CHAPTER VII
A ONE-SHIP CARNIVAL
"Hi, sleepy-head, don't you ever get up of a morning? Going to snoozeall day?" A couple of resounding smacks against the hammock he swung instartled 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 ina hurry?" Hal stuck a tousled blond head out of his sleeping bag andgazed reproachfully down at Maben, who was already up and, in spite ofthe crisp autumn chill, was taking a shower bath by the simple expedientof standing in the shallow creek and flinging water all over himself.
It was a strange camping outfit that Maben and Hal had evolved. Insteadof a tent, they utilized the upper wing of Maben's old biplane as a roofover their heads. They had constructed hammocks of heavy canvas whichcould be suspended, one on each side of the fuselage, up under the topwing. The corners of a hammock were tied to the upper strut fittings,and when a fellow crawled into the three blankets inside, which weresewn up to form a bag, he was prepared for a comfortable night.
Sliding out carefully, so as not to wreck the wing fabric above andbelow him in any way, Hal stood up, stretched again, then made a speedydash for a dip in the creek and a leap into clothes.
"My time to cook! I'll get breakfast to pay for oversleeping," shoutedHal, back at the plane and grabbling into the little provision sacktucked 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 andset out the meal in two tin plates, he attended to the job by meremechanical touch,--his mind was running round in circles. What in thedickens were they going to do? If they spent what little they had buyingfood, 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 nostunt flying--no stunt flying, no crowd to take for rides. And carryingpassengers 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 andstunt together over the backwoods country towns. It would be aprecarious livelihood. Some days they might cop nothing. Some days theymight make a pile. Maben needed a "pile" for his folks back home, hiswife, a baby boy, a little daughter just old enough to start school.Maben carried their pictures in a rubbed old case stuck away in aninside pocket. Hal had his home folks on his heart too. He needed toearn money somehow. Even though the mere touch of a plane and the callof the air were a delightful lure, he knew aero-stunting was a riskybusiness. In the end he had decided to tackle it, for a while anyway. Sohe had rattled the old truck home from Interborough, turned over to hismother 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 hadnever come or at most had been merely glimpsed--a swift moving speck inthe sky that came out of nowhere and disappeared into nowhere--a planethat really came down to earth was a novelty. As they flew overvillages, folks rushed out into the open, heads thrown back, eyes on thesky, arms waving and beckoning excitedly.
After circling to find a good pasture or stubble field from which tooperate (a piece of open ground close up to the village being of coursemost desirable from a showman's point of view), Maben would fly low, andHal would begin to do wing-walking. If the sight of a young fellowwalking and cavorting and skinning-the-cat between wire struts on thewing of a flying plane didn't catch the eye of the crowd, the parachutedrop 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 safeit was to come down in an airplane.
After landing, there would always be a heavy barrage of questions--werethe wings made of tin or catgut; what was that paddle thing in front;which was worse, to break the nose or the tail; how did it feel to fly,anyway? The answer was that the only way to know how it felt to fly wasto try it.
Because a plane was an expensive machine and because it tookconsiderable funds to buy gasoline, the charge for a short sky-ride hadto be five dollars.
After one brave native son took his courage in his hands and went up fora flight, others usually crowded in, anxious for their share of thethrills. Once a whole village, out on the gala event of an annualpicnic, "took to the air." That night Maben and Hal found they had takenin a hundred and seventy-five dollars. The nickels and dimes and smallbills, emptied out of a bulging canvas sack into the dip of a hammock,looked like a young mountain of money. Hal and Maben both had fat checksto send home that week.
Hal had enjoyed visualizing how his mother and Uncle Tel looked whenthey received his check, liked to picture the comforts in which theycould now indulge.
But out here on the edge of Texas business had flopped. They seemed tohave struck a belt where planes had become common as dirt, no rarity atall. Other barnstormers must have combed this section well ahead ofthem. When Hal and Maben zoomed over villages, nobody even bothered tolook up.
"We've got to make 'em look," said Maben fiercely, as he mopped the lastcrumb out of his tin plate, "got to make 'em look--or we don't eat. I'vegot sort of a plan."
When he and Hal walked into town to see about having a tank of gasolinesent out to the plane, Maben dropped hints everywhere about a thrillerof a high dive they were going to stage, a high dive into the whirlpoolbelow the falls of Faben River, just out of town. Folks that wantedtheir hair to stand on end better not miss that! Plenty of excitement!
Back at their camp, Maben, chuckling like the big boy he was at heart,worked all the rest of the morning on a contraption made of empty clothsacks on which he sewed valiantly with a huge needle threaded with stoutstring. He made four bolster-shaped rolls, a square pillow, a roundedknob, all of them stuffed with dead grass and some mixed sand and claythrown in for good weight. Then he assembled his six parts, sewed themstrongly together into the form of a stiff, stubby dummy man.
That afternoon when Hal and Maben went up in the plane, the dummy manwent with them, scrouged down out of sight in the cockpit. Low over thehouses and trees flew Maben, with Hal out on a wing tip doing all thestunts he knew. With that air balance that seemed born in him, Hal bowedand whirled on the lower wing, did acrobatics between struts, climbed tothe top wing, stood outlined against the sky in daring silhouette. Fromhis swift-moving aerial stage, the boy shouted down for the crowd togather at the river bank--last stunt to be pulled there--a thriller!
Higher and higher over the foaming, rocky rapids of the river and itswhirlpool below the falls rode the airplane. Flat on his stomach on thelower plane wing, Hal lay stretched out, holding to a wing strut withone hand and reaching into the cockpit with the other. It took everyounce of muscle in him to draw the weighted dummy up, to flatten it ontop of him.
Maben was too high to allow a good aim at the tiny blotch of waterbelow. Good aim and quick sinking of the dummy into the whirling waterswas the main part of the huge, thrilling joke they were attempting topull off. Down from eighteen hundred feet to a thousand, to eighthundred--five hundred. The roar of the motor diminished. Max Mabenhovered over the pool center in slow reversements and wing slips.
"Quick, shoot him overboard!"
Over the plane edge, down and down went the dummy, waving its arms andlegs wildly. Hal felt a ridiculous sympathy for it, it looked so human.Still flattened out and peering warily over the wing, Hal saw it takewater in one splendid plunge into oblivion. He saw people running up anddown the bank, pointing,--he was sure they were shouting, only no voicescame up to him.
But instead of circling down, straightening out for one of his beautifuleasy landings in even the small field that the river valley allowed,Maben began to circle upward, always in the same tight spirals.
Going up now was poor business. Maben ought to be easing down to takeadvantage of the excited inte
rest his little advertising stunt hadaroused.
Hal wriggled forward, stuck a head over to see why Maben didn't go down.
Still circling, the pilot made motions, pointing to the throttle. In ajiffy Hal whirled his long legs around and slid into the cockpit. As hebent close, Maben shouted in his ear:
"Gotter keep going! Throttle's stuck! Can't shut the motor off!"