CHAPTER VIII

TRAILING AN OLD PAL

That same evening Jeanne’s giant dragon fly came drifting sweetly down from the clouds to land at the Chicago airport. After a few words with Danby Force and a promise to meet him before the airport depot on the following day, she taxied her little plane into a hangar, gave the mechanics some very definite instructions regarding its care and general inspection, then went away with her gypsy companions to spend the night in a cozy Chicago haunt of those dark brown wanderers, the gypsies.

It was past mid-afternoon of the following day when a large, rosy-cheeked girl came striding along the path that leads to aviation headquarters. Had you noted her jaunty stride, the suggestion of strength that was in her every movement, the joyous gleam of youth that was in her eyes, you would have said: “This is our old friend Florence Huyler, her very own self.” And you would not have been wrong.

Had Petite Jeanne been there at that moment she must surely have leapt straight into her good pal’s strong arms. They had been separated for months, Jeanne had journeyed to France. Florence had been adventuring in her own land. Letters had gone astray, addresses lost, so now here they were in the same great city, but each ignorant of the other’s nearness. Would they meet? In a city of three million, one seldom meets casually anyone one knows.

But here was Florence. She had come to the airport with a definite purpose. She was, as you will recall, a playground director. She had tried her ability at many things, but this was her true vocation. Times were hard. Playgrounds had been closed. For the moment Florence was unemployed. But was she downhearted? Watch that smile, that jaunty tread. Florence was young. Tomorrow was around the corner and with it some opportunity for work. Just at this moment an unusual occupation had caught her fancy; she wished to become an airplane stewardess. How Jeanne would have laughed at this.

“Oh, but my dear Florence!” she would have cried, “You and your one hundred and sixty pounds! You an airplane stewardess!”

Jeanne was not there, so Florence, marching blissfully on, arrived in due time at the door of aviation headquarters.

“I wonder if I might see Miss Marjory Monague?” she said to the girl by the wicker window. There was a suggestion of timidness in her voice.

“Miss Monague, the chief stewardess?” The girl at the small window arched her brow. “She’s frightfully busy. But I—” She hesitated, took one more look at Florence’s face, found it clean, frank and fair as a dew-drenched hillside on a summer morning, wondered in a vague sort of way how anyone could keep herself looking like that, then said, “I—I’ll call her.”

She turned to a telephone. A moment later she said to Florence, “Miss Monague will talk to you. Go right up those stairs. It’s the last office to the right.”

To the girl beside her this one whispered, “Bet she’s going to apply as a stewardess of the air! Can you e-ee-magine!

“All the same,” she added after a moment’s silence, “I’m sorry they won’t let her. She—she’s a swell one I bet! Regular pal like you dream about sometimes.”

In the meantime Florence had made her way blithely up the stairs. “Chief stewardess,” she was thinking, “probably forty, wears horn-rim glasses, sits up straight, stares at you and says, ‘Age please?’”

She was due for a shock. The chief stewardess was not forty, nor yet twenty-five. A slim slip of a girl, she looked in her large mahogany chair not more than twenty.

“I—I want to see Miss Monague,” said Florence.

“I am Miss Monague.”

“You? Why I—” Florence broke off, staring.

The other girl smiled. “There have been stewardesses of the air for only about five years,” Miss Monague explained quietly. “We were all young when we started. Naturally you can’t grow gray hair and get your spine stiff with old age in five years. So—” she smiled a very friendly smile. “So—o here I am. What can I do for you?”

“I—why you see—” Florence began, “I—I’d like to be a stewardess. I—I’ve been a playground director.” She went on eagerly, “That really calls for pretty much the same thing. You try to make people comfortable and happy—show them a good time. That’s what a stewardess does, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose so. But—”

“That,” Florence broke in, “that’s just about what I’ve done. Sometimes I taught them to do things, when they didn’t know how—trapeze, swinging rings and all that. But mostly I just stayed around and saw that everyone was busy and happy. Truly, I did love it. But I’ve been away. And now there are no openings. I just thought—”

“Yes.” The little chief of the stewardesses favored the big girl with one of her rarest smiles. She too liked this girl. She wished to help, but—

“I’m truly sorry!” A little up-and-down line appeared between her eyes. “The trouble is, I don’t think you could ever reduce that much. Besides, you’re too tall.”

“Reduce!” Florence exclaimed. “Of course I couldn’t. I’m hard as a rock. I put in four hours in the tank or the gym every day when I can. Why should I want to reduce?”

“Because—” a strange little smile played around the chief stewardess’ mouth. “Because our airplane cabins are just so big and we have to get girls that fit the cabins,—five feet four inches, a hundred and twenty pounds; those are the limits. Can be smaller, but never larger.”

“Oh!” Florence stared for a moment, then burst out in good-natured laughter. “I—I guess I won’t do.”

She was gone before the truly kind-hearted stewardess could tell her how sorry she was.

Florence was still smiling when she left the building. But the smile did not last. It is always hard, for even the strongest hearted to be in a great city alone and with no one near who will say, “You may help me do this.”

She walked slowly and quite soberly over the cinder path that led to the airport depot. Arrived there, she walked in and looked about her. There was something about the place that stirred her strangely. “Such movement! Such a wonderful feeling of abundant life!”

She walked through the door that led to the landing field. Once outside, she stood spellbound. A giant silver plane, looking more like a huge sea bird than any man-made thing, came gliding down the runway to wheel gracefully about and into position. From somewhere came the barking notes of an announcer: “Plane No. 43 eastbound for Toledo, Buffalo and New York, now loading.” She saw the smiling passengers following redcaps to the plane as they might have to a train, caught the signal, watched the plane roll away, heard the thunder of its motors, then saw it rise slowly in air and speed away.

“That—” her voice caught. Experienced as she was in the ways of the world, a tear glistened in her eye as she murmured hoarsely, “That is what I wanted to become a part of. And they won’t let me be—because I’m too big.”

She turned about to hide that tear. Next instant she was staring fascinated at three tiny objects lying close to the wall, three tiny sticks, two parallel and one crossing them at a sharp angle. “Jeanne! Petite Jeanne!” she all but cried aloud. “Jeanne has been here, not long ago either. That is her gypsy _patteran_!”

“Listen!” In her excitement she grasped the arm of an attendant. “Was there a slim blonde-haired girl here a little while ago?”

“Plenty of them,” the attendant grinned good-naturedly, “mebby twenty.”

“No, but one you would not forget. One who dresses in bright clothes like a gypsy. Perhaps there was a gypsy woman with her.”

“Oh, you mean that gypsy pilot!” The attendant began to show a real interest. “Yes, she was here. She went away with Rosemary Sample and a couple of men.”

“Who—who’s Rosemary Sample?” Florence could scarcely speak for excitement. Jeanne! She had found her good pal Jeanne—that is, almost.

“Rosemary Sample is a stewardess,” the attendant explained.

“Wh—where did they go?”

“I don’t—yes, come to think of it, I heard Rosemary say they was goin’ to Little Sweden.”

“Little Sweden? Where’s that?”

“How should I know?” the man drawled. “You might ask in Norway. That’s close to Sweden, ain’t it?

“Yes!” His voice rose suddenly. “Coming!” He hurried away, leaving Florence hanging between the heights of heaven and the depths of despair.