The Lost Pilots

by Corey Mead

  The next morning’s weather was still poor, but Shelton was eager to push on. This was fine with Lancaster, who was deeply frustrated with the amount of time they’d already lost. They were nearly out of money, and they could no longer afford to be picky about the conditions in which they flew. After refueling, the trio set off on a direct compass course for El Paso, but they hadn’t gone far before the weather turned even worse. Snow began to fall, hampering their view. When they were halfway to the 8,500-foot peaks of the Guadalupe Mountains, visibility became nil.

  Just as the Robin approached the mountain ridge, the Challenger engine belched forth all the oil in its tank, completely dousing the forward windshields. The oil pressure plunged; the oil temperature needle flatlined to the right. The engine, Lancaster wrote to Jessie the next day, “thumped like a thrashing machine.” Shelton, who was piloting the plane, handled the emergency like a pro. With the Guadalupe’s peaks only twenty feet below, Shelton carefully reversed course, then flew twenty miles back to an emergency landing field at the foot of El Capitan. Due to the oil-covered windshield, Shelton was flying blind. Lancaster opened his window, stuck his head out into the cold, and shouted instructions. Tancrel panicked; in his wild fear, he attempted to jump out of the plane, and had to be restrained by Lancaster. The twenty miles to the emergency field seemed to last ages. When the Robin finally landed, the three spent men staggered out into the field. Lancaster called it his “narrowest escape since [his] crash in Trinidad.”

  The group drove the plane’s engine to El Paso for repairs, where Russell met them, spinning tales about lucrative flight opportunities on Mexico’s west coast. Lancaster derided Russell’s claims as a “waste of time.” The most they could hope for, Lancaster estimated, was a hundred dollars a day, far less than Tancrel and Russell had promised. He also wanted their activities to remain strictly within U.S. and Mexican law.

  Lancaster, now stuck in El Paso, was wracked with guilt at his inability to provide for Jessie. “Darling, you know how much I love you, so you must realize what a ghastly thing it is for me to have no money to send you,” he wrote, adding, “Nothing I hope can ever take you really from me.” Lancaster never handled idle time well, and the feeling of limbo that now entrapped him was made worse by Tancrel’s unending stream of tall tales and jokes. The two men were staying in the same room. “I am tired of his opening phrases: ‘When I was master of so and so’ or ‘When I was bullfighting in Mazatlan and had killed three bulls with one sword,’ ” Lancaster complained to Jessie. “He will look well walking down to the hotel lobby dressed as a U.S. Navy Captain, when the desk clerk calls over and says no more telephone calls or wires until the bill is paid, ‘Captain!’ ”

  Lancaster confessed that he’d felt “much better mentally” when he had “work to do, such as flying here, and working on the engine.” He confided to Haden Clarke that he no longer trusted Russell, who was pressuring him “to run two Chinamen over the border” in a borrowed aircraft. Despite Lancaster’s pledge not to break any laws, the prospect of making a few hundred dollars, which he could pass on to Chubbie, was difficult to resist.

  Lancaster remained fairly positive that Tancrel was a fraud, but Tancrel’s seeming lack of shame could be entertaining in its way, as when the manager of their El Paso hotel pressed them to pay their room bill. Tancrel, unflustered, responded by suggesting the manager should give them money instead to invest in Latin-American Airways. Lancaster and Shelton also found hilarious an incident in which Tancrel critiqued the poor wallpapering job in the hotel’s hallway. “I’ve hanged thousands of square miles of wallpaper,” Tancrel huffily declared, after Lancaster and Russell ribbed him about his comment. They mocked this statement, too, until Tancrel produced a Wallpaper Hangers’ Union of Washington, D.C., card bearing his name. This produced further laughter: Why would a U.S. Navy captain belong to such a union? Tancrel’s claims of captaincy were obviously false. He also told Lancaster that he was a Freemason, and attempted to prove it by giving the secret handshake. “It was as far from the Masonite [handshake] as it could be,” Lancaster chortled in a letter to Jessie.

