of house and home. There’s four on that glider contraption, and the rest of ’em—the rest of ’em—” With a guilty look, Uncle Tel clapped a hand to mouth and went off into a hasty fit of coughing. He turned away and stamped down the length of the shop where he began to putter with some spruce sticks and a lathe.

When he rejoined the others, Raynor was saying:

“Didn’t Hal drop a few hints that he was going to do some gliding for my benefit to-morrow?”

“I fear so.” Mary Dane’s lips quirked up in a smile, but her hand was flung out nervously. “And just look at that innocent little wind cloud lazying out there on the horizon! It could roll up into anything. I tell Hal that every time he even plans a glide, his subconscious mind stirs up a wind somewhere.”

“What’s he going to take off in—this?” Raynor touched the battered glider.

“Gosh, no—er-r—” Uncle Tel joined the conversation, then sputtered off distractedly, “er-r—well, you just wait and see!”

CHAPTER III
FLYING HOPE

Interborough got wind of the near-robbery, the wild sky-ride, the subsequent crash of a great plane on the outskirts of Hillton. A horde of reporters swarmed over to interview the crashees, to get pictures of them and the wreck. For the first time in his life, Hal Dane saw himself staring, with the usual garbled, wood-cut expression of newspaper pictures, from the front page of a metropolitan paper. But if the picture was poor, Harry Nevin, the young reporter for the Interborough Star, had at least wielded a kindly pencil. In spite of the crash, he gave Hal Dane credit for “unusual wing sense.”

In reality as well as in the smeary newspaper picture the wrecked plane showed up as a dismal mess. To the uninitiated eye, this grotesque thing with its tail in the air and its nose in the mud had all the appearances of having flown its last flight. But when mechanics from Interborough, with Raynor to direct them, began to dig out the ship, it was found that the actual damage was done only to the propeller, although the fuselage and wings were covered with mud and some of the wing fabric would have to be patched and “doped.”

“It’s that ditch that did it,” consoled Raynor, going over the various aspects of the “cracked-up” landing with Hal. “In the night that grass-covered ditch couldn’t have looked much different from the rest of the field. But a ditch for a landing place can turn most any sky bus into a bronco-bucking affair. Nearly every pilot mixes in with something of the kind sooner or later. Settling in a little gully out in Texas about seven years ago gave me a wallop in the bean that I won’t be forgetting any time soon,” and Raynor ducked his head to show Hal a jagged white scar that persistently parted his black hair unevenly at the crown.

As soon as a new propeller could be shipped out and adjusted, one of the flyer’s friends from the air mail route was coming down to pilot off both Raynor and his ship.

So the next day, in spite of a few rolling, murky wind clouds in the east, Hal determined to do some gliding on his homemade apparatus. He wanted this chance to get a real aviator’s criticism and advice on the board and cloth mechanisms with which he had to satisfy his longings for air flight.

Hal Dane might have wing sense, but he had no money with which to buy engine-powered wings. All he could do was patch up contrivances out of the crude materials that lay to hand.

Long ago Hillton had ceased to throw up its hands and fall in a faint over that “crazy Dane boy” scudding along gully edges propelled by a pair of sheets stretched on some sticks. In fact, Hillton had grown so used to Hal’s experimenting that by now the village just accepted him and his stunts as a matter of course.

But with the famous Rex Raynor present and evincing interest in such things, the whole of Hillton turned out to watch this new gliding attempt of Hal’s.

Instead of rolling out the battered little glider that reposed in the main workshop, Hal, with considerable help from all the small boys of Hillton, pushed back a section of the opposite wall, revealing that the barn had a second long room—the harness or storage room of the old days. From out of this, scraping and screaking along the ground on its keel skid, was hauled a white monstrosity—a huge thing of wood and cloth, of wires and bars and levers.

Hilltonians who hadn’t seen the latest of Hal’s handicraft couldn’t resist a laugh at the ungainly monster with long, warped-looking stretch of wing.

“Gangway, gangway!” shouted a youngster. “Here comes the Willopus-Wallopus!”

“Willopus, your foot!” snorted Uncle Telemachus. He himself might laugh a bit at Hal, but he wasn’t going to stand for anybody else doing it. He silenced the mouthy boy with a glare from his fiery old eyes. “Hi, don’t you know a wind bird when you see one?”

Wind bird, indeed! To the uninitiated, this cloth contraption stretched on hay-bale wire and sprucewood sticks, hauled out of its lair on its screakily protesting keel skid, looked more like some waddling antediluvian from the prehistoric past.

