by B. M. Bower
“Help me turn ’er first,” called Bland, with a gesture to make his meaning clear.
“’Bye, Mary V! Now’s your chance to get a picture—but you’ll have to hurry!”
Johnny climbed up, straddled into the seat ahead of Bland. He placed his feet, pulled down his goggles, grasped the wheel and felt himself balanced—poised, with a drumming beat in his throat, a suffocating fulness in his chest. His moment had come, he thought swiftly, as one thinks when facing a sudden, whelming event. The biggest moment in his life—the moment that he had dreamed of—the culmination of all his hopes while he studied and worked—the moment when he took flight in an airplane of his own!
“Easy on the controls, bo, till you get the feel of it.” Bland leaned to shout in his ear. “You can over-control, if yuh don’t watch out. You feel my control. Don’t try to do anything yourself at first. You’ll come into it gradual.”
He sat back, and Johnny waited, breathing unevenly. He had meant to wave a hand nonchalantly to Mary V, but when the time came he forgot.
The motor drummed to a steady roar. The plane started, ran along the sand for a shorter distance than before, smoothed suddenly as it left the ground, climbed insidiously. The beat in Johnny’s throat lessened. He forgot the suffocated feeling in his chest. He glanced to the right and looked down on the ridge that held the hangar in its rocky face. A perfect assurance, a tranquil exaltation possessed him. Godlike he was riding the air—and it was as though he had done it always.
He frowned. The earth, that had flattened to a gray smoothness, roughened again, neared him swiftly. Ahead was a bare, yellow patch—they were pointed toward it at a slackened speed. They were just over it—the wheels touched, ran for ten feet or so, bounced away and returned again. They were circling slowly, just skimming the surface of the ground. They slowed and stopped, the plane quivering like a scared horse.
“Fine!” Bland shouted above the eased thrum of the motor. “You done fine, but seems like you showed a tendency to freeze onto the wheel when we were coming down; yuh don’t wanta do that, bo. Keep your control easy—flexible, like. Now we’ll go back where the girl is and make a landing there. And then we’ll make a flight—as far as is safe on our teacup of gas!”
“I brought five gallons; that ought to run us a ways,” Johnny pointed out. “I didn’t want to land, that is why I froze to the wheel, as you call it. I wanted to keep a-goin’!”
“You get me the gas, and we’ll keep a-goin’, all right, all right! I got a hunch, bo, you’re holding out on me.”
“Forget it! Let’s go!”
Again the short run, the smooth, upward flight, the slower descent, the bouncing along to a stop.
“You done better, bo. I guess this ain’t the first time you ever flew, if you told it all. I hardly touched the controls. Now, say! On the square—where’s that gas at? She’s working perfect, and now’s the time we oughta beat it outa here, before something goes wrong. I know you’ve got more gas than what you claim you’ve got.”
“You know a lot you just think. I’ll send for some, right off. Let’s go. No use burning gas standing still!”
Mary V, her camera sagging in her two hands so that the lens looked at the wheels, gazed wistfully after them as they rose and went humming away toward the rising sun, that had just cleared the jagged rim of mountains and was gilding the ledge behind her. They climbed and swerved a little to the south, evidently to avoid looking straight into the sun.
Sandy stamped and snorted, tugging at the rope that tied him. Mary V looked down, away from the diminishing airplane, and gave a shrill cry of dismay.
“Jake! You come back here—Whoa!”
She stood with her mouth partly open, staring down along the ledge to where Jake, whom she had daringly borrowed again because of his strength and his speed that could bring her to Sinkhole in time to watch the trial flight, was clattering away with broken bridle reins snapping. Sandy wanted to follow. When she ran toward him to catch him before he broke loose, he, too, snapped a rein and went racing away after Jake.
Mary V stamped her foot, and cried a little, and blamed Bland Halliday for flying down that way where Jake could see him and get scared. She had been very careful to tie Jake back out of sight of the strip of sand where Johnny had told her they would make their start and their landing. It wasn’t her fault that she was set afoot—but Bland Halliday just knew Jake would be scared stiff if he went down past where he was, and he had done it deliberately. And now Sandy was gone, too—and Johnny only had a couple of bronks in the little pasture—and she would just like to know what she was going to do? She should think that the least Johnny and Bland could do would be to come back and—do something about the horses. They surely must have seen Jake running away, and Johnny would have sense enough to know what that meant.
