Frank Armstrong at College

by Matthew M. Colton

  CHAPTER XIV.

  PROGRESS AND A WRECK.

  We will leave Frank Armstrong shooting Londonward in the largestpassenger-carrying biplane in the Burtside School for Aviators,seated on a mere chip of a seat, holding on with a death grip to theslender upright of seasoned spruce, and turn our attention back tothe morning at Brighton.

  Contrary to what Gleason and Frank imagined as they sat in theirdisabled motor on the highway some miles outside of Brighton at thehour their train was scheduled to leave, they were not missed atfirst. In the hurry of leaving their temporary training quarters, theteam managers and assistants had so much to do that they left thebusiness of getting from the hotel to the station, a matter of onlya few hundred yards, to the individuals themselves. No one happenedto notice, as they left the hotel in straggling groups of three andfour, that Armstrong was not with them. At the station half a dozencompartments on the London train having been reserved in advance,the athletes tumbled aboard without even a thought of luggage, takingit for granted, with the usual cheerful carelessness of travelingathletes, that everything would be all right. Each was concerned onlyfor himself. It was not to be thought of for a moment that any memberof either team would be so foolish as to get himself left behind.

  The ten-thirty on the London and Brighton was the vestibule andcorridor type of train, not like the ordinary single compartmentcoach in common use on English and Continental railroads. It wastherefore possible to pass from car to car and from compartment tocompartment on this train much the same as on an American Pullmantrain, and visiting between team members shortly began. TrainerBlack, going the rounds, discovered that Armstrong was missing.

  At first it was thought that he, with his companion Gleason, hadaccidentally gotten into a wrong compartment, but a hasty search fromend to end of the train disclosed the fact that he was not aboard atall.

  "I don't remember having seen him after breakfast," said the Yalecaptain. "Could he have gone up to London on the train ahead of us byany chance?"

  "No," returned McGregor, "Armstrong is very conscientious and wouldnot disobey orders which were explicit enough about this train."

  "I'll bet a hat," said Halloby, "that his rattle-headed friend,Codfish Gleason, took him out for a ride this morning, and thatsomething went wrong with the power-plant, and they are sitting onthe road somewhere waiting for someone to tow them home."

  And, as it proved, Hurdler Halloby wasn't so far out of the way,excepting that, instead of sitting on the road, they were at thatmoment falling with a loud report into the hands of the law. So,perhaps, it was well that no one on the American team knew theirexact location.

  "Come to think of it," said another, "I saw the chap they callCodfish swing around to the hotel this morning in a red runabout anda little later saw the runabout going off up the street, but didn'tnotice who was in it. But I do know that all three seats were full."

  "That's enough," said Black. "Gleason thinks he is the sole andspecial guard of Armstrong's health and happiness, and hired thatautomobile for the purpose of keeping the jumper's mind occupied withsomething besides jumping. I agreed to it myself. Now we lose a manon account of it."

  "Thank goodness," broke in the captain, "we didn't have to depend onhim for an event or we'd have been in a bad way. If he should get tothe grounds in time after all, I'd feel like punishing him by notallowing him to jump," snapped the captain.

  "He's punished already," said Black. "Probably eating his heart outsomewhere. He's the most conscientious fellow I ever saw. It's hisfool friend, the Codfish, who got him into any trouble that he's in."

  "I'll telegraph him to come on the next train," said the captain.

  "Will not do much good, I guess, the next train wouldn't get himthere in time. But don't worry, he'll be there at those games if hehasn't met with a serious accident, or I miss my guess badly, but asfor his doing any good, it's another matter."

  "It's too bad," growled Captain Harrington. "The papers will throwthe hot shot into us for being careless. It makes us all look likedummies, confound the luck!"

  "Don't worry about it, Captain. You have enough on your hands, andVare is a certain winner anyway in Armstrong's event. You have yourown troubles this afternoon in the quarter. So take it easy, and quitworrying about something that really doesn't matter a great deal asfar as actual results go."

  "I'm going to telegraph, just the same," returned the captain, "tothe Grand. They would probably go there when they found we had gone,eh?"

  "Go ahead, it will do no harm," admitted Black.

  So Harrington sent off a telegram from a station fifteen miles or sofrom London. A bit peremptory the telegram was, but it relieved thecaptain's feelings. This was the telegram:

  "Frank Armstrong, The Grand, Brighton. Come to London on next train, take taxi to Queen's Club immediately afterwards. Absolutely no excuse for missing team train."

  But this telegram, as we have seen, never reached the man for whom itwas intended.

  At one o'clock taxicabs dropped the Yale-Harvard athletes,attendants, and trainers at the south gate of Queen's Club. Alreadyseveral thousand people had gathered in the stands, and a steadystream was pouring in the gates, not with the impetuosity thatdistinguishes an American crowd, but interested withal in the gamesthey were shortly to see. The majority of the crowd was, of course,English, but the Americans made a brave showing. They gatheredtogether, apparently for mutual support, halfway down the trackstretch and at once selected a cheer leader who was now working upenthusiasm by an occasional yell, simply to let the enemy know thatyoung America would be heard from in more ways than one. A surprisingnumber of Americans had come together for the event. Not all wereHarvard and Yale men, although members of these two institutionspredominated. Students and graduates from universities all overthe United States might have been seen in the crowd. It was not aHarvard-Yale affair to them, it was America against England, andeveryone from the far side of the Atlantic was there to lend a shoutfor his countrymen. College lines were forgotten.