But Rex Raynor seemed to find nothing comical in the wind bird. Her slow progress while being dragged to the brow of Hogback Hill gave him a chance to study her every line. To an aviator used to the exquisite finish and polish of a modern factory-built sky boat, Hal’s contraption offered a contrast of a rather sketchy aircraft fuselage. A little board, an upright post, some slim sprucewood longerons,—that was the fuselage, if one could call it a fuselage! But for all its homemade roughness, there was an interesting compactness in the way the boy had braced his few wires and uprights down to a “V,” converging at the board seat. The one wing was a long cloth-covered affair of wood strips and wires—streamlined after a fashion, for it was narrower at the tips than in the center, and thinner at the back edge than at the front edge. The longerons ended in rudimentary elevators and rudder, connected by wires to a pair of pedals set before the board seat that was fastened at the nose of the fuselage. A broomstick control stuck up before the seat too, and wires hitched it to the wings.

“The boy’s worked out something, eh?” grunted Uncle Tel, shuffling rheumatically alongside of Raynor, who seemed bent on studying every inch of the curious, lumbering craft. “Got some technique all his own, eh?”

“Cat’s back!” snorted the flyer, “but I’ll say the kid’s got technique!” He laid a hand on one of the hinged sections that formed the back of each wing tip. “Look at those ailerons he worked out on the wings! He’s combined the idea of the German Taube and the French Nomet in that wing lift. Where did he get it?”

“Got it out of his head—and from watching birds fly, too, I reckon,” said Uncle Tel. “That boy, he’s always snatching time to sit out here on the top of old Hogback Hill, watching buzzards sail, crows flap, and how the lark gives a little spring when she sails up into the sky. Looky here, see that sort of spring, set there where the glider rests on its skid? That’s what Buddy calls his ‘lark spring up.’ It helps him get gliding in a shorter run than he could before he put it there.”

The glider and its escort had about reached the crest of the hill now. Raynor stepped a little apart and stood looking down over the lay of the land below him.

“Um—valleys and bare rolling hills,” he muttered to himself. “The sort of terrain below to make air currents that rise and flow. The kid’s a good picker of gliding country. Reckon though he’s been experimenting and studying out this air current business for himself. He’s not exactly the kind to leave everything to mere blind chance.”

Hal Dane jammed his old cap down on his head nearly to the ears, stood a moment beside his glider. He was a tall, fair boy—fair at least if he hadn’t been so outrageously tanned. His eyes had the Norse hint of “blue fire” to them, like the blue fire of the ice glint of the far north. For a fact, the boy had more than a hint of the old Norse Viking look to him as he stood there beside his wind ship.

His mother, in the fore-edge of the crowd, hands nervously twisting but chin up and eyes steady, might have been the mother of a Viking. Only, instead of watching a son take boat for unknown sea currents, this mother was watching a son mount the even more unknown air currents.

Ducking down to get in under the overhanging wing, Hal seated himself on the board, rammed his back against the upright post that formed the main member of his skeleton fuselage, then doubled up his long legs to set feet on the pair of pedals.

It was rather good sport, this starting Hal off on a flight. The Hillton youngsters had plenty of experience in their end of the matter—which was the pushing and pulling off. On this occasion, when there were so many onlookers, it was a matter to be fought over. Fuz McGinnis, acting as master of ground ceremonies, straightened affairs out and selected those that had already had some experience in pulling off.

At a signal from Hal, half a dozen fellows, three to the left and three to the right, walked away with the ends of a rope that led back in a “V” to the front of the wind bird. At the tip of one wing a tall boy trotted along to hold the wings level. Behind the wind bird, Fuz and another fellow came ambling along, pulling back slightly on a tail rope.

At twenty steps down the hill, Hal shouted, “Run!”

The contraption, which had been slipping along the ground on its keel skid, rose a few feet as the runners picked up speed.

Ten paces more, and the pilot crouching up there under the wing yelled, “Turn loose! Let her go!”

Already the fellow at the wing had stood away. At the yell “Let her go!” the others dropped ropes, which fell free from the down-pointed hooks they had been merely held against by pressure. Now with the back pull relaxed, the glider shot upward and forward like a stone hurled from a catapult.

Wedged between some spruce sticks under a stretch of cloth, Hal was off on his motorless flight.

