Part 1

MARSTON AND ME

by Thomas Burtis

Author of “Groody Among the Gushers,” “The Lone Raider,” etc.

Life on the border had hit a dry spell for some unknown reason. Not a ---- thing had happened, was happening or seemed about to happen. For approximately four months the border patrolmen, of which, at times, I had the honor to be one, were slowly dying of dry-rot. We galloped up and down the frisky Rio Grande from Brownsville to San Diego, including waystations, with our customary eagerness to spot something of interest in connection with smuggling, rustling and other diversions of the Spigs and American renegades, but we were like a bunch of mosquitoes sucking on a piece of marble.

The McMullen flight, which I decorated with my lanky presence, was composed of youths like “Sleepy” Spears, “Tex” MacDowell and other flyers whose ideas of life do not include monotony as an ingredient of Paradise, and we were beginning to discuss the fact that the border was becoming really disgustingly effete. As Sleepy Spears put it in his slow drawl:

“The ---- of it is that there’s getting to be so ---- much law down here they’ll be sending delegations from Connecticut, Michigan and the Oneida Community to study Sheriff Bill Trowbridge’s methods, and we might lose our jobs!”

All of which just goes to show that it is darkest just before you switch on the electric lights, and that it’s a long worm which has no turning.

When the big news struck us we needed it, and I needed it most of all. It was the day after St. Patrick’s day, and when I awakened to greet the morning after in Laredo I was sleeping in an alley, and alongside me was Lieutenant George Groody, at that time one of the leading lights of the American Air Service.

Groody had invited me, two days before, to participate in his annual celebration of St. Patrick’s birthday.

“As an enemy of snakes,” stated Groody, “Old Pat deserves the consideration of every true Irishman.”

After the day was done I agreed, because I was on the verge of seeing a private collection of nice pink and blue ones myself. How was I to know that Groody invariably started St. Patrick’s day in Mexico by ordering six gin fizzes set up in a row, and, starting with this little eye-opener, proceeding on to drinks adjacent? At midnight of the holiday we were drinking to Clemenceau, Lafayette and Garibaldi, having long before run out of dead flyers, movie stars and famous Irishmen.

Anyway, as I sent my De Haviland staggering on its way back to McMullen I was, temporarily, a prohibitionist, with particular reference to _tequila_ and _mescal_ and _aguadiente_, which are Mexican beverages guaranteed to grow hair on the top of Mt. Everest. Any one of the three will make a rabbit spit in a bulldog’s face.

The airdome at McMullen is small, flat and hard to land on without over-running. I made it by a miracle, and as I stalked into headquarters I was greeted by a very perspicacious and inquiring look from the good eye of Cap Kennard, our genial flight commander.

“And did you enjoy yourself, ‘Slim’?” he inquired, while “Pop” Cravath, our superannuated adjutant, laughed raucously.

“Temporarily,” I admitted.

“Think you’re going to bed now, put icebags on your head and tomatoes in your stomach, and convalesce?” pursued Kennard, his scarred face holding a peculiar expression.

He’s been in twenty-three airplane wrecks, and what he did to the ships was as nothing to what he had done to his face.

Judging from photos of our stocky, chipper little C. O., he had joined the Air Service as a handsome young man with a face which could pass in a crowd on a dark night without sending any damsel into hysterics. After a couple of years in France and more time on the border, however, he looked as if he were breaking in a new pan for somebody else.

“What’s up, Cap?” I demanded, being able to see through a ladder if some one lends me his glasses.

“The chief’s got his bill through Congress, the bombing tests on those German battleships are going to take place this summer, and you, Slim, are ordered immediately to Langham Field, Virginia. You’re going in advance of the picked flyers who’ll drop the said bombs upon the bodies and persons of the Ostfriesland and other boats, and you’ve got to be out of here on the four o’clock train to San Antonio. Get under a cold shower, take some salts, drink a lot of icewater, pack the extra sock of yours, and may ---- have mercy on your soul!”

II

All of which more or less accounts for the fact that I, Slim Evans in person, was ensconced on the edge of Chesapeake Bay three days later. Langham Field is in the commonwealth of Virginia with the bay bounding one edge of it. All around it on the other sides there are marshes and estuaries and swamps and puddles and so forth.

The mosquitoes have a formal review each night, and march and countermarch up and down any face within reach. Every once in a while there comes an order for them to take careful aim and fire. The first night I spent in the officers’ barracks I had no screens on my windows, and the mosquitoes were so thick that when I started to throw my shirt in a corner it just hung right in the air.

Seriously speaking, I was in a very pleasant frame of mind at that, and I wouldn’t be far wrong if I said that just about every other flyer in the service was in a similar mental condition. Granting, of course, that any man who flies for a living has any mind at all to be in any condition whatever.