But Johnny, as it happened, was wholly absorbed in other things. He was not thinking of horses, nor of Mary V, nor of anything except flying. He was crowding into a few precious minutes all the pent emotions of his dearest dreams. He was getting the “feel” of the controls, putting his theoretical learning to the test, finding just how much and how little it took to guide, to climb, to dip. Bland Halliday was a good flyer, and he was doing his best, showing off his skill before Johnny.
He shut off the motor for a minute and volplaned. “Great way to see the country!” he shouted, and climbed back in an easy spiral.
Johnny looked down. They were still within the lines of the Rolling R range, he could tell by a certain red hill that, from that height, looked small and insignificant, but red still and perfect in its contour. Beyond he could see the small thread stretched across a half-barren slope—the fence he meant to inspect that day. Between the red hill and the fence were four moving dots, following behind several other smaller dots, which his range-trained eyes recognized as horses driven by men on horseback.
The airplane circled hawklike, climbed higher, and disported itself in an S or two and a “figure eight,” all of which Johnny absorbed as a sponge absorbs water. Then, pointing, flew straight.
They were going back to the ledge. Johnny’s heart sank at thought of once more creeping along on the surface of the earth like a worm, toiling over the humps and the hollows that looked so tiny from away up there. He wanted to implore Bland to turn and go back, but he did not know how long the gasoline would last, and he was afraid they might be compelled to land in some spot a long way from his rock hangar. He said nothing, therefore, but strove to squeeze what bliss remained for him in the next minutes, distressingly few though they were.
As it happened, Bland did not know the topography of Sinkhole as did Johnny, and in the still air the flour sack did not flutter. Bland was in a fair way to fly too far. Johnny knew they were much too high to land at the cleft unless they did an abrupt dive, and he did not quite like the prospect. He let Bland go on, then daringly banked and circled. Bland had done it, half a dozen times—so why not Johnny? Luck was with him—or perhaps his sense of balance was true. He did not side-slip, and he made the turn on a downward incline, which brought them closer to earth. He sought out the place where Mary V, a tiny wisp of a figure, stood beside the cleft, and flattened out as the ground came rushing up to meet him.
To all intents Johnny made that landing alone, for if Bland helped he did not say so. Johnny was positive that he had made it himself, and his sense of certainty propelled him whooping to where Mary V stood, her camera once more slanted uselessly in her two hands, her lips set in a line that usually meant trouble for somebody.
“How’s that—hunh? Say, there’s nothing like it! Did you get a picture of that landing I made? Say—”
“It seems to me that you are doing all the saying, yourself,” Mary V interrupted him unenthusiastically. “It may be all very nice for you, Johnny Jewel, to go sailing around in an aeroplane. I suppose it is very nice for you. I grant that without argument. But as for me—” Sympathy for herself pushed her lips into a trembling, forced a quiver into her
voice.
“As for me, you went and stampeded Jake so he broke loose and went off like a—a bullet! And Bill Hayden will just about murder me for taking him; I was going to sneak him back while the boys were out after more horses, and sneak out again with Tango so Bill wouldn’t know. And now look what a mess you’ve got me into! Of course you don’t care—you and your darned old flying machine! I wish it had busted itself all to pieces! And you too! And Sandy’s stampeded after Jake, and I’m just glad of it!” She gulped, forced back further angry-little-girl storming, and recovered her young-lady sarcasm.
“But please don’t let me interrupt your very fascinating new pastime. Of course, since you are a young man of leisure, playing with your new toy must seem far more important than the fact that I have about twenty miles to walk—through the sand and the heat, and not even a canteen of water to save me from parching with thirst. I—I must ask you to pardon me for—for thrusting my merely personal affairs upon your notice. Well, what are you grinning about? Do you think it’s funny?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A RIDER OF THE SKY
“I could take her home, old top—if I had the gas.” Bland turned his pale stare significantly from Mary V to Johnny. “Come through, bo. You know you’ve got more gas hid out on me somewhere. I got a slant at the bill of it, so I know. It wouldn’t be polite to let the young lady walk home.”
