CHAPTER VIII

RIVER OF THE WIND

Maben kept circling. Beside him, Hal worked desperately, trying every known and unknown device for loosing a stuck throttle. But stuck she stayed.

And the interminable circling kept on. It seemed hours that they rode thus, using up their precious gas in this ridiculous, passengerless flight. Finally Hal crawled out of the cockpit and crept to the front of the wing. He risked thrusting a hand gingerly down in the back of the engine. Finally his searching fingers closed over the obstruction, a slick, bottle-shaped thing with a greasy pointed neck. It was their can of motor oil, carried for emergencies, and it had jarred under the throttle-arm and wedged. Hal tugged and pulled but the grease-covered can seemed to offer no grip for his fingers. He reached in for a closer grasp, set his teeth, and yanked. The obstruction gave, zipped out with such momentum that the force of Hal's pull nearly shot him backwards off the plane edge. The can spun a thousand feet down through space. Rather white 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 ease and grace. But there was no one to watch him. The little crowd that their ruse of the diving dummy had assembled for them had long since departed.

So far as barnstorming aviation was concerned, East Texas seemed to be a total loss. Hal and Maben swooped down to their camp, gathered up their very limited assortment of housekeeping necessities, and set wing for further 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 if he expected to make a living with his sky bus. And with necessity fostering invention, Hal's brain conjured up the something.

Even on these little half-mile country tracks, the auto racer was replacing the old-time horse racer. Hal's agile imagination leaped a step 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 full view of the grandstand?

It was so revolutionary an idea that at first no one would listen to him. A laugh in the face was all he got for his explanations of how to manage this new thrill-offering.

Then the manager of the lively carnival in swing at Repton caught Hal's vision. On his track was staged their first auto-aero race. There was a spice of danger to the thing--at least for the aerial part of it. To speed a plane in a little half-mile circuit takes a master hand at the stick. But Maben had that master hand. He could make a sky bus do almost anything in reason.

Above the tiny circuit of the dirt track he had to bank his old plane pretty nearly straight up and down and zoom around like a bee in a bottle. To keep from winning too soon and ruining the show, he had to throttle down her motor until the last lap. Then he'd let the sky bus out and show the boys what she could do. Below him the begoggled auto speed-fiend would let his ground ship out too and smoke his wheels on turns, but the sky bus always won.

The auto-aero race was a success, a wow! It caught the fancy of the crowds and gave them more thrills than they knew were left in this thrill-worn universe. The air-earth races kept the Repton Fair open a week longer than had been counted upon. After its closing, Hal and Maben drifted on to other fairs and found good money waiting for them almost everywhere they touched. Sometimes they took in twenty-five dollars a day, but more often it was seventy-five, and now and again they reached the hundred mark.

At Zenner, Hal had the thrill of buying himself a plane. It was an old J-1 Standard, the type of ship the army used to train pilots before the war. Its owner had made one flight in it and had come down to a perfect one-point landing--straight on the nose--and smashed up everything.

Max Maben knew points though when it came to planes, and advised Hal to buy. They made Zenner their headquarters for a while and radiated out from 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. But she flew like a bird. The carnival season was closing in. Hal used the old J-l Standard to double their earnings by flying races at one fair while Max filled his schedule at other fairs.

But for all her sweet flying, the Standard wasn't altogether a lucky plane. Some nemesis of mischance seemed to dog her flights more often than not. Once when the two flyers had her out for a pleasure spin that took them hedgehopping over mountain tops and skimming the warm air softness of the desert edge, the false darkness of a windstorm swooped around them and sent them earthward for a forced landing. In the dimness they took to ground between the cactus and Spanish dagger covering old fields. 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 spar of a wing. It took half a day to patch the ten-inch gap in the spar and to sew up a dozen rips in the wing fabric. It took half a week of cutting sagebrush and cactus to clear enough space for a take-off runway.

But whether the old J-l Standard was a lucky bird or not, possession of it began to stir in Hal Dane a slow, subtle change. Ownership of a plane of his own awoke in him vast longings and hopes. In spare moments he was always tinkering lovingly around the old bus, seeing if a wire tightened here didn't make her wing edge better, or if a heavier wire coil above the landing gear didn't make her taxi along sweet. Now and again when he had a spell off from carnival work, he took the "J" up on long, high solo 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 for him. Zooming up into the ether till from land he might seem some mere speck in the sky had long since ceased to awake in him any nervous terrors. Instead, he reveled in the sense of space and freedom the heights gave him. Aerial intuition showed him that, within limits, the higher he was, the safer he was. An engine break a hundred feet above ground, where room for soaring tactics was limited and the parachute of no account, was a much more terrible danger than a similar accident two miles high. The heights meant safety from rough ground air; ten or fifteen 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, sixteen thousand feet up. Intense cold froze him to the marrow, chattered his teeth. Air pressure weighted his brain, reeled his head dizzily. If only he had some protecting, oxygen-piped helmet to protect him from air heights, 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 puny sixteen-thousand-foot height, the sky had revelations for one that soared its spaces knowingly.

