Part 19

In the fight which had occurred the bag of cotton which the aviator had dropped from his machine had been torn to pieces and the cotton scattered all over the prairie. A number of negro boys amused themselves by throwing the wads of cotton at each other and at their elders. One negro boy picked up a wad and hurled it at the fat stomach of the Rev. Vinegar Atts.

Vinegar doubled up with a yell of pain, and then stooped and picked up something.

It was a buckskin bag, which Vinegar had last seen in the possession of Red Cutt.

“My Gawd!” Hitch Diamond bellowed. “Ain’t dat our bag of money?”

With trembling fingers Vinegar untied the buckskin bag and drew out a large number of soiled bills. There was a shout of delight which James Gannaway could have heard fifteen thousand feet in the air.

“When dat nigger, Red Cutt, climbed up into dat machine, he hid dat money in my sack of cotton,” Hitch howled, “an’ now we done get it all back. Bless Gawd!”

So it was a happy band which moved slowly back to Tickfall. Vinegar Atts forgetting all about his automobile walked back to town with the others. He improvised a song on the way which he taught his fellow pilgrims. The chorus, repeated many times, was this:

“De airships fly up to de sky An’ circle all de stars around. While yuthers try to fly on high— Lawd, keep my foots on solid ground.”

When they had sung the chorus for about the first time there was great excitement in Tickfall, four miles away.

The first army airplane ever seen in that neighborhood flew over the town, and every man, woman, and child was looking at it. The aviator gave an exhibition of stunt flying. First, a series of loops, then tail slides, then what he would have called a “stall,” a maneuver in which the machine was brought to a dead stop after reaching the apex of an upward curve. Then he did side slides and nose dives. It was wonderful to the people of Tickfall to see the number of evolutions that pilot put his machine through.

There were all kinds of funny stunts, and that machine cut all sorts of queer figures like a playful kitten of the clouds.

The people of Tickfall thought that he was doing all of that for them—but they were greatly mistaken.

Everything James Gannaway did was a message telling a certain girl that all was well with him, that he would return to the aviation camp with his own beautiful lie and her beautiful truth, and that he anticipated no trouble before him. Most of all, it was a message of passionate love to that same girl, who now sat alone in her buggy on a sandy road and looked up at the airplane with eyes that filled with tears and glowed with love like stars.

● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected. ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected. ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book. ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_); text that was bold by “equal” signs (=bold=).