CHAPTER II

WINGS

When Hal Dane came to himself, lanterns and electric torches on all sides bobbed crisscross lights above him. A dozen hands seemed pulling and tugging to extricate him from the one-sided crash of plane wreckage.

He was laid out on the ground. A wet handkerchief mopped blood out of his eyes. He felt broken all over. Through a mist of pain he heard voices frantically calling, "Send for Doc! Get Doctor Joe!"

But something more than the pain and the voices beat in his brain--a throbbing "chug-chug-chug" that stirred him out of his apathy. The train, the eastbound that he'd raced!

"G-get me up," he croaked hoarsely. "Hold that train--mail packet--im-m-mportant--no, no, no!" He fought away hands that strove to hold him quiet. His struggles seemed to clear his brain, give him strength to rise. "Don't doctor me, doctor him," pointing to Raynor, "he's injured, bad off! Me--I--I'm not dead yet, not by a l-long shot!" and Hal even managed a white-lipped grin.

It was pain to walk. But the urge to complete what he had undertaken drove him on. From Raynor's coat, thrown aside by Doc Joe who was probing the bullet wound, Hal extracted the thick envelope. After an eternity of putting one foot before the other foot, he got it delivered at the mail car of the long train that Mr. Tilton, the rotund little station agent, was importantly holding.

After the train pulled out, there was still one more job to attend to. "That airplane, Mr. Tilton," he begged of the fat little agent. "Don't let cows get at it--or people poke around too much. And maybe you'd better rope what's left of it to the fence. Big wind--might--come up."

The urge had spent its force. Hal Dane felt a thousand years old all at once. He sank wearily into the spidery, yellow-painted little car of Fuzzy McGinnis, his chum, whom all this excitement had summoned to the scene. Fuz understood. Fuz had been in smash-ups himself. In silent sympathy, and keeping the Yellow Spider throttled to a gentle gait, he carted Hal the half mile from Morris Gap to Hillton.

Doc Joe, in his own car, was bringing Rex Raynor also to the Danes' hospitable, ramshackle old house.

After his mother, Mary Dane, wild-eyed with fear, but holding to her calm, had gone over him for broken bones, that she didn't find, and had bound up his head better and had poured hot milk down him,--and after Uncle Telemachus had excitedly heard the story of the air crash three times--Hal crawled into bed and slept a round of the clock.

Next day Hal Dane's sturdy constitution asserted itself and yanked him out from any lazy coddling between the sheets. His scalp might still show some split skin from bucking a wire strut, and bruises the size of plates and saucers decorate him here and there, but he'd better be thanking his stars he wasn't disabled. And Hal did thank 'em! His work was needing him too. The truck that earned the family living was idling up there in the pine woods.

Need to get back to work rested heavily on Hal's shoulders, but worse than that was a worry burden that weighted down his heart.

As Hal, cap in hand and a bag of tools thrust under one arm, tiptoed down the long hall whose once beautifully plastered walls now gaped in ugly cracks, he paused before the room Rex Raynor was in. The door swung half open in the summer breeze. Hal stepped in, stood uncertain, twisting his cap into a knot. He opened his mouth once or twice as if he were trying to speak and couldn't. Then finally he blurted out:

"Mr. Raynor, I--it's awful that I smashed your plane--I, oh--some day--I'll try--pay--"

"Huh!" snorted the recumbent Raynor, slightly raising his head and glaring with fiery eyes beneath beetling brows. "Huh, come here!" His injured left arm, grotesquely enlarged by bandages, lay on a supporting pillow. But with his right hand, he beckoned imperiously.

Hal came to the bed.

"Did you ever fly a sky bus before?" questioned Raynor.

"Not--not a real plane," answered Hal. "I've got books and--"

"Boy," said Raynor, reaching out his good hand and pulling him close, "boy, you're a wonder. You brought us down alive--in the night. More'n some trained pilots can do. Wing sense must have been born in you. And say," Raynor's brows drew up fiercely again, "get that pay idea off your chest. I owe you more than you owe me. If you hadn't been a plucky youngster to go up with me and bring down my wind bus by book learning, I'd--I'd have crashed to a dead one. That's sure!" Raynor shut his eyes.

Hal eased out of the room. His head and his heart felt suddenly, gloriously light and tingling. He hadn't known what a burden he'd carried--until now that it had lifted. His spirit was free again.

After the crash where, in that last downward swoop, he had evidently pulled the wrong mechanism and tipped the plane to a dangerous turn, an obsession of distrust had oppressed him. He had begun to fear that he lacked air sense, was not fitted for the fulfilment of his dreams of wings and the airways.

And now with one lift of his brows, a wave of the hand, Rex Raynor had dispelled the gloom. What was it Raynor had said--"Wing sense--born in him!"

Hal flung himself through the front door and down the steps so excitedly that he near toppled over his red-headed friend Fuz McGinnis, who was rushing up the steps.

"What do you think you are--a Wright Whirlwind Motor?" Fuz fiercely rubbed a barked shin. "Here I was thinking you an invalid, and hopped by to say I'd take the Yellow Spider and tow in the truck from the pine woods for you."

