CHAPTER VIII
RIVER OF THE WIND
Maben kept circling. Beside him, Hal worked desperately, trying everyknown and unknown device for loosing a stuck throttle. But stuck shestayed.
And the interminable circling kept on. It seemed hours that they rodethus, using up their precious gas in this ridiculous, passengerlessflight. Finally Hal crawled out of the cockpit and crept to the front ofthe wing. He risked thrusting a hand gingerly down in the back of theengine. Finally his searching fingers closed over the obstruction, aslick, bottle-shaped thing with a greasy pointed neck. It was their canof motor oil, carried for emergencies, and it had jarred under thethrottle-arm and wedged. Hal tugged and pulled but the grease-coveredcan seemed to offer no grip for his fingers. He reached in for a closergrasp, set his teeth, and yanked. The obstruction gave, zipped out withsuch momentum that the force of Hal's pull nearly shot him backwards offthe plane edge. The can spun a thousand feet down through space. Ratherwhite around the mouth, Hal slid back into the safety of the pit.
With a freed throttle, Maben made a landing with all of his usual easeand grace. But there was no one to watch him. The little crowd thattheir ruse of the diving dummy had assembled for them had long sincedeparted.
So far as barnstorming aviation was concerned, East Texas seemed to be atotal loss. Hal and Maben swooped down to their camp, gathered up theirvery limited assortment of housekeeping necessities, and set wing forfurther westward.
Within the week they hit a line of carnivals and country fairs.
With so much competition in the way of stunt flyers and aerial circuses,any newcomer on the scene must think up something out of the ordinary ifhe expected to make a living with his sky bus. And with necessityfostering invention, Hal's brain conjured up the something.
Even on these little half-mile country tracks, the auto racer wasreplacing the old-time horse racer. Hal's agile imagination leaped astep further. Why not race car against airplane? The one on the ground,the one in the air, but both racing in the same limited circle in fullview of the grandstand?
It was so revolutionary an idea that at first no one would listen tohim. A laugh in the face was all he got for his explanations of how tomanage this new thrill-offering.
Then the manager of the lively carnival in swing at Repton caught Hal'svision. On his track was staged their first auto-aero race. There was aspice of danger to the thing--at least for the aerial part of it. Tospeed a plane in a little half-mile circuit takes a master hand at thestick. But Maben had that master hand. He could make a sky bus do almostanything in reason.
Above the tiny circuit of the dirt track he had to bank his old planepretty nearly straight up and down and zoom around like a bee in abottle. To keep from winning too soon and ruining the show, he had tothrottle down her motor until the last lap. Then he'd let the sky busout and show the boys what she could do. Below him the begoggled autospeed-fiend would let his ground ship out too and smoke his wheels onturns, but the sky bus always won.
The auto-aero race was a success, a wow! It caught the fancy of thecrowds and gave them more thrills than they knew were left in thisthrill-worn universe. The air-earth races kept the Repton Fair open aweek longer than had been counted upon. After its closing, Hal and Mabendrifted on to other fairs and found good money waiting for them almosteverywhere they touched. Sometimes they took in twenty-five dollars aday, but more often it was seventy-five, and now and again they reachedthe hundred mark.
At Zenner, Hal had the thrill of buying himself a plane. It was an oldJ-1 Standard, the type of ship the army used to train pilots before thewar. Its owner had made one flight in it and had come down to a perfectone-point landing--straight on the nose--and smashed up everything.
Max Maben knew points though when it came to planes, and advised Hal tobuy. They made Zenner their headquarters for a while and radiated outfrom it to do carnival flying. Between times they worked on the plane.In the end they evolved a patched-up creation built with homemade spars,a second-hand engine and rusty fittings that had to be painted over. Butshe flew like a bird. The carnival season was closing in. Hal used theold J-l Standard to double their earnings by flying races at one fairwhile Max filled his schedule at other fairs.