When on the ground this contraption of wood and wires had seemed an ungainly, waddling freak. But now as it soared upward on air currents in its sky-element, it swooped with a marvel of grace.

Instead of a short flight and a mere slide down a wind hill, the boy began to twist and turn to take advantage of every rising current of air so as to ascend to a greater height than that from which he had started.

Though he couldn’t hear it, the crowd below him let out a gasp of admiration. Rex Raynor stood, head bent back so as not to miss a movement of the rider of the wind.

Already the wind bird had climbed a hundred feet above the take-off; it banked again for another climb. Now it circled, swept in a series of loops, and began to drift easily down a landing at the foot of the starting hill.

Then through the valley swept a gust from the wind clouds that had been rolling up all day. Like a leaf the lazily dropping wind machine was caught up in the blast, swept high again, hurled this way and that, dipping crazily.

“Gosh!” shrieked Fuz McGinnis in a bleat of terror. “Oh, my gosh! He’s going to head on his stand!” Fuz always said his words hind part before when he got excited.

CHAPTER IV
WINDS OF CHANCE

Caught in a swirl of air currents, Hal Dane and his craft were hurled this way and that like some toy shot from a giant’s hand. Watchers below held their breath.

Although a hundred feet and more intervened between them, those on the ground could see that the boy in the air was exerting every ounce of craftsmanship in his battle with the wind. He banked to the right, now dipped and rose, as though striving to ride the twist of air currents flowing about him, instead of drifting helplessly in their battering clutch. At times the wind ship seemed to whirl completely around, yet mostly it was held to an even keel.

Then the heavens opened and the rain came down in torrents; preluded by lightning and thunder, a cold blast swept down the valley with something of the fury of a small cyclone. Caught in this tempest, the crude plane bucked and went rearing upward like an affrighted horse.

“There goes the last of Grandma Harrison’s sheets,” roared Uncle Tel, hardly conscious of what he was saying and charging through the crowd as though he, on his rheumatic old limbs, would keep up with that flying white in the sky above.

“There goes my boy!” thought Mary Dane. It was a silent prayer.

Higher than it had ever gone before surged the wind bird. Storm, darkness, and rain seemed to cut it off from men’s sight.

The crowd began to run down the valley, letting the push of the wind guide them in the direction the aircraft must surely be following also. Clinging wet garments and the rain torrent made progress heartbreakingly slow.

Fuz McGinnis turned and began a stumbling progress against the wind back towards the starting point at Hogback. After a while he reappeared, charging along over the roadless, stony valley in his grotesquely inadequate looking Yellow Spider. Into it he somehow crowded Mrs. Dane and Uncle Tel. Others turned back and went for their cars. Raynor caught a ride with someone. Quite a procession went skidding and lumbering through the rain-washed valley.

Then, as quickly as it had come, the summer storm cleared. The sun even came out.

Something white showed up, flapping dismally in a distant tree top. It must be the remains of the wind bird. It—it couldn’t be anything else.

Fuz let out the yellow cut-down, speeding by stumps, dodging boulders. From the car behind him he could hear Raynor’s voice urging on the driver.

These two cars were by far and away the lead of practically the entire population of Hillton that surged running, walking, riding down the valley.

Mary Dane, and Raynor not far behind her were the first to reach that tree with its flaunting ragged streamers of the wrecked windcraft. Hal was not lying at its foot, battered and crashed. Instead, with blood on his face, and his clothes half torn off, he was gingerly lowering himself from branch to branch. He shinned on down the trunk, dropped beside his mother, and fair picked her up in a great boyish bear hug.

Above him, half of the wind bird hung in streaming tatters from a couple of tree branches. The other half had already descended and lay like a vast white splotch on the ground.

“Reckon I’d better go get the truck and haul this in,” said Hal, using his fist to mop blood out of his eye from a cut on the forehead. “I’m sort of used to hauling in the remains and patching up things after every flight. I—”

As man to man, Raynor clapped him on the shoulder and thrust out a hand. “Put her there!” he said.

“I—er—had the luck to land in the soft part of a tree. I—I got down anyway,” said Hal gruffly to hide the emotion that was stirring him.

“You got down—but you did more! Man, man! Without any engine, on some sheets strung on sticks, you flew to the clouds, banked, dipped, soared with the best of them, till that whirlwind caught you. Prettiest thing I’ve seen in years.”

“If only that wrong wind hadn’t got me,” moaned Hal.