"Don't believe my famous vehicle needs any towing-in," answered Hal, "but I'll be thankful to have you haul my carcass and these tools out there, and apply some of your manly strength to helping me jack the old bus up." And linking arms with Fuz, Hal strode off toward the yellow roadster.

For Rex Raynor, his week's stay in the shabby old Dane home was a period of mixed pain and pleasure. At first his arm wound throbbed irritatingly, and added to it was the anxiety for the condition of his crashed plane. But these pleasant, kindly people among whom Fate had dropped him were an interesting compensation.

There was Mother Mary Dane. She was a little woman with blue eyes and lots of soft brown hair that was usually wound into a firm, tight knot, because there was never any time to primp it up and do it fluffily. When the fever pains let the aviator up from his bed and allowed him the run of the place, he marveled at the amount of work a slip of a woman like Mary Dane could "turn off." He seemed to find her always churning, or stooped over everlasting "taken-in" sewing, or on her knees with garden trowel in her hand. Her mouth would be a stubborn line combating the weariness of her eyes, offsetting the whiteness of her face--only folks didn't often catch her like that. When she saw Raynor or Hal or Uncle Tel coming, she could usually produce a smile.

When the sun shone warm and bright, from a big room at the end of the hall would arise snatches of quavery whistling, thump of hammering. That would be Uncle Telemachus Harrison enjoying a "good day." Uncle Tel was Hal's great-uncle. When the sunshine eased his rheumatism, he pounded away at chair repairing and odd jobs to help along with the very limited family exchequer. Uncle Tel Harrison was a curiosity--a fiery little man with bright blue eyes and a bristling, bushy mustache.

As great a curiosity as Uncle Tel was the old house. Hal's mother was a Harrison and had inherited the ancient dwelling from her people.

The Harrison house had been two-storied. Then the roof fell in. Hal and Uncle Tel, with very little outside help, had cobbled up some sort of roof over the remaining lower story. In the bleakness of winter, the makeshift, curling shingles and the warped walls must have looked their pitifulness. But now in the summer, when the cudzu vine was in its swathing glory, the old cobbled-up house looked rather quaint and cool under its dress of vines.

Back of the tumbledown dwelling was a tumbledown barn that had once housed the high-stepping Harrison horses. Now it housed some strange contraptions beneath its sagging roof.

When Rex Raynor went out to that old stable under the voluble and excited escort of Uncle Telemachus, he was amazed at the variety and perfection of things aeronautical that he found there.

"Just look at 'em," chortled Uncle Tel, waving a gnarled hand about the barn workshop to include little models of gliders, models of planes in paper and wood, some tattered books on aviation mechanics, and a crude man-sized glider made of wood strips and cloth.

"Looks like this one's seen real usage." Raynor's eyes lighted up with interest as he laid a hand on various splicings of the wood and huge patches on the fabric.

"My sakes alive," sputtered Uncle Tel, "I'll say it's been used! That crazy boy's always rigging himself up in something like this, and having the kids from the village pull him off down that bare slope of old Hogback Hill. Sometimes he'd achieve a pretty good float before he'd drift to the plain at the hill bottom. He achieved his head bumped, too, a score of times, a shoulder wrenched, arms and legs knocked up--but dang it, he keeps on trying the thing!" Uncle Tel's voluble complaining was belied by the prideful glint in his old blue eyes.

"And what does Mother Mary Dane think of all this gliding and head bumping?" laughed the flyer, turning to Mrs. Dane who had just come in.

She stood there, a hand resting on the glider wing. The eyes she lifted held a glow of pride, but around those eyes anxiety had etched its own lines too.

"Umph, Mary, she's got sense--if I do say it," grunted Uncle Telemachus. "She knows it ain't any more use to try to keep an air-minded boy out of the air than it is to try to keep a water-minded duck out of the water. Mary, she's shed tears over his busted head and banged-up shoulders considerable times. But shedding tears didn't keep Mary from giving her wing-sprouting offspring all ten of the linen sheets she heired off her Grandma Harrison. Real linen sheets and a silver spoon or two was all there was left to descend to Mary. Grandma Harrison would turn over in her grave if she knew just what an end her good hand-woven cloth had come to. A whole sheet ragged up on a hawthorn bush where Glider Number One went gefluey in a gulley and spilled Hal for a row of head wallops. Another burned to a crisp when some invention of wing lacquer combustulated and liked to have fired us all out of house and home. There's four on that glider contraption, and the rest of 'em--the rest of 'em--" With a guilty look, Uncle Tel clapped a hand to mouth and went off into a hasty fit of coughing. He turned away and stamped down the length of the shop where he began to putter with some spruce sticks and a lathe.

When he rejoined the others, Raynor was saying:

"Didn't Hal drop a few hints that he was going to do some gliding for my benefit to-morrow?"

"I fear so." Mary Dane's lips quirked up in a smile, but her hand was flung out nervously. "And just look at that innocent little wind cloud lazying out there on the horizon! It could roll up into anything. I tell Hal that every time he even plans a glide, his subconscious mind stirs up a wind somewhere."

"What's he going to take off in--this?" Raynor touched the battered glider.

"Gosh, no--er-r--" Uncle Tel joined the conversation, then sputtered off distractedly, "er-r--well, you just wait and see!"