But for all her sweet flying, the Standard wasn't altogether a luckyplane. Some nemesis of mischance seemed to dog her flights more oftenthan not. Once when the two flyers had her out for a pleasure spin thattook them hedgehopping over mountain tops and skimming the warm airsoftness of the desert edge, the false darkness of a windstorm swoopedaround them and sent them earthward for a forced landing. In the dimnessthey took to ground between the cactus and Spanish dagger covering oldfields. And here they stayed the better part of a week. As they landed,a villain of a Spanish dagger plant had slashed through the front sparof a wing. It took half a day to patch the ten-inch gap in the spar andto sew up a dozen rips in the wing fabric. It took half a week ofcutting sagebrush and cactus to clear enough space for a take-offrunway.
But whether the old J-l Standard was a lucky bird or not, possession ofit began to stir in Hal Dane a slow, subtle change. Ownership of a planeof his own awoke in him vast longings and hopes. In spare moments he wasalways tinkering lovingly around the old bus, seeing if a wire tightenedhere didn't make her wing edge better, or if a heavier wire coil abovethe landing gear didn't make her taxi along sweet. Now and again when hehad a spell off from carnival work, he took the "J" up on long, highsolo flights.
On one of these lonely air journeys he pushed higher than ever before.The vast altitudes were always luring the boy, held a fascination forhim. Zooming up into the ether till from land he might seem some merespeck in the sky had long since ceased to awake in him any nervousterrors. Instead, he reveled in the sense of space and freedom theheights gave him. Aerial intuition showed him that, within limits, thehigher he was, the safer he was. An engine break a hundred feet aboveground, where room for soaring tactics was limited and the parachute ofno account, was a much more terrible danger than a similar accident twomiles high. The heights meant safety from rough ground air; ten orfifteen thousand feet often meant safety from storms.
Up and up Hal pushed his rough-built, patched-winged old army relic,reveling wildly in the freedom of the skies, fourteen, fifteen, sixteenthousand feet up. Intense cold froze him to the marrow, chattered histeeth. Air pressure weighted his brain, reeled his head dizzily. If onlyhe had some protecting, oxygen-piped helmet to protect him from airheights, as a diver had helmet to save him from water pressure! If--if!Then he could explore the great unknown of the air! But even at a punysixteen-thousand-foot height, the sky had revelations for one thatsoared its spaces knowingly.
Once in his high flying, Hal was swept into the vast power of a greatwestward flowing current of air. A veritable river of the wind. It swepthim on fast and faster. Exhilaration shot through the boy's being.Speed! Power! Here was power waiting to be harnessed by man. Westward ona river of the wind!
A thousand years ago his Norse ancestors had swept westward on oceancurrents, the rivers of the sea, to find a new land. Some day, he, HalDane must sweep westward on a river of the wind to discover--what?
He longed to fly onward forever as he was now, with a speed wind underhis wings. But the cold was devouring him, the awesome pressure wasroaring into his brain. Anger at his puny man's impotence in the face ofsuch power shook him. He could bear no more, the air weights weresmothering him. Downward he began to drop in long swoops.
As altitude had plunged him into a baptism of ice, so earth, as heswooped downward, seemed to have prepared for him a baptism of fire.
Below him, in great gusts, yellow-edged billows of black smoke cloudspoured up. Funnels of sparks blasted up on the winds and scattered toshower back into an inferno of flames.
Hal swerved aside, but sent his plane in a huge circuit nearer earth, sothat without danger he could inform himself concerning this disaster.
It was a barn in flam
es--the great red barn of some lonely ranch place.Crammed as it must be with hay and wheat shocks, it had become a roaringfurnace, spouting flames up into the very skies.
Disastrously near to the doomed barn was the house. The little whitefarmhouse seemed to crouch pitiably, seemed almost a human thing,earth-bound and with fire-death sweeping against it.
As Hal circled nearer, he could see little frantic specks that werehuman beings running back and forth with futile buckets of water. Fromexperience out here, Hal had come to know something of the water dearthof the plains. What avail were the few hundred gallons of water in alittle cistern against this raging fire monster?