Johnny stilled him to silence with a round-eyed stare.
“Thank you, I’d much prefer to walk—if it was forty miles instead of twenty!” Mary V chilled him further. “What are we going to do, Johnny? I don’t know what will happen if Bill Hayden finds out that I borrowed Jake. And then letting him get away, like that—”
“Sandy’s at the pasture fence, I’d be willing to bet; but at that it’s going to be the devil’s own job to catch him, me afoot. And he wouldn’t let you on him if I did. I guess it’s a case of ride the sky or walk, Mary V.”
“Then we better be stepping, bo, before the wind comes up, as I’ve noticed it’s liable to, late in the forenoon. You dig up the gas, and I’ll take her home.”
“Thank you, I do not wish to trouble you, Mr. Halliday. Johnny can take me, if anybody—”
“Who—him?” Bland Halliday’s smile was twisted far to the left. “Say, where do you get that idea—him flyin’ after one lesson? Gee, you must think flyin’ is like driving a Ford!”
“You could go to the shack and ’phone home for some one to come after you,” Johnny suggested uncertainly.
“And let them know where I am? You must be absolutely crazy, if you think I’d consider such a thing. I’m supposed to be getting ‘Desert Glimpses’—”
“Well, you sure got your glimpse,” tittered Bland.
Mary V turned her back on him, took Johnny by the arm, and walked him away for private conference.
“You better let him take you home, Mary V. He’s all right—for flying. I’ve got to hand it to him there.”
“And give him a chance to steal your aeroplane? He’d never bring it back. I know he wouldn’t.”
“He’d have to. I’d only give him gas enough to make the trip on, and—”
“And if he had enough to come back with, he’d have enough to get to the railroad with. Don’t be stupid. You can take me; couldn’t you, now, honest?”
“Well,—I feel as if I could, all right. But a fellow’s supposed to practice a lot with an instructor before he gets gay and goes to flying alone. Bland says—”
“Oh, plague take Bland! What would you have done if you hadn’t run across him at all? Would you have tried to fly?”
“You know it!” Johnny laughed. “I’ve sat in that seat and worked the controls every day since I got it. I know ’em by heart. I’ve studied the theory of flying till I’ll bet I could stick Bland himself on some of the principles. And I’ve been flying in my sleep for months and months. Sure, I’d have tackled it. But I wouldn’t have had you along when I started in.”
“You know how the thing works, then. Well, come on back and work it! Unless you’re scared.”
“Me scared? Of an airplane? It’s you I’m thinking about. I’d go alone, quick enough. Maybe we could both crowd into the front seat, and let Bland pilot the machine. Then—”
“I abso-lutely will not—fly with—Bland Halliday! If you won’t take me home, I’ll walk!” Mary V pinched in her lips, which meant stubbornness.
Johnny heaved a sigh. “Oh, shoot! I’m game to tackle it if you are. Far as I’m personally concerned, I know I can fly.” His lips, too, set themselves in the line of stubbornness. And he added with perfect seriousness, “It ain’t half as hard as topping a bronk.”
He glanced back, saw that Bland had gone into the cleft, and hurried on to where he had buried the gasoline in the sand behind a jagged splinter of rock in a shallow niche.
“Well, the Jane changed her mind, did she?” Bland commented when Johnny arrived at the plane with the gas. “Thought she would. Walking twenty miles ain’t no sunshine, if you ask me. Better have the tank full-up, bo. It’s always safer.”
A suppressed jubilance such as had seized and held him when he first beheld the disabled airplane in the desert valley, filled Johnny now. As he climbed up and filled the tank his lips were pursed into a soundless whistle, his eyes were wide and shining, his whole tanned face glowed. Bland Halliday regarded him curiously, his opaque blue eyes shifting inquiringly to Mary V, halted at a sufficient distance to take a picture. They were very young, these two—wholly inexperienced in the byways of life, confident, with the supreme assurance of ignorance. It had been a queer idea, hiding the gasoline; and threatened to be awkward, since Bland was practically helpless out here in the sand and rocks. But things always turned out the right way, give them time enough. The kid was filling the tank—at present Bland asked no more of the gods than that. His sour lips drew up at the corners, as they had done when Johnny had made him the proposition in Agua Dulce. Mary V closed her camera and came toward them, walking springily through the sand, looking more than ever like a slim boy in her riding breeches and boots.
