CHAPTER XVIII

TO THE RESCUE

"Since you are one of the Wiljohn men," said Huntley, "I'll turn you over to the Colonel for further directions. He's handling our aviation fleet with a master hand."

When Hal came face to face with his friend farther down the street of the City of Tents, he was shocked to see how broken and feeble Colonel Wiljohn had become. In six days he had aged a score of years.

"Hal, Hal--we've needed you."

"I came as soon as I heard, sir."

"Might have known you would." Hal could feel the tremble of the Colonel's arm as it lay across his shoulder. Then the tremble steadied, and the Colonel went on in a firm voice, "Well, we've work a-plenty for you to do. I'll be showing you the ropes."

It was a marvelous organization that Hal Dane slipped into. He became a cog in a huge, efficient machine.

Over night almost, this flood had come.

Over night, also, America organized to save the people in the flood path.

When this appalling disaster broke, the American Red Cross moved swiftly. At Troja, Alabama, was set up a special Flood Relief Headquarters. Here quickly came the key men of the Red Cross staff from all neighboring states. To work in liaison, there came also officers of the Army, Navy, Public Health Service, Coast Guard, Department of Agriculture, Veterans' Bureau and the railroads which served the flooded area. It was an effective relief force, equal to any war-time organization.

It was a war these men were fighting--a war against a treacherous, rolling, yellow flood.

From all over the Union came shipments of food, clothing, tents, medicine. There were garments to fit any size refugee, from an infant on up. There were specially prepared tin cases of food, all ready to be dropped down by airplane to hill-top refugees, or those marooned on drifting houses, so as to keep life in their bodies till boats could haul them off to safety.

Hal was surprised to see in the midst of a supply train standing out in the railroad yard, a long box car bearing in big letters this striking sign: "Extra Airplane Parts. Rush to Three-River Flood District."

"The airplane is showing the world what it can do in times of trouble," said Colonel Wiljohn, noticing Hal's excited gaze upon the portable aircraft shop on the side track. "Aviators are the eyes of the Rescue Program, boy; scout planes fly this blasted flood day and night, reporting refugees, their exact location, and the best way to reach them. See, here come some results now." He motioned out towards the water.

A square-nosed old river steamer was pushing in before her a barge loaded with the pitiful, shabby furnishings of many a humble plantation tenant home. Over bundles of bedding, the dogs and children crawled; amid piles of rickety furniture, tin tubs and hastily gathered utensils and tools, the family mules and cows were tethered. On the decks of the steamer, itself, huddled half a hundred cold, wet, hungry refugees. The boat was a weather-beaten old side-wheeler, clumsy and creaking. But to those refugees, just snatched from the jaws of death, she probably seemed the finest ship afloat.

Planes came in, other planes took off--an endless chain of scouts.

Hal was aching to be out on the work.

"Aviators have to be the ears as well as the eyes in this flood fighting," went on Colonel Wiljohn, "I'm expecting great things of even this dog plane you've brought down, but we've got to get radio equipment installed on it before you take it out on the job. Radio is our time-saver. You can wireless a message in one-twentieth of the time it would take you to zoom back and forth delivering reports by word of mouth. There's an extra seaplane here, already radio-equipped. You can take that out."

"Any kind will do," said Hal, "just let me get my hands on the stick and be off."

"I'm changing one group of men to another section," went on Colonel Wiljohn, "and the work I want you to do today is scout-flying in a ten-mile radius over the flood country below the forks of the Pea River and the Choctawhatchee. You'll have to locate the forks by chart, that section's been under water a week. And Hal, search every creek that leads in--I--I'm depending on you more than any of the others--to find--" The Colonel turned away suddenly.

Hal felt a quick sting behind his eyelids. He choked till he could hardly give his answer. Without having actually said so, the Colonel, he knew, was giving him the patrol of the district Jacky was lost in. If only he could find Jacky!

A few moments later, Hal had become one of the many aviators whose planes circled over the heaving waste of flood waters. At low altitude roared these scout planes. Keen-eyed as hawks, the flying men sought continually for groups marooned on ridges or housetops. In answer to their radio messages flung into the ether, the rescue steamers churned far and wide across the yellow tide, hauling bargeloads of silent, stupefied people snatched from their perilous retreats. As the work went on, most of the hill-top islands were cleared of their refugees, but out of creeks and bayous, shackly old buildings swept from their foundations, and burdened with pitiable human freight, continued to drift down with the flood current. Scout planes flew low over these floating derelicts. It would be haggard faces at a window, or a scream; or, sometimes it would be a quavery old voice singing a hymn that told rescuers that here was human freight drifting down to death.

At the beginning of the flood, each drifting house was, mayhap, searched a dozen times by various boat crews--no crew knowing that already others had been there before them. Time was lost that could have been put to other needs. To avoid this, it was finally agreed that when a house was once searched a red flag, made of calico salvaged from a half-submerged dry goods store, should be nailed to its gable.

Hal saw some pitiful sights during his day's work. Up Jardin Bayou he found five negroes on the roof of a tottering barn, the building ready to collapse and float off. When Hal dropped them bread from the emergency box in his cockpit, they hardly had strength to hold it and eat it. They had been without food for days, and were so weak that when the rescue boat came they had to be lifted off into it.

Some of the refugees that Hal radioed word back about were the four-footed kind. All through the flooded district, hundreds of mules and cattle were marooned on ridges and mounds. These hungry ones soon cleaned their tiny islands of every vestige of grass, moss and twigs. After that, they looked starvation in the face. Hal saw one hungry old horse, marooned on a bare little mound, who had the courage to plunge into the roaring flood, swim a hundred yards to a leafy tree that lifted its head above the yellow torrent, eat what waving green he could from it, then go struggling back to his mound. Such a courageous one deserved to be rescued. A radio message brought a barge to gather him up with a herd of other animals stranded on a ridge farther up.