“If!” said Raynor, narrowing his eyes. “Aviation’s full of ifs, boy—don’t let ’em—”

“I won’t,” said Hal, grinning in spite of the fact that half of his best wind bird was dangling from a branch in a tree top.

The next day Rex Raynor was leaving. Pilot Osburn had come down to fly him off in the now fully repaired airplane. After a warm handclasp for all the friends into whose kindness he had dropped, Raynor started to climb up into the cockpit of the R.H.3. Then he stepped back to ground, drew out a notebook and wrote a few lines. He turned to Hal.

“I expected to write you a letter about this. But,” with a grin, “aviation’s too full of ifs, so—thought I might as well attend to it now while we’re together. You saved my life. And you’re not the kind of a chap I can get a reward off on. But there’s something I want to do for you, and this note will tell you what.” He slid the piece of paper into Hal’s pocket, then climbed up into his plane.

The pilot removed the blocks, the motor roared, and the R.H.3 taxied forward and zoomed into the air. The boy stared upward until the great plane grew small, became a mere speck, disappeared beyond the horizon. Then he silently turned away from the crowd and headed towards home, walking fast. He rather wanted to get into the privacy of his own old workshop before he opened Raynor’s note.

CHAPTER V
CHALLENGING THE AIR

Once within the quiet silence of the old workshop Hal plumped down on a sawhorse and pulled the note out of his pocket.

Quickly he unfolded the paper, and gave a gasp at the contents. It was a note scribbled to the head of the Rand-Elwin Flying School, saying: “Here’s a real air-minded boy who risked his life for a flyer. He wants to become one of us, and all he’ll need is work to pay for lessons. I think you could use such a boy.”

Hal Dane’s head was in a whirl as he read and re-read the few scribbled lines. Hal had every right to feel dizzy. Raynor’s words were suddenly opening up and making real to him certain vague, misty dreams he had desperately believed would somehow materialize in a far, far distant future.

Instead, they were materializing now—right now—immediately. The boy sitting rigid on the old sawhorse suddenly shut his eyes, as if the realized dreams were too dazzlingly bright. Flying school—actual training! He’d live with planes—eat, sleep, dream with planes—till he knew every inch of the real machinery of aeromotors. Then a pilot’s license! That would open the world for him.

Hal Dane would fly a real plane—make real money. His vision traveled fast. Mother should have everything. No more bending over “taken-in” sewing with weariness pains lacing her bent back and lines deepening in her face. Uncle Tel should have all the pipes, all the books he wanted. They’d do over the old house, renovate it back to its former two-storied elegance, paint, flowers—he’d—the dream circled back on itself and began all over again at airships, Hal Dane aviator!

Hal slid down off the saw bench. He’d write the letter to Rand-Elwin—now.

That same day’s mail carried Hal’s letter to the Flying School, a fervid boyish epistle stating how enthusiastically hard he’d work if they would only give him the chance. Pinned to it was Raynor’s all-important scribble.

A week’s space brought the answer. It was a business-like typed sheet signed by the Mr. Rand of the Rand-Elwin.

Crowded as they were with pay students, it was out of the ordinary, he wrote, for them to take one to work out his tuition expenses. But the written recommendation from Mr. Raynor (one of their former men), also a personal visit from him pertaining to this matter in hand, had inclined the school to change its policy in this case. Work would be found for him in the hangars or in the corps of mechanicians. He could expect no money pay for this, of course, but instead would receive the much greater pay of free tuition, board and lodging at the barracks. From Raynor’s recommendation, they were expecting great work from him, an interesting flying future—

Hal’s eyes traveled back from the pleasant prophecy that closed the communication,—traveled back and riveted upon “no money pay.”

It had been foolish of him, of course, but somehow he had never figured at all that there would be “no money pay.” He had rosily visioned himself as pulling down some neat sum for his probable labors at sweeping hangars, trundling grease cans, blocking and unblocking plane wheels. Half of this money would have gone to pay flying-tuition, most of the other half would have gone to the folks back home. In his visioning he had slept in some corner of a hangar, had eaten any old fare.

But now, no money coming in at all, that was different! The vision seemed closing up, drifting away. Mother and Uncle Tel had to eat. He hadn’t earned much, but he had earned something, enough to keep their little household going, anyway.

He’d have to stick at this truck job that paid even a pittance of real money—give up this flying vision, this Rand-Elwin offer.