  The most amusing incident occurred one morning at 4 a.m., when Tancrel frantically shook Lancaster awake because of shouting in the hallways. When they opened their hotel door they were confronted by billowing smoke coming from a fire in a lower-floor room. As Lancaster described the scene to Chubbie:

  Our gallant Captain M.G. Tancrel seized the hose manned by the bellhop and night clerk and after the door of the room had been opened he shot several tons of water in. The smoke was terrible. “It’s life and death,” said he, gallantly entering room 438 with chocking breath. Hell! The room was empty! The room clerk then remembered that a man and woman full of booze had checked out but an hour previously. Lights were turned on, the smoke cleared, and there was a hole in the center of the bed. Tancrel had shot the windows out with the hose stream, brought down five plaster ceilings-rooms underneath, and put . . . an inch of water on the fourth floor. Then he was mad because the hotel manager did not send him a bouquet and a receipted bill for his gallantry.

  On another memorable morning, Tancrel and Lancaster were awakened by a sharp knock on the door. When they opened up, a sixty-year-old Australian man strode into the room. “I’m Billy Smith,” the man announced, “sergeant of detectives for this city, boys!” A panicked Tancrel blanched. But Lancaster, thinking quickly, announced, “I’m a digger [Australian], too,” forging with the detective an instant bond. Smith produced the telegram that had brought him to the room: “Chief of Police, El Paso, Texas: Arrest Gentry Shelton in care of Captain W. N. Lancaster, Hotel Hussman, for felony, theft. W. A. Ovington, Sheriff, Beaumont, Texas.” Lancaster was briefly confused, until he realized, to his ire, that the Beaumont airport officials who had lent him and Shelton a propeller—to replace the propeller their errant mechanic had been responsible for breaking—were upset that it hadn’t yet been returned. Lancaster and Tancrel telephoned Shelton in Nogales to tell him the news, taking mischievous delight in his traumatized reaction. Detective Smith was “quite won over” to their cause, as his sarcastic response to Beaumont indicated: “W. Ovington, Beaumont, Texas. Gentry Shelton left some days ago for California and points North, suggest you line up a dog team and requisition some woolen [underwear].” Lancaster roared with laughter at Smith’s words. He found it delightful that El Paso was filled with “cattlemen” who were “for the most part a cheery and picturesque crowd.”

  Still, these incidents were an exception. Lancaster was far too distressed by the lack of communication from Jessie to be in good humor overall. As he admitted in his diary: “Tonight I am more than just worried, I am plumb crazy because of no news of Chubbie.” Shelton was in Nogales, where Jessie was supposed to be mailing her letters, but nothing had arrived there. “Am terribly worried on [Chubbie’s] account,” Lancaster wrote Clarke. “Haden, old man, the knowledge that you are ‘standing by’ the fort and looking after Chubbie has meant more to me than you will ever know. As soon as you get this tell me frankly if I should beg, borrow or steal my way back to Miami.” Even a chance meeting with an old RAF buddy, Joseph Ince—who had witnessed one gangster murdering another at his hotel the previous night—couldn’t fully distract Lancaster, although he was grateful for the company.

  But his love for Jessie overrode all else, to the point of obsession. “I love you and long for you, my sweetheart,” he wrote her. “I lay in bed at night and pray you are not suffering too great a hardship. I want to have you in my arms again, Chub. I love you more and more each moment of my life.” The more isolated Lancaster became, the more he retreated into an idea of Jessie as a kind of savior, an island of purity in the sea of moral and financial uncertainty that surrounded him. Jessie’s cooling feelings, to whatever extent Lancaster suspected them, only fueled his dedication. “Do you still love me?” he inquired in a letter, but the answer seemed irrelevant to his ardor.

  Finally, on March 20, Lancaster received three le
tters from Jessie and one from Haden, all written two days earlier. He was relieved, but he didn’t hide from Jessie his precarious financial situation: he and Tancrel now had precisely forty cents between them. Lancaster was distressed to learn that Jessie hadn’t received the five dollars he’d mailed days earlier. He realized with fury that Russell was the likely thief, since Russell had seen him place the bill inside the envelope, and Russell had also delivered the letter to the post office. Compared to the brazen Russell, Lancaster felt, Tancrel was actually “quite generous hearted.” Russell had also proven himself devious by diverting Latin-American Airways’ money for his own uses: he’d sent money to his wife that Tancrel had given him to spend on traveling to Nogales, Phoenix, and Tucson. He then wired Tancrel with a “cock-and-bull” story about his car breaking down, and pleaded for more cash. Yet Russell’s crookedness now came in handy.