The facts were that for weary months General Mallory, the chief, had been lifting his melodious voice to high heaven, Congress and the world at large, insisting that a bunch of airplanes flying out to sea with bombs aboard could considerably embarrass any navy approaching our shores. The fact that I was at Langham Field was simply due to the fact that Congress had finally taken a few dollars out of the appropriation for a new post office with a solid gold cupola for the town of Four Forks, Arkansas, and added it to the money which had been set aside to dredge the Yahee River in Mississippi and turned it over to the Air Service. The latter money was made available when the Yahee turned out to be a brook which had temporarily dried up.

The Air Service, I already knew, had developed a four thousand pound bomb, but the dope was that for the tests mere peas, as it were, weighing only two thousand pounds, would be used. It was the general’s contention, which seemed to the naked eye to be well-founded, that a few of these eggs, each with a yolk consisting of a thousand pounds of T. N. T., when laid alongside a battleship might embarrass it a trifle.

In fact, he had an idea that said monarch of the seas might become extinct almost immediately. It meant plenty for the Air Service if they could prove that they could fly a hundred miles or so out to sea and bother a navy. And when one gets down to hardpan, every flyer I ever knew has a certain pride in his corps which is seldom equaled and never surpassed in any organization I know, from the Independent Order of Odd Fellows to the Queen’s Own Royal Mounted Sussex Fusileers, which organization acts as bodyguard to the Prince of Wales, I understand, and have heavy casulaties daily as men die of heart failure, trying to follow him around.

I had but vague ideas of just what the plans were, and least of all as to why I had been ordered on ahead, until I reported to Major Lamb Johnson next morning. Major Lamb Johnson is a fox-faced little fellow with a spike mustache consisting of five hairs on one side and four on the other. He has a habit of blowing frequently with a loud report, and when he comes down to earth again the second lieutenants can be found fainting on the ground all around him.

He was striding up and down his office when I entered. From the windows of it I could see the long line of huge, corrugated iron hangars which bounded the southern edge of the field, and the one huge dirigible hangar on the northern side. Eastward was Chesapeake Bay, and on the western boundary were a few more hangars and some frame administration buildings.

“Come in, Evans,” stated the Major. “You are here a month and a half before the hundred-odd picked veterans of the service arrive to commence practising for the bombing tests. The reason for your orders is that we want you as a ferry pilot. Your job will be to commute between here and Cleveland, Ohio, where the Martin factory is located, flying a new twin-motored Martin bomber to Langham each trip. Have you ever flown one?”

I shook my head.

“We have two on the field now, and Captain Lawton will teach you. You had a lot of big ship experience in France, I believe, and you also were officer-in-charge of ferrying three tankwings from Long Island to Texas a year or so ago, were you not?”

I agreed to this without reservation.

“The big ship squadron will be the 114th to which you’ll be assigned immediately. Captain Lawton in command. It’s just a skeleton squadron until the other flyers arrive, of course. Report to him immediately. Just one thing more, Evans.”

I knew something was coming. Major Lamb was always full of good advice and uplifting thoughts.

“I have never served in the same outfit with you. However, your reputation is that of a flyer who gets where he’s going by hook or crook, but that as an officer you are somewhat lax and careless. We are face to face with the biggest opportunity the service has ever had. Every man must put his shoulder to the wheel and live, think and breathe nothing but these tests, working twenty-four hours a day if necessary and----”

He went on with his discourse for some five minutes for the good of my soul and the glory of ----. At the end I expected that he’d lead in prayer for my unregenerate soul or something. Finally I got out after agreeing piously with everything he’d said and resolving to lead a better life.

Then I hied me up to the ten big hangars which were to house the 114th, and found old Cap Lawton, who’s three inches over six feet and hence only a couple of inches shorter than I. In lankiness we are about alike, but whereas his feet are bigger than mine, my nose makes his seem like merely a microscopic growth in the middle of his thin face.

I knew him well, and he greeted me with a broad smile as he shook hands. After fanning a while I found out that my teammate in trips from Cleveland to Langham would be Les Fernald. We’d ferry two ships at a time.

“You’ll be in command of Flight Three of the squadron, Slim, after the ships get here and the boys come in. At present that flight’s got one sergeant first class in charge, and two mechanics. Later it’ll have four sergeants, meaning one crew chief apiece for the ships, and eight mechanics. Your flight sergeant is Marston, a good man, although peculiar. Better stroll down and get acquainted with him, eh? You’ll probably use him as mechanic on these trips of yours.”

I strolled down to hangar fourteen which, it seemed, was to house the ships of Flight Three for the summer, and heard voices from the little tool room partitioned off in one corner of said iron structure. There wasn’t a ship in the flight