Oh, but how could he? This, his first real chance! In reality it was a full generous thing the Rand-Elwin people were willing to do. They were offering lodging, board and something like a thousand dollars in tuition in exchange for the part-time work of an unknown boy. Only the recommendation of a valuable man like Raynor could have secured him this.

His mother, eyes flashing, head held high, insisted stoutly that of course he must go—his chance—he must take it. Why, she’d manage!

Hal knew exactly how Mary Dane would manage. Sewing, and more sewing, and a pain in the side most of the time. She had put him through high school that way. Mothers were like that, always insisting that they could do the impossible—and doing it.

Well, his mother had sacrificed herself enough for him. Hal shut his lips fiercely.

The next day his answer went back to the Rand-Elwin Flying School, a letter very different from that first boyishly exuberant communication. This ran: “Sorry—circumstances make it impossible for me to accept your splendid, kindly offer—hope at some future date—”

The clumsy old sliding doors to his barn-hangar were rammed shut, and left shut. Within were the remains of his greatest wind bird. The torn cloth and tangled wires were left undisturbed in their huddled dump. Hal didn’t even bother to see what parts were good enough to be rejuvenated into some other variety of gliding apparatus. He just ceased to experiment.

He repaired the old truck instead. He went after hauling business. Several times a week he made double trips to Interborough. Once he made three trips—a haul that worked him twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. He wanted to work, so that he would be too tired even to think.

Summer passed into autumn.

One day when Hal rattled into the paved streets of Interborough with a towering combination load of cowhides, lightwood bundles and great blackened sacks of country-burned charcoal, he found himself in the midst of carnival.

Autumn was a period of street fairs. One had strung its booths of shooting galleries, side shows and outdoor aerial trapezes along a roped-off concession on one of the city’s side streets. Even this early in the morning, flags and banners flaunted themselves in a chipper gayness. Small dark-skinned people, with a gypsyish, foreign look, busied themselves with settling tent-pins, tautening ropes, setting out their tinsel wares,—calling out now and then in soft, slurring accent.

They might be a travel-grimed lot, these gaudy-costumed traders in tinseled junk and these bandy-legged acrobats. But they had been somewhere, were going somewhere. They caught Hal’s imagination, stirred it out of its long, dull dormancy. After he had halted some minutes, while his eyes caught the glint of sunlight on tent tops and fluttering little banners, he shot the juice to the old truck and, stiffening his backbone behind the wheel, rattled off down the street actually whistling. Out across town in an old field behind the warehouse, where he went to deliver the roll of cowhides, Hal’s eye glimpsed something roped down to fence posts and a couple of stakes. A something that sent his heart blood pounding suffocatingly up to his very ears,—an airplane! A battered affair, with the look of having ridden the winds full many a time! But an airplane, for all that.

All the air hunger that Hal had been crushing out of his soul for months surged up, took possession of him overwhelmingly. Leaving his truck standing in the sandy street, he slid down, was over the fence, stood near this air thing roped down against any chance windstorm. For all its lack of paint, the old bus had good points. It was shaped for speed, its wings gave a sense of balance, proportion too.

Hal walked round and round it, hands thrust down into his pockets. He made no attempt to touch it. He knew from his own experience how one hated having outsiders mauling and prodding at one’s contrivances. But just standing close, merely looking gave him more pleasure than he had known for most of the past summer. He was so absorbed in contemplation of wires and struts and curve-twist of propeller that he was hardly aware of a knot of men coming down the field towards him. They came in a close-packed group, talking loudly, gesticulating—evidently in heated argument over something. Words shot up like explosives. Snatches of sentences beat into Hal’s consciousness.

“But man, you got to—in the contract, flying—stunting—parachuting—everything—” A fat man waved his arms in windmill accompaniment to his argument.

“I know—I know all that,” a slender dark fellow with black eyes and a boldly aquiline nose above a square chin interrupted quietly. “I’m willing to fly, I’m willing to stunt. But I gotter have help. I can’t sail a bus and parachute drop from it all at the same time—not without crashing my bus, and I ain’t going to do that for any fifty dollars a day. Ain’t my fault. How’d I know old Boff was going to get sick and quit on me for keeps?” The speaker rammed a hand into his pocket. “Say, wait, I’ll do the right thing. You can cancel the whole thing. I’ll hand you back the dough you paid for yesterday’s work—that’ll even up—”

“No, keep the money,” a heavy-set fellow said. “It’s not the money that’s worrying us. It’s the advertisement business. The city’s paying for the stunts—Trade-in-Interborough Campaign and all that, you know—got posters plastered over the county, newspapers been tooting it up—if we don’t give ’em the thrills we been promising, our country customers pouring in here have got a right to be sore at us. Say, don’t you know anybody round about you can pick up to stunt?”