  Desperate to get his hands on money to send to Jessie, Lancaster searched for items to sell. (He had already sold his watch.) He opted to pawn the loaded .38 revolver that Ernest Huston had loaned him back in Miami. With the gun in his pocket, Lancaster prowled through El Paso searching for a buyer. Pawnbrokers unanimously turned him down; Texas stores, it seemed, were already filled with firearms. So Lancaster met with a “gangster” friend of Russell’s, who gave him a five-dollar loan on the gun. If Lancaster couldn’t pay the money back by Tuesday, the gangster would own the gun.

  “I have completely lost faith in the ability of Russell and Tancrel to produce any legitimate business worth while,” Lancaster fumed in his diary, while reaffirming that he had “not the slightest intention of doing anything dishonest or breaking the laws of the U.S.A.” But he and Shelton had gone too far, and had too few other options, to abandon the trip just yet. “Until Gent and I get on the spot we can’t tell whether any of these Latin-American people are speaking the truth,” Lancaster rationalized to Jessie. At least Shelton himself had proved trustworthy, remaining sober and focused for the entire trip. But Lancaster’s law-abiding resolve, however firmly held, was wavering in the face of his potentially hopeless financial situation. Tancrel was dropping regular hints about illegally transporting Chinese citizens from Mexico to the United States, as per Russell’s offer, and even Shelton seemed to feel that a onetime deal might be worth the risk, considering the money to be made.

  Lancaster was tormented, unable to make up his mind. He had promised Jessie that he wouldn’t break any laws, and a promise to her meant more than anything. But what if Jessie agreed with Shelton? He tossed in bed all night, until, at 5:30 a.m., he threw off his sheets and went to his desk to write a letter to Haden Clarke:

  Forgive what appears to be dramatic and believe in the absolute sincerity of this note! I am faced with quite a problem. You know I am devoted to Chubbie. For her I would do anything, if necessary risk anything. [At the present time the economic situation is so acute that I must in some way remedy matters.]

  This Mexican venture so far has been painful. . . . Now we are within reach of some cash if I take a chance and make a little trip with unmentionable cargo. Gent has weakened and thinks we must go ahead in the manner “R” [Russell] suggests. . . .

  If I return to Miami, bringing with me just my body and the few garments I left with, the strain on Chubbie is going to be great. Whereas if I am able to send back in the course of a few days several hundred dollars, the child will be happy and it will brace her for the future.

  Because of our newly formed friendship for each other, I am asking you to assist me as far as possible. Write me, as fully as possible, your ideas after going over such evidence as you have. There may be a way of obtaining Chubbie’s reaction without fully disclosing the hand.

  For me, life would be very empty if I lost Chubbie. For me, she is the all-important thing. If I thought my return to Miami in a penniless condition would mean the possibility of losing the kid I would take even greater chances to return with money than might be prudent.

  That same day, Lancaster wrote to Jessie, describing the day as “ghastly,” with forty-five-mile-per-hour winds churning up dust and sand, covering anyone who ventured out. He informed her of Russell’s plan to smuggle Chinese nationals, but added, “[D]o not worry. I am not going to take any chances.” He also urged her to keep Russell’s news confidential from anyone in Miami until “such time as we might want to produce it.” Lastly, he reiterated his hope that Clarke was making progress on the book, as that seemed to offer “the greatest opportunity for the future.”

  Still, messages from Jessie arrived far too infrequently for Lancaster’s taste; his writings were soon filled with remonstrations regarding her seeming neglect. Jessie argued that there was no point in her writing him regularly, since she never knew where he would be staying, but this did little to placate Lancaster. “Cannot understand why Chubbie does not write,” he wrote in his diary. “This is my greatest hardship, the lack of news from her.” And the next day: “No news from Chubbie. She has disappointed me far more than this damned expedition.” And again: “No letters—Chubbie, you wretch!” Every day he poured out his love for her, but to little avail. “I miss you, Chub, terribly. Have wanted you more than I can describe,” he proclaimed in one typical message. “Oh! To give you a great big hug and feel you close to me once more,” he ended another. “I love you more and more each moment of my life,” he pledged. But the few replies he received from Jessie seemed brief and tossed-off, and he described to her his bruised feelings: “Last night I received a typewritten letter from Haden, which had a short note from you written on the bottom. . . . This is all I have had from you since Friday. As a result, I am terribly blue tonight. Maybe the morning will produce a sweet letter from you. But I am getting accustomed to disappointment.”