But the human specks fought on madly. The barn was doomed. They werefighting for the house. Up went the buckets of precious water to wetdown the roof. Now they were spreading sopping blankets. And to whatuse? The wind was veering more, the sparks were showering continuously.For one flaming shingle stamped out, two more leaped into blaze.
Like one fascinated by danger, Hal circled nearer. It was madness. Aspark on his wing, curl of flame bursting out of the inflammable lacquerpigment--then the death crash.
But this little white house was somebody's home--his all!
The boy flung caution from him. He dropped low, aimed his plane straightout. With a zoom of the mighty wind-makers of his wings, he droveforward down the air lane between the flaming hell of the barn and thelittle crouching house in its imminent doom.
In his wake swept vast air currents swirled upward by the speed of hispassage, a wind wall that turned back spark and flames from showering onthe house roof.
His own wings had dodged sparks somehow, run the fire gauntlet unscathedthis one time. It was risking fate, but Hal Dane wheeled his aircraftand shot again down the dangers of that fire-fenced air lane.
Hal Dane was using his plane like a gigantic fan to combat the fire'sspread. His very speed must have shed the falling dangers of sparks fromhis own wings.
Full forty times he drove his ship back and forth between the littlehouse and the flaming barn, making mighty air currents that turned backthe peril like a shield of the wind.
The fire-riddled structure collapsed, shooting flames enormously high,then settled into a smouldering mass. This might burn on for days, butits real menace to the farmhouse was ended.
With danger conquered, Hal Dane, like some crusader of the air, whirledskyward, incognito. Those he had saved would never know who had savedthem.
But flame and danger had strangely stirred the boy's heart, had firedhis ambition into a steady glow that henceforth was to flinch atnothing.
Emotion--inspiration--a medley of feelings surged up in him as heswirled high into the sky. Higher, higher, back again into the mightyrushing currents of the rivers of the winds! To what did that currentflow westward? Some day he must explore it--must know.
High, and higher, till the air pressure sang heavily against his brain.Here in the heights the lure of still another adventure was callinghim--the adventure of invention. The world was waiting for that--waitingfor man to pit his brain against the dangers of the great ethereal upperstrata. Man must conquer air heights as he had conquered earth heights.
It was a new Hal Dane that came down from this sky flight. He was nolonger a boy, satisfied with clowning above a carnival in an airmachine. In his mind burned a definite desire to master aeronauticsinstead of merely drifting aimlessly, satisfied to dabble in air flying.
Along with ambition he had the hard common sense to know that he must goback and begin at the bottom, lay his foundations right if he meant toclimb high.
That night he mailed a letter to the Rand-Elwin Flying School. Dayslater the answer came, stating that he could still have the work and thetuition in that organization that he had applied for once before. Halwas both surprised and pleased to read that Rex Raynor was now one ofthe flying instructors in the school.
With the chill of winter beginning to creep over the great southernstretches of Texas, the season of country fairs and carnivals came to aclose. Maben was anxious now to get home for a short visit with hisfamily. After that he meant to try for some practical, year-aroundwork--the air mail, or forest ranger air service. And Hal had his ownambitious plans burning within him.
At the Louisiana-Texas border town of Aldon, he and Maben partedcompany. It was a wrench for both of them. But then they could cheertheir hearts with the knowledge that the science of flying was makingthe world smaller every day. All through life, he and Maben would likelyenough be meeting at various landing fields--to "ground fly" and jokeabout their lurid carnival past.
Barnstorming might have been the slap-stick life, but both Hal and Mabencould be thankful for their period of buzzing a plane above countryfairs--their work had brought them in enough money to keep theirfamilies comfortable for some months to come.
Hal was also ahead an additional five hundred from the sale of his oldplane. He could embark with an easy mind on what promised to be thegreatest adventure, so far, in his life.