“No-o,” the dark fellow shook his head and walked restlessly around the plane, laying a hand affectionately on it here and there. “Boff and I’ve been out west mostly, don’t know any outfits down this way. Sa-a-ay, you get me a man! In a pinch like this, I’ll do well by him, give him half the dough.”

Half the dough, half of fifty dollars—that would be twenty-five dollars! A madness, evoked perhaps by his sudden contact once more with airmen and airplanes, stirred Hal Dane clear out of himself. Hardly conscious that it was he, Hal Dane, who was doing this fantastic thing, he walked straight into the group.

“I’ll take him up on that,” he said firmly. “I’ll stunt with him!”

“Umph—eh! You’ve got the nerve, you sound sporting,” the flyer whirled and looked him straight up and down. “But no, you’re just a youngster. What would folks say if I let you go up and something happened to us—no, no!”

“I’m six feet of man, and make my own living—and I can’t help being young,” said Hal whimsically. Then his grin faded and his face set. Now that this fantastic chance was slipping away, he wanted it desperately. “Give me the chance,” he pleaded. “There’s not a dizzy bone in me, and I’ve got some idea of balance—”

“Look who it is! That’s right what he’s telling you, he’s got—what you call it—wing sense.” Like a small chipper tornado, Harry Nevin, newspaperman, ploughed up from the rear of the group. “Hey, don’t you folks remember? This is the kid that got his picture in the Star! Went up with Raynor and brought down Raynor’s machine for him, and all that!”

“Oh, so you know about flying, and running sky busses,” stated the aviator with relief.

“I know about flying—but, well, not so much about real planes,” admitted Hal, honestly.

“He’s sailed all over the country on a glider he made himself,” broke in the reporter. “He knows more about balance in a minute than most—”

“Have it your own way,” burst out the aviator irritably. “Since you’re all so set on letting this kid do your stunting, I’ll take him up. But the responsibility’s on your heads, not mine. And say, you all better clear out and let us get to work. He ain’t got but an hour to be taught all there is to this here stunting business.”

While the crowd was departing, some over, some crawling under the three-strand wire fence, the aviator busied himself with peering into the vitals of his ship. Soon though, he raised up, and stalked over to the boy.

“I’m Maben, Max Maben,” he said.

“I’m Hal Dane.” The boy stuck out his hand and the older man grasped it in a quick strong motion.

“Say, what makes you willing to go up in a strange plane, with a strange flyer, and tackle a lot of stuff you don’t know anything about?”

“Got it in the blood, I reckon, this being crazy about wanting to get mixed up in anything that’ll keep me near an airship,” mumbled Hal. “Anyway, I’d been studying your plane. It looked right to me; I liked its jib,” Hal grinned. “Then you came along, and I—well, I reckon I liked your jib, too.”

“Guess we’re going to get on.” And Maben grinned back.

CHAPTER VI
ON THE WING

Hal Dane’s blond head was in a whirl. In sixty brief minutes Maben had tried to cram into his cranium all the vast maze of desperately important facts that one needs must master prior to stunting and parachuting.

They were up in the air now, zooming over the city. Young Dane had on his first real flying suit. He leaned back awkwardly against the pack of his parachute. He had never had on one of the things before. There was something else new, the speaking tube with earpieces that fitted up under the helmet. Maben was talking through it now.

“City looks pretty down there—trees and houses all flattened out like pictures on a rug. I’ll circle you over the Fairgrounds next, so you can see the clear space you’re to come down in. Got a mob to watch us, ain’t we?”

Hal felt grateful to Maben. He knew all this kindly rambling talk was indulged in to keep a raw new amateur stunter’s mind off the coming crisis.

Above them the sky was bright and beautiful; scarcely a cloud flecked it. Below them little black dots milled around in every direction. That would be the crowd swarming out to enjoy the vicarious thrill of seeing someone else in the air. There were tiny waving threads that must be flags, and a decorated stand where a band was probably blaring.

“Feel your strap—good and tight—for sure?” Maben’s voice rumbled to him. “Got to do my part of the stunting now.”

