CHAPTER XIII

VISION

Hal Dane was above the trimotor now, and was still sending out his desperate aerial telegraph call, "T-t-t-tat tat-t-tat t-tat--danger--keep flying--danger!"

He had raced and choked and pounded his engine till smoke fumes discharged gassily from it. The next sputter might stall a filthy motor to a "conk" in mid-air, might back-fire flame into the carburetor. Yet the message must still go on. Three lives depended on that one hairbreadth chance.

"Danger--keep flying!"

But the trimotor was going down. It swooped to five hundred--three hundred--began to flatten at two hundred feet for the last lap of the down glide.

"Danger! Danger! Danger!" shrieked the tortured staccato of the higher plane. "Danger! Danger! Keep flying!"

Even as the great plane below swooped to strike earth, its pilot lifted wings in a mighty upward dart. Higher and higher he rose. Behind him trailed his own call in aerial telegraphy. "Danger--where--what?" roared the staccato bellow of the trimotor.

In their brief code, Hal Dane tapped back the answer on his engine, and urged return flight to the school aviation field before attempting the landing.

As Raynor and Hal circled near, they could see McGinnis turn the control over to Colonel Wiljohn. Then the boy climbed out over the side of the plane and swung head downward to see if he could reach the broken gear and perhaps lash it back into place.

A hopeless task, it appeared, for Fuz McGinnis slowly dragged himself back into the cockpit. Soon the plane circled and headed back for the Rand-Elwin grounds.

All that wild race to Clanton had taken a bare fifteen minutes. Another quarter of an hour saw them back above the home field.

Raynor and Hal made their descent in record time, leaped from the plane and raced for the edge of the field. Men jostled together to give these two room. Like the rest of the waiting throng they stood, heads back, eyes glued to the crippled sky craft.

"She's coming--now!" It was a whisper, a prayer that came from every heart and lip in the crowd.

The plane was coming down in wide, slow circles.

"Atta boy, you're bringing her in beautifully--yet every odd's against you!" gritted Raynor through set teeth.

"But he's got a chance, one chance," muttered Hal, gripping Rex Raynor's arm and pointing excitedly. "If he keeps to the balance he's got--runs on that one wheel to lose momentum, it can--"

It could.

Fuz McGinnis held his plane to angle of balance, even as he sped half a hundred feet on the one wheel after he struck ground. Then came a tearing, splintering crash as the plane shot sideways, dragging the down wing into mangled wreckage. Even so, the greatest danger mark had been passed. That one-wheel run had spent the worst of the dread momentum.

Guards held the frantic crowd back while experienced hands tore at the wreckage, lifted out the occupants. The three of them were dazed, bruised, cut about hands and face from flying pieces of wood and fabric. But the miracle of it--they were alive, practically unhurt.

Fuz McGinnis stood for a long minute leaning weakly against the tilted mass of wing debris. His face held the look of one who has been on a far journey and is not quite sure he is really on home land once again. As he came out of his daze, he leaned over and gripped Hal Dane in a shaky grasp.

"B-boy," he said, "if you hadn't that message us to got--no, no, got that message to us, I mean, we'd have been--"

"We'd have been dead," broke in Colonel Wiljohn. "But you brought the word, in a blasted clever way. You turned some sort of tomfoolery into lifesaving. We owe our lives to you both. I--I--we thank you." Reaching down, Colonel Wiljohn swept his grandson into his arms, pressed the child against his face. Then he set the little fellow down and gravely instructed him to give a handshake of thanks to each of the young fellows.

The crowd would be denied no longer. It broke through the guards, surged over to the little group beside the wreck. Women laughed and sobbed in relief as they saw the child standing unhurt, clinging to his grandfather's hand. Men laughed huskily and tried to hide emotion in heavy handclasps. They wanted the whole story,--how had McGinnis brought her down without a worse wreck, where had Raynor and young Dane found them, got the warning across to them?

It was full thirty minutes before the crowd could be dispersed so wreckers could haul off the disabled plane, and so the aviators in this thrilling episode could slip away to some place of quiet and rest.

That night Hal Dane and Fuz McGinnis attended their first banquet. It was not altogether an unmixed pleasure--this the first formal festival in the whole of their work-filled young lives. The fact that they were seated rather high was not altogether comforting to their timidity, either. This was the celebration that had been planned weeks ahead of time and was staged to do honor to the school's guest, Colonel Wiljohn. Then here at the eleventh hour, so to speak, and at the Colonel's especial request, this couple of young aviators had been dragged in to sit next to him.

It was comforting to feel the Colonel's kindly presence but even that did not compensate entirely for the unmitigated terror of a startling array of forks with varying uses staring balefully up at one from the heavy linen of a banquet cloth. One felt conspicuous in such a dazzle of lights, in such a gathering of notables.

"I'm not much up on banquets," hoarsely whispered Hal under cover of a speech by one of the notables. "Y-you don't reckon anybody'll expect us to say anything?"

"Gosh, no!" from Fuz. "Anybody could look at us and know we couldn't talk. But something else is bothering me--"

"Bothering me, too," mumbled Hal, and subsided glumly beside a plate of broiled chicken, green peas and mushrooms in ramekins, potatoes in some newfangled way, a spiced jelly.

Colonel Bob Wiljohn responded to a speech of welcome. Other speeches followed.