“All right. You lend Miss Selmer your goggles and cap, Bland. You won’t need ’em yourself till I get back.”
“Till you—what?”
“Till I get back. I aim to take Miss Selmer home.” Johnny’s lips were still puckered; his face still held the glow of elation. But his eyes looked down sidelong, searching Bland’s face for his inmost thought.
Bland was staring, loose-lipped, incredulous. “Aw, say! D’yuh think I’ll swallow that?” There was a threatening note beneath the whine of his voice.
“If you don’t choke. Come on, Mary V; ‘hop in, and we’ll take a spin,’ and all the rest of it. Venus’ll have nothing on you. Here’s my goggles; put ’em on. I’m going to borrow Bland’s.” It had occurred to Johnny that Mary V would probably shrink from wearing anything belonging to Bland Halliday; girls were queer that way.
Bland stepped pugnaciously forward; his pale eyes were unpleasantly filmed with anger. “Aw, I see your game, bo; but you can’t get away with it. Not for a minute, you can’t. You think I’m such a mark as that? Come down here and work like a dog to get the plane ready to fly, and then kiss yuh good-bye and watch yuh go off with it—and leave me here to rot with the snakes and lizards? Oh, no! I’ll take the young lady—”
“Give me a hand up, Johnny. The front seat? How perfectly ducky to ride home in an aeroplane! Oh, Johnny wants your goggles, Mr. Halliday.” Mary V reached down quickly and lifted them off the irate aviator’s head before he knew what she was after. “Here they are, Johnny. Sit down, and Mr. Halliday will crank up—or whatever you call it. I’ll send him right back, Mr. Halliday, just as quick as ever he can make the trip!”
Mr. Halliday gave her a venomous glance, and a sneer which included them both.
“Ain’t it a shame she ain’t equipped with a self-starter?” he fleered. “You two look cute, settin’ there; but I don’t seem to see yuh making any qui
ck getaway, at that.” He spread his legs and stood arrogantly, arms folded, the sneer looking perfectly at home on his face.
“Don’t be a darned boob!” Johnny snapped impatiently. “Turn ’er over. Miss Selmer wants me to pilot her home, and I’m going to tackle it. You needn’t be scared, though; I’ll come back.”
“I don’t think so,” said Bland, teetering a little as he stood.
“I will, unless I bust something. And it’s my machine, so I’m sure going to be right careful that nothing busts.” What Johnny wanted to do was get out and lick Bland Halliday till he howled, but since the gratification of that desire was neither politic nor convenient, he promised himself a settlement later on, when Mary V was not present. Just now he must humor Bland along.
“I don’t think you’ll come back,” Bland repeated, “because I don’t think you’ll start. There’s a little detail to be looked after first—a little swingin’ on the propeller to be done. I don’t see anybody doin’ it. And I never did hear of anybody flying without their motor running.” He tittered malevolently.
“Cut out the comedy, bo, and let me in there. You start ’er for me, and I’ll take Miss Selmer home for you. You ain’t got your pilot’s license yet—by a long ways. I never heard of a flyer getting his license on a thirty or forty minute course. It ain’t done, bo—take it from me.” He spat into the sand with an air of patient tolerance.
“Are you all ready, Johnny?” Mary V’s voice was rather alarmingly sweet. “I’m not going to touch this ducky little wheel. I’m afraid I might think it was my car and do something queer. I shall let you drive—if you call it driving. Now if Mr. Halliday will crank up for us, we’ll go.”
“Mr. Halliday will let you set there till you get enough,” Bland grinned sourly. “I’m thinking of your safety, sister. I’m thinkin’ more of you than that piece of cheese in the pilot’s seat.”