There came a sudden change in the behavior of the plane. Instead of straight flying, Maben began to put it through an intricate series of stunts. He went into nose spins, tail spins, falling leaves, and loop the loops. It was a breath-taking exhibit, at times seemingly reckless beyond all warrant. Yet there was never a slip nor careen to the ship. For perhaps half an hour this continued, then the plane straightened out in a long graceful glide.

“Your time next, kid,” muttered Maben, “and for Scott’s sake, hold on and be careful. Don’t try to give ’em too much for their money.”

Hal pulled the earpieces of the speaking tube from under his helmet and climbed out of the cockpit.

He stood on the lower wing surface, holding on by a strut, waiting. Over his left shoulder he had a glimpse of the pilot’s strained face.

Maben was circling the plane lower and lower, flying just above the trees and the grandstand to catch the eye of the crowd.

Ready, go! It was the time. Hal, clinging to the strut, poised to walk out on that wing piece of fragile wood strips and cloth, had the ghastly feeling that his heart had stopped beating. Then its pounding sent the blood roaring to his ears.

No treat, this wing walking business! Suppose the pilot shoved the stick or jazzed the engine!

But Max Maben held his speed to a level; no dropping, no high-riding. Nice work! The ship steady on all axes, calm as a rocking chair in a parlor!

Hal’s terror wave passed. He stood free of the strut, walked, bowed, cut a step or two. With a man like Maben at the stick to hold her steady, this was nothing. No more than walking the boards of some earth-bound floor. All you had to do was to keep your mind on your feet, and not look over the edge. Through Hal shot a sudden daring desire to climb a strut to the top wing of the biplane, to stand there erect, outlined against the sky. He gripped a support preparatory to a climb.

Maben’s signal stopped him. It came sharply, the signal they had arranged upon, two quick taps on the fuselage. Hal turned. The pilot was glaring at him from under fiercely drawn brows, and his mouth was in a set line. Swiftly Maben gave the next signal, three taps. That meant the ship was going to climb for altitude for the parachute jump.

The altimeter began to mark up—fifteen hundred, eighteen hundred, two thousand. Maben made a level movement with one hand. That meant all was ready. In slow reversements, Maben held the ship over the center of the field below.

“Go!” tapped the four beats of the signal.

Hal was out on the wing tip. He made a movement towards space, froze back into a crouch and felt frenziedly back at his parachute. Suppose it were not there! Suppose he had never put it on! His fingers touched the compact bulk of the ’chute that dangled gawkily from shoulder straps and belt straps. Hal braced himself, shamed at his childishness. No more fooling. He must go this time.

Steady, go!

Hal Dane stepped off the wing edge and dropped into space.

The pull-off swung him like a toy. Everything went black. He shut his eyes, opened them again. The earth seemed to gyrate below him. Above him, the zoom of the ship.

He must pull the rip cord of the ’chute. No, no—not yet! Must wait, must be no danger of tearing silken fabric against a whirl of the plane.

Down, down. Top speed. Heart in throat. Ghastly shriek of air in his face. His head was going down. He must kick, keep the slant. Maben had said, “Keep your head up—head down gives you one bustin’ yank in the middle when she opens up!”

One, two, four, six,—twenty—no use to count heartbeats—heart must have thumped a thousand times by now. No time to waste. Earth looked like it was coming up. Now! Now! He must pull the rip cord!

Down, down. The thing hadn’t opened! Suppose—

The great silk lobe opened out with a “pow-a” like a cannon shot.

The lightning speed drop was checked suddenly, and the parachute harness tightened about him at the pull. He seemed to drop no more. He felt that he was only floating, a mere dot against the immensity of the skies. He seemed an unreality, a swaying atom drifting in the gulfs of space. The earth that a moment ago had seemed coming up to meet him now seemed a thousand miles away. Would he ever come down, touch foot on that earth again?

As the great inverted chalice of the silken parachute ceased its oscillations, the earth also ceased its tremendous rise and fall. It seemed to stand steady below Hal Dane, and he was approaching it faster than he had thought.

The boy suddenly remembered to cross his legs (Max Maben’s orders), lest he straddle a telephone wire, a church steeple or something equally disastrous.

A feeling of terrible helplessness was upon him. Nothing that he could do could change his direction. The wind could do that though. A sudden gust could blow him out over water, ram him against a stone building, hurl him before a rushing train.

But no wind arose. He was coming straight down. The crowd below seemed scattering to give him room. He looked up, saw Maben climbing down from the skies to meet him.

On the field, men were running forward to catch his heels as he touched earth. Many hands helped him hold down against the tug of the parachute, while he worked at the clips of the harness. As the straps fell away and he stepped free, Maben landed and taxied towards him.