Then Hal Dane and Fuz McGinnis became redly aware that Mr. Rand, standing very erect beside the table, was talking in a serious voice and mentioning their names considerably.

"The blow's going to fall now," Hal's lips silently sent a message to his chum.

"We have here an extraordinary case." Mr. Rand's voice was stern. "It concerns two of our most brilliant pupils in aviation--and on the eve of their graduation. Although under a sentence of suspended judgment already, they have now risked locking the doors of graduation on themselves forever by flagrant disobedience of strict orders--"

"I protest--" Colonel Wiljohn was on his feet, gray eyes flashing. "Your words give the wrong impression. You mean two boys entered a risk to save a valuable plane if possible, to save human lives--"

"Wait, wait! And I accept your protest, Colonel." Mr. Rand's eyes also held a flash, a high enthusiasm, his stern mouth relaxed into a smile. "I want to state further that we, the board of officers of this institution, had already decided--against all past precedent and rules--to ignore said flagrant act of disobedience, and to graduate these two young men--with honors!"

Waves of hand-clapping and cheers broke over a couple of dazed young aviators.

"So the--" Fuz muttered.

"The 'Benzine Board' didn't get us after all," finished Hal.

That very night Colonel Wiljohn had a long talk with the boys and offered them work. He could use them well. They had both displayed an uncanny aptitude for flying, and he needed plane demonstrators. Hal's instructors, Raynor and Major Weston, had told him enough about the boy's unusual grasp of engine mechanics to arouse his interest. This keen, successful business man got up and walked the floor in his excitement as he and Hal delved further into the boy's future-looking ideas for invention in harnessing piston power for landing planes gently and with a lessening of landing dangers. His factories, he said, were willing to pay well for brains, needed young fellows with vision, both in the flying and in the invention departments. Would they consider coming with him?

Would they?

Young McGinnis quite emphatically mixed his words hind-part-before in the fervor of assuring Colonel Wiljohn of his willingness to go.

For the space of a minute Hal Dane sat perfectly still, eyes wide open, but in them the look of a man in a dream. He was in a dream; this was the beginning of visions about to come true. It couldn't be real. He'd wake up--

"I'm counting on you." Colonel Wiljohn's strong, friendly hand grasped his shoulder.

"I--yes, sir--I'll be on hand," Hal finally got out.

Leaving the Rand-Elwin Flying School seemed to Hal like turning over one of the busiest, happiest pages of his life. He parted from his splendid, true friends here with real regret. Yet, like all youth, he was eager to turn the next page of life.

Before he entered upon his new work, there was time for a brief visit with his home folks. He found the old house still uprearing its makeshift patchwork roof among the tree tops. Within, though, the money that he'd managed to save and send home in carnival days had wrought some comfortable changes. There were rugs, dainty curtains, a piece or two of new furniture. He found his mother and Uncle Tel not so ground down with toil these days. In his mind, Hal was already looking forward. to other changes--a roof, and a coat of creamy white paint for the house, a little car so the folks could get around--just wait till he began making some real money!

* * * * *

For Hal Dane, life at the Wiljohn Works promised to be the greatest thrill he had ever known. Up till now he had not realized the vast extent, both in space and operations, of a modern aviation factory. It was not one factory, but many. There was a bewildering variety to the output.

Hal had thought the Works concentrated on some special type of plane. Instead, he found them manufacturing about everything from a small, neat sky boat for private use up to giant craft for freight and passenger airliners. There were air boats with wings that folded up so one could trundle them into the family garage instead of into a hangar.

Over in the invention department tests of all kinds were being continually conducted. With his keen gray eyes looking well to the future, Colonel Wiljohn was willing to try out in his laboratories things which to more conservative men seemed mere schemes and addle-pated ideas. If a scheme failed in the testing, it was just another visionary mechanism to be set aside. If one idea out of ten, out of a hundred even, proved to have worth, aviation had made a forward step!

In the parachute department strange weaves of silk were being tested for qualities and purposes that silk makers of fifty years ago never dreamed would ever be demanded of their products. According to laboratory decision, the habutai silk in present use for parachutes would soon be displaced by a new weave, the basket-mesh type. And why? Because the basket-weave oscillated less than the old habutai type, it absorbed shock better, it lowered more slowly and allowed for better landings. Silk that once fulfilled its purpose if it had a sheen and gloss to catch milady's eye! And now it was demanded that it have a strength to lower man ten thousand feet through the air without a jostle and land him on earth without a bruise!

In the engine room, motors were being tried out for streamlines and cooling systems, for weight reduction and elimination of fire hazards, for burning new high-powered fuel oils.

Where the prevailing wing material had formerly been wood and fabric, tests were now being made to prove the worth of all-metal construction. For new purposes the old-time metallic standbys were found unusable. Light metals crystallized and snapped into brittle pieces. The old strong metals possessed of endurance were too heavy for aircraft. A new metal, light as aluminum and strong as steel, must be produced.

And so the experimenting and testing went on.

As Hal Dane became familiar with some of the scientific revolution and evolution going on at the huge Wiljohn Works, he caught again something of the high splendid vision of following the river of the wind on a great exploration. If ever he were to go as sky viking, here in this vast plant were being riveted and welded aircraft suitable to bear him on that journey.