CHAPTER VII

A ONE-SHIP CARNIVAL

"Hi, sleepy-head, don't you ever get up of a morning? Going to snooze all day?" A couple of resounding smacks against the hammock he swung in startled 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 in a hurry?" Hal stuck a tousled blond head out of his sleeping bag and gazed reproachfully down at Maben, who was already up and, in spite of the crisp autumn chill, was taking a shower bath by the simple expedient of standing in the shallow creek and flinging water all over himself.

It was a strange camping outfit that Maben and Hal had evolved. Instead of a tent, they utilized the upper wing of Maben's old biplane as a roof over their heads. They had constructed hammocks of heavy canvas which could be suspended, one on each side of the fuselage, up under the top wing. The corners of a hammock were tied to the upper strut fittings, and when a fellow crawled into the three blankets inside, which were sewn up to form a bag, he was prepared for a comfortable night.

Sliding out carefully, so as not to wreck the wing fabric above and below him in any way, Hal stood up, stretched again, then made a speedy dash for a dip in the creek and a leap into clothes.

"My time to cook! I'll get breakfast to pay for oversleeping," shouted Hal, back at the plane and grabbling into the little provision sack tucked 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 and set out the meal in two tin plates, he attended to the job by mere mechanical touch,--his mind was running round in circles. What in the dickens were they going to do? If they spent what little they had buying food, 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 no stunt flying--no stunt flying, no crowd to take for rides. And carrying passengers 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 and stunt together over the backwoods country towns. It would be a precarious livelihood. Some days they might cop nothing. Some days they might make a pile. Maben needed a "pile" for his folks back home, his wife, a baby boy, a little daughter just old enough to start school. Maben carried their pictures in a rubbed old case stuck away in an inside pocket. Hal had his home folks on his heart too. He needed to earn money somehow. Even though the mere touch of a plane and the call of the air were a delightful lure, he knew aero-stunting was a risky business. In the end he had decided to tackle it, for a while anyway. So he had rattled the old truck home from Interborough, turned over to his mother 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 had never come or at most had been merely glimpsed--a swift moving speck in the sky that came out of nowhere and disappeared into nowhere--a plane that really came down to earth was a novelty. As they flew over villages, folks rushed out into the open, heads thrown back, eyes on the sky, arms waving and beckoning excitedly.

After circling to find a good pasture or stubble field from which to operate (a piece of open ground close up to the village being of course most desirable from a showman's point of view), Maben would fly low, and Hal would begin to do wing-walking. If the sight of a young fellow walking and cavorting and skinning-the-cat between wire struts on the wing of a flying plane didn't catch the eye of the crowd, the parachute drop 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 safe it was to come down in an airplane.

After landing, there would always be a heavy barrage of questions--were the 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 was to try it.

Because a plane was an expensive machine and because it took considerable funds to buy gasoline, the charge for a short sky-ride had to be five dollars.

After one brave native son took his courage in his hands and went up for a flight, others usually crowded in, anxious for their share of the thrills. Once a whole village, out on the gala event of an annual picnic, "took to the air." That night Maben and Hal found they had taken in a hundred and seventy-five dollars. The nickels and dimes and small bills, 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 checks to send home that week.

Hal had enjoyed visualizing how his mother and Uncle Tel looked when they received his check, liked to picture the comforts in which they could now indulge.

But out here on the edge of Texas business had flopped. They seemed to have struck a belt where planes had become common as dirt, no rarity at all. Other barnstormers must have combed this section well ahead of them. When Hal and Maben zoomed over villages, nobody even bothered to look up.

"We've got to make 'em look," said Maben fiercely, as he mopped the last crumb out of his tin plate, "got to make 'em look--or we don't eat. I've got sort of a plan."

When he and Hal walked into town to see about having a tank of gasoline sent out to the plane, Maben dropped hints everywhere about a thriller of a high dive they were going to stage, a high dive into the whirlpool below the falls of Faben River, just out of town. Folks that wanted their 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 cloth sacks on which he sewed valiantly with a huge needle threaded with stout string. He made four bolster-shaped rolls, a square pillow, a rounded knob, all of them stuffed with dead grass and some mixed sand and clay thrown in for good weight. Then he assembled his six parts, sewed them strongly together into the form of a stiff, stubby dummy man.

That afternoon when Hal and Maben went up in the plane, the dummy man went with them, scrouged down out of sight in the cockpit. Low over the houses and trees flew Maben, with Hal out on a wing tip doing all the stunts he knew. With that air balance that seemed born in him, Hal bowed and whirled on the lower wing, did acrobatics between struts, climbed to the top wing, stood outlined against the sky in daring silhouette. From his swift-moving aerial stage, the boy shouted down for the crowd to gather at the river bank--last stunt to be pulled there--a thriller!

Higher and higher over the foaming, rocky rapids of the river and its whirlpool below the falls rode the airplane. Flat on his stomach on the lower plane wing, Hal lay stretched out, holding to a wing strut with one hand and reaching into the cockpit with the other. It took every ounce of muscle in him to draw the weighted dummy up, to flatten it on top of him.

Maben was too high to allow a good aim at the tiny blotch of water below. Good aim and quick sinking of the dummy into the whirling waters was the main part of the huge, thrilling joke they were attempting to pull off. Down from eighteen hundred feet to a thousand, to eight hundred--five hundred. The roar of the motor diminished. Max Maben hovered 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 and legs wildly. Hal felt a ridiculous sympathy for it, it looked so human. Still flattened out and peering warily over the wing, Hal saw it take water in one splendid plunge into oblivion. He saw people running up and down the bank, pointing,--he was sure they were shouting, only no voices came up to him.

But instead of circling down, straightening out for one of his beautiful easy 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 take advantage of the excited interest his little advertising stunt had aroused.

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 a jiffy Hal whirled his long legs around and slid into the cockpit. As he bent close, Maben shouted in his ear:

"Gotter keep going! Throttle's stuck! Can't shut the motor off!"