Once in his high flying, Hal was swept into the vast power of a great westward flowing current of air. A veritable river of the wind. It swept him on fast and faster. Exhilaration shot through the boy's being. Speed! Power! Here was power waiting to be harnessed by man. Westward on a river of the wind!

A thousand years ago his Norse ancestors had swept westward on ocean currents, the rivers of the sea, to find a new land. Some day, he, Hal Dane 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 under his wings. But the cold was devouring him, the awesome pressure was roaring into his brain. Anger at his puny man's impotence in the face of such power shook him. He could bear no more, the air weights were smothering him. Downward he began to drop in long swoops.

As altitude had plunged him into a baptism of ice, so earth, as he swooped downward, seemed to have prepared for him a baptism of fire.

Below him, in great gusts, yellow-edged billows of black smoke clouds poured up. Funnels of sparks blasted up on the winds and scattered to shower back into an inferno of flames.

Hal swerved aside, but sent his plane in a huge circuit nearer earth, so that without danger he could inform himself concerning this disaster.

It was a barn in flames--the great red barn of some lonely ranch place. Crammed as it must be with hay and wheat shocks, it had become a roaring furnace, spouting flames up into the very skies.

Disastrously near to the doomed barn was the house. The little white farmhouse 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 were human beings running back and forth with futile buckets of water. From experience out here, Hal had come to know something of the water dearth of the plains. What avail were the few hundred gallons of water in a little cistern against this raging fire monster?

But the human specks fought on madly. The barn was doomed. They were fighting for the house. Up went the buckets of precious water to wet down the roof. Now they were spreading sopping blankets. And to what use? 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. A spark on his wing, curl of flame bursting out of the inflammable lacquer pigment--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 straight out. With a zoom of the mighty wind-makers of his wings, he drove forward down the air lane between the flaming hell of the barn and the little crouching house in its imminent doom.

In his wake swept vast air currents swirled upward by the speed of his passage, a wind wall that turned back spark and flames from showering on the house roof.

His own wings had dodged sparks somehow, run the fire gauntlet unscathed this one time. It was risking fate, but Hal Dane wheeled his aircraft and 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's spread. His very speed must have shed the falling dangers of sparks from his own wings.

Full forty times he drove his ship back and forth between the little house and the flaming barn, making mighty air currents that turned back the 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, but its real menace to the farmhouse was ended.

With danger conquered, Hal Dane, like some crusader of the air, whirled skyward, incognito. Those he had saved would never know who had saved them.

But flame and danger had strangely stirred the boy's heart, had fired his ambition into a steady glow that henceforth was to flinch at nothing.

Emotion--inspiration--a medley of feelings surged up in him as he swirled high into the sky. Higher, higher, back again into the mighty rushing currents of the rivers of the winds! To what did that current flow 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 calling him--the adventure of invention. The world was waiting for that--waiting for man to pit his brain against the dangers of the great ethereal upper strata. 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 no longer a boy, satisfied with clowning above a carnival in an air machine. In his mind burned a definite desire to master aeronautics instead of merely drifting aimlessly, satisfied to dabble in air flying.

Along with ambition he had the hard common sense to know that he must go back and begin at the bottom, lay his foundations right if he meant to climb high.

That night he mailed a letter to the Rand-Elwin Flying School. Days later the answer came, stating that he could still have the work and the tuition in that organization that he had applied for once before. Hal was both surprised and pleased to read that Rex Raynor was now one of the flying instructors in the school.

With the chill of winter beginning to creep over the great southern stretches of Texas, the season of country fairs and carnivals came to a close. Maben was anxious now to get home for a short visit with his family. After that he meant to try for some practical, year-around work--the air mail, or forest ranger air service. And Hal had his own ambitious plans burning within him.

At the Louisiana-Texas border town of Aldon, he and Maben parted company. It was a wrench for both of them. But then they could cheer their hearts with the knowledge that the science of flying was making the world smaller every day. All through life, he and Maben would likely enough be meeting at various landing fields--to "ground fly" and joke about their lurid carnival past.

Barnstorming might have been the slap-stick life, but both Hal and Maben could be thankful for their period of buzzing a plane above country fairs--their work had brought them in enough money to keep their families comfortable for some months to come.

Hal was also ahead an additional five hundred from the sale of his old plane. He could embark with an easy mind on what promised to be the greatest adventure, so far, in his life.