Midday came and passed. The hours wore on into the afternoon. The night of flying across half a continent, combined with the strain of the work he was at now, began to tell on Hal's strength. His head was whirling and his aching muscles were in rebellion against the will that drove them on.

Then in an instant, a glimpse of a something lodged in the branches of a drifting tree spurred him on to fresh endeavors, cleared his brain of fatigue clouds. Hal was miles from headquarters, skimming above a section which had been cleared of refugees earlier in the day. And now into his line of vision there came drifting a tree, now and again submerging to the pull of the currents, and bearing caught in its branches a tiny figure.

Mechanically, his fingers tapped out location and a call for help. Then Hal began to maneuver his seaplane for a landing in these troubled waters. Assistance he knew would come quickly, but perhaps not quick enough in this case. If the plunging tree raft with its lone little passenger was swept into the eddies just beyond it would be the end.

Hal brought his plane to water as close to the forest derelict as he dared. He stood, braced himself strongly, and hurled a coil of rope. It hissed through the air and fell over the leafy drift. At the first throw he caught only some twigs that the rope knotted about and he had to jerk it free. The next cast, however, fell over the body of the child, and by expert jockeying was finally tightened about the shoulders. A moment later Hal had drawn the slight burden to the edge of the seaplane and gotten it aboard. Like a great bird the aircraft zoomed up and sped back towards camp.

As Hal landed and came up from the improvised wharf bearing the child in his arms, it was pitiful to watch hope blaze in Colonel Wiljohn's eyes--then as quickly die, for the child was not Jacky Wiljohn.

But he was someone's darling. At the end of a long line of refugees waiting before the open-air kitchen for their tin pannikins to be filled with the steaming food, stood a haggard woman who seemed to have no interest in food or anything else. With a sudden scream, this one darted out of line, crying, "Renee! Renee! My lost child!" as she gathered the little boy into her arms.

It was far into the afternoon when Hal paused at the kitchen grounds for a hasty lunch, his first bite since the morning soup. He began to realize how weary he was, for his hand was trembling as he picked up the big mug of steaming coffee.

Radio kept even a rescue camp in touch with world news. As Hal revived his drooping spirits with a good, thick hot beef sandwich, he heard men discussing word that had just come in concerning the two flyers, Lang and Munger, who had crossed the continent in their planes, preparatory to undertaking the great Pacific non-stop flight. On all sides, argument waxed hot over this coming event. Wasn't there enough land-flying to keep men busy without all this running into needless danger trying to fly over the frozen poles and the oceans? And yet, so ran the other side of the argument, think of the future of aviation, the real service these pioneer flights were doing, the huge money prizes, the glory!

After the meal, the flyers that had been out on flood patrol were snatching a little rest.

A dreadful restlessness urged Hal Dane back into his scout plane. A new savage energy drove him with the feeling that he must work till he dropped. He must be too tired to think. Thoughts were dangerous. The news that already at Oakland airport, across the bay from San Francisco, planes were lining up to compete in the Pacific race, stirred him terribly, shook the iron control that he had fought to preserve.

As soon as weather conditions permitted, a dozen planes would be off on the great flight--and his plane would not be among them!

The time for the splendid Onheim Safety Device Contest was looming even nearer. Just a few days to that date now.

Prizes could come and prizes could go, but under the strain of combing the torrent-washed land for the lost Jacky Wiljohn, neither Hal nor the Colonel could have time for thoughts of contests. At least, Hal would not let his thoughts dwell on the great chance he'd have to miss. Right now was a time of testing out a character, if not of testing out a ship for a prize.

Grimly, Hal forced the tremble out of his hands on the controls, and turned the nose of his plane out over the rolling ochre-colored waste of flood waters.

He had come perhaps ten miles from Troja when, out of the wide, flooding mouth of a tributary creek, he saw a roof top come drifting into the main rush of the torrent. Hal flew low, noting it expectantly--any drift from the creek bottoms might contain those he sought. His sharp eyes soon showed him, though, that this derelict had already been searched. The strip of weather-stained red calico nailed to the gable told him that much. But while he still hovered near with engine muffled to its softest, his ear seemed to catch a scream--a woman's scream from within the drifting house.

The flapping bit of red calico signaled, "No occupant--searchers have been here."

That one long-drawn wail still echoing in Hal's brain, though, must mean that some victim of the flood was housed within. There was the chance that a refugee from floating logs, or a tree top, had but lately managed to crawl aboard the half-submerged dwelling.

Hal noted well the location and the type of house this drifter was, but instead of radioing for help, he shot back to Troja in his plane. At the camp, he sought out Colonel Wiljohn and told him of the case. All he had to go on was the fact that this old dwelling had drifted in from the creek bottoms, and that the sound of a woman's scream had seemed to come from it. Frail grounds for hoping that here might be Jacky Wiljohn's mother and the boy himself. But Colonel Wiljohn squared back his shoulders; he became all fire and energy in his preparations. A launch was got ready, blankets, hot soup in thermos bottles, axes to break any barriers, ropes.

In short order the boat shot out across the waters, leaving a froth of yellow foam in its wake.

When the drifting, two-story dwelling was sighted, the pilot cut in close and maneuvered until he got his craft alongside one of the windows.

Hal was the first man to scramble from the boat to the window ledge that was now just a few inches above the roaring yellow torrent. As he flung a leg over the sill and slid down into the room, a scream, like that first he had heard, greeted him--only terrifically loud, a wild demoniac scream, followed by a coughing, snarling roar.

As Hal focused the electric torch on the corner whence came the sound, the beam blazed upon the wide-set eyes, the tense, crouched body of a great panther.