“Kid, you did it!” Maben’s brown hands gripped his shoulder and turned him about to face the applause of the crowd that had gone crazy with clapping and shouting. Swept away by relaxation of the tense excitement, those near him pounded him, tried to hoist him on shoulders for a parade.

It was Hal’s first taste of glory. It thrilled him, but he soon longed to get away from it all. As soon as he could he ducked and escaped and followed in the direction of Maben, whom he had seen trundling the plane into seclusion behind the grandstand.

“Say!” Maben turned on him in mock fierceness, “I’m of a mind to kick you for overstunting on that plane wing. No use being too risky—just plain foolishness, that. But, kid,” the aviator’s habitually tense face relaxed into a boyish grin. “I’ll say you made that come down O. K.,—all jake! An old-timer couldn’t have done it prettier. Listen, I got a proposition I want to make you!”

CHAPTER VII
A ONE-SHIP CARNIVAL

“Hi, sleepy-head, don’t you ever get up of a morning? Going to snooze all day?” A couple of resounding smacks against the hammock he swung in startled Hal into semi-wakefulness.

“Um-m, yes,” hammock shaking to violent stretchings of its human burden. “Gosh, seems like just a minute since I crawled in. Didn’t night pass in a hurry?” Hal stuck a tousled blond head out of his sleeping bag and gazed reproachfully down at Maben, who was already up and, in spite of the crisp autumn chill, was taking a shower bath by the simple expedient of standing in the shallow creek and flinging water all over himself.

It was a strange camping outfit that Maben and Hal had evolved. Instead of a tent, they utilized the upper wing of Maben’s old biplane as a roof over their heads. They had constructed hammocks of heavy canvas which could be suspended, one on each side of the fuselage, up under the top wing. The corners of a hammock were tied to the upper strut fittings, and when a fellow crawled into the three blankets inside, which were sewn up to form a bag, he was prepared for a comfortable night.

Sliding out carefully, so as not to wreck the wing fabric above and below him in any way, Hal stood up, stretched again, then made a speedy dash for a dip in the creek and a leap into clothes.

“My time to cook! I’ll get breakfast to pay for oversleeping,” shouted Hal, back at the plane and grabbling into the little provision sack tucked under canvas in the cockpit.

The sack contained little enough in the way of foodstuff—some potatoes, a little bacon, nubbin of bread.

As Hal flopped over the sizzle of meat and spuds in the frying-pan and set out the meal in two tin plates, he attended to the job by mere mechanical touch,—his mind was running round in circles. What in the dickens were they going to do? If they spent what little they had buying food, there’d be no money to buy gas. If they bought gas,—no food! Um, better draw their belts tighter and put the cash in gas. No gas meant no stunt flying—no stunt flying, no crowd to take for rides. And carrying passengers was how they earned their living.

Three states lay between Hal and home.

Maben’s proposition had been a wild one—that he and Hal join forces and stunt together over the backwoods country towns. It would be a precarious livelihood. Some days they might cop nothing. Some days they might make a pile. Maben needed a “pile” for his folks back home, his wife, a baby boy, a little daughter just old enough to start school. Maben carried their pictures in a rubbed old case stuck away in an inside pocket. Hal had his home folks on his heart too. He needed to earn money somehow. Even though the mere touch of a plane and the call of the air were a delightful lure, he knew aero-stunting was a risky business. In the end he had decided to tackle it, for a while anyway. So he had rattled the old truck home from Interborough, turned over to his mother the first twenty-five dollars he had ever earned all in a lump, and had joined Maben.

For a while they had made good money. In sections where airplanes had never come or at most had been merely glimpsed—a swift moving speck in the sky that came out of nowhere and disappeared into nowhere—a plane that really came down to earth was a novelty. As they flew over villages, folks rushed out into the open, heads thrown back, eyes on the sky, arms waving and beckoning excitedly.

After circling to find a good pasture or stubble field from which to operate (a piece of open ground close up to the village being of course most desirable from a showman’s point of view), Maben would fly low, and Hal would begin to do wing-walking. If the sight of a young fellow walking and cavorting and skinning-the-cat between wire struts on the wing of a flying plane didn’t catch the eye of the crowd, the parachute drop could always be counted on to “get ’em going.” After the stunts, Maben would fly low and ease to a perfect landing to show folks how safe it was to come down in an airplane.