  Along the track-side and in the grand stand speculation was rife asto the outcome of the games. Experts had figured out just how thevarious men were to finish, and the figures had been printed in themorning papers and in the noon editions. All admitted, however, thatthe match would be an extremely close one with the chances slightlyin favor of the visitors.

  "Well," said one confident young man in the group of Americans,"we'll take the hundred, two-twenty and both the hurdles. I'd bet mylast dollar on that. These Englishmen can't get their legs moving ina short distance."

  "Ah, yes, but then when it comes to the longer distance we can't keepour wind going. That's where they have us."

  "Oh, I don't know, there's Harrington, the Yale captain, who cancertainly get away with the quarter. He's been doing under fiftyseconds right along. He will give us the fifth event, and all we needto tie is one more, and to win, two more. Why, Dick, old fel, it's acinch."

  "And what are the other two events, please, Sir Prophet?"

  "Shot for one, they can't beat old red-top McGinnis. These Englishchaps never learned how to put a shot anyway, and there's the highjump, certainly ours; it's like taking money from a baby."

  "Sounds like seven wins, the way you have it figured out."

  "It is seven places or my training as to what five and two make isall to the bad. I tell you it's a cinch. I'd put up all my spare cashon it, and walk home cheerfully if I lost out. But, pshaw! we can'tlose!"

  Conversation was checked by the appearance of several athleteswho had emerged from the Club locker-room doorway, and who werewalking across the turfed stretch to the track. They were seen tobe Americans, and a ringing shout went up from their supporterswhich brought smiles to the faces of the young athletes. The Englishspectators applauded the Americans with hand-clapping. By twos andthrees the athletes made their appearance on the track before thehour set for the beginning of the games, for the day was bright andwarm and the sun of more advantage to them than the shade and
cool ofthe training quarters.

  It is not our purpose to narrate in detail the doings of the halfhundred athletes who struggled for the honor of their colleges andcountry that afternoon nor how records fell and predictions ofexperts were set at naught, how the balance swung this way and that,how the mercurial American cheer-leader ruined the throats of hiscountrymen for the encouragement of the team striving desperatelyon field and track. We are more intimately concerned with FrankArmstrong whom we left a thousand feet more or less in the air,taking a last desperate chance to be in at the finish on the Queen'sClub track.

  Frank afterwards said that he experienced no fear of any kind as theflying machine glided upward from the earth. At first there was thesensation of great speed, though the machine was comparatively closeto the ground, but as the height increased that sensation diminished.Instead of the machine seeming to rise, the earth seemed to drop awayleaving the machine stationary. Below, the country revealed itselflike a map, with the highways and lanes standing out sharply. To thesouth he got the glint of the English Channel, and to the north wasa great black smudge which he took to be London with its smoke fromtens of thousands of chimneys.

  "Going higher," shouted Butler. "Bad currents down here." The wordscame faintly to Frank through the roaring of the wind and the sharpcrackle of the engine exhaust. The plane plunged and rocked in an airbillow.

  "Go ahead as far as you want to," shouted Frank, "but get me there."He had lost all sensation of fear and almost of interest in theflight. His mind was on Queen's Club. Steadily the machine climbeduntil the green of the trees and the grass all became as one, andthe red tiles of the roofs showed only as a splash of color amongthe vast expanse of green. At the greater height of perhaps twothousand feet, where Butler found better currents, Frank thought thecountry below seemed more than ever like a map in one of his oldschool geographies. Twenty towns and cities lay within the range ofhis vision and, by turning his head slightly, he could distinguish,across the whole width of the Channel, the dim outlines of the shoresof France.

  The motor of the big biplane, which had been running with theprecision of a well-timed clock for the space of half an hour, beganto give evidence of something wrong with its internals. It skipped,stuttered in its rhythm for a moment and then went on, only to repeatin a moment. The aviator, helpless in this emergency, merely jiggledhis spark lever, but the stuttering of the motor continued, and thenwith a most disconcerting suddenness the motor stopped entirely.

  "We've got to come down," shouted Butler, "but I'll make our fall aslong as possible. Hold tight."

  Frank needed no urging. He felt the death of the steady forwardmovement and the grip of gravity as the biplane began to drop withincredible swiftness toward the earth. But it was a drop which wascontrolled by the cool-headed Butler, and every foot of the drop tookthem nearer to their destination.

  Five hundred feet below, Frank saw a little patch of green fieldentirely free from trees or shrubbery, and to this he rightlyguessed the aviator was heading. It looked like a golf course fromthat height, and, indeed, proved to be. Now they were directly overthe haven which Butler had picked out, and it seemed in a fair wayto pass it, when the flyer banked hard to the left, almost pivotedon his left wing, brought the machine around over the golf linksagain and, with a final swooping spiral came to earth with a shocksufficiently hard to snap off at the hub one of the wheels of thebiplane's running gear.