  The lack of news from Jessie only increased Lancaster’s anxiety at not having money to send her. He was so broke that he and Tancrel had eaten only one thirty-cent meal per day for the past four days. His clothes were filthy, but he had no money to dry-clean them. Ernest Huston’s gun was gone, too, since Lancaster couldn’t raise the funds to repay the gangster who was holding it. He had reached his nadir: he was starving, dirty, broke, and surrounded by likely criminals.

  Though Tancrel still kept up the fiction that Latin-American Airways was a legitimate enterprise, he again suggested that smuggling Chinese nationals—at a thousand dollars a pop—from Mexico to America could be a lucrative short-term fix. Despite the off hand manner in which Tancrel made his pitch, Lancaster had a strong hunch that this had always been his and Russell’s plan. This seemed confirmed when Tancrel, still playing the naïf, said he had just discovered that Russell was a drug smuggler. According to Russell, Tancrel reported, flying a single marijuana-filled suitcase from Mexico to San Francisco would net thirty thousand dollars. Lancaster felt sure that Tancrel’s ignorance was feigned, and that Latin-American Airways had been set up as a front for criminal activity. Tancrel was obviously probing Lancaster to find out if he was on board.

  On March 24 Lancaster cabled, complaining that he was “terribly disappointed and worried” that he’d had no news from her, adding “this period of waiting has been worst ever experienced.” Hours later, Lancaster’s letter to Clarke about the possibility of illegally ferrying aliens across the border received a firm response. Despite Lancaster’s plea to keep the matter hush-hush, Clarke had gone to Jessie anyway. Now they cabled: “Both advise against contemplated move most emphatically. Abide by original decision to letter. This no time to take chances. Situation not so hot but such steps by no means warranted. You are in dog house on chain if you ignore this regardless of outcome. Writing El Paso, love, regards. Chubbie and Haden.”

  Lancaster was already wary of breaking the law, and the cable from Jessie and Clarke only strengthened his resolve. He informed Tancrel that he wanted no part of smuggling drugs or people. He wrote back to Jessie, promising, “Alright, my sweetheart, I will abide by your decision. . . . I will not take any chance at all. . . . As long as you stick
by me, Chub, in this worrying time I don’t care a damn. You alone are the one thing that matters to me.”

  He also told her to thank Clarke for his kindness and his help. “I somehow felt I could trust him more than anyone else I have met for a long time,” Lancaster confided. “I hope this has turned out to be so.”

  Lancaster received a lengthy, caring letter from Clarke several days later that seemed to vindicate his trust in him. Because Jessie already suspected that Lancaster was contemplating breaking the law, Clarke began, he had disregarded Lancaster’s instructions and “put the whole thing to her squarely.” Clarke then elaborated on the many reasons why Lancaster should steer clear of illegal activity:

  The risk involved is entirely out of proportion to the gain you can anticipate. The slightest slip would result in your being deported, the loss of all the prestige you have worked 16 years to gain, and an awfully tough road to the future for you. The amount of money you would make would furnish only temporary relief at best, and would in no wise help you to become permanently established. You should not let the fact that you are in a tough spot influence you to take a step that you know to be unwise. The worst time in the world to make a foolish decision is when you are down to your last stack of chips. . . .

  [Y]ou are surrounded by people who are using every argument in their power to convince you and put the matter in the best possible light. . . . Regardless of what your associates say, and of how rosy the chances may seem, I know perfectly well that there is a very big chance of things going wrong. . . .

  You promised Chubbie that you positively would not swerve from your original intentions and I am convinced for you to do so would make her most unhappy regardless of the outcome. I appreciate that your one idea in the whole matter is her welfare and happiness, so since the move must defeat this purpose, what possible argument is there in its favor? I agree that it would be a bit tough to come back absolutely empty-handed, but I strongly advise this in preference to the move you contemplate. Frankly, I think she has been convinced you were on a wild goose chase from the very beginning and I assure you she will in no wise blame you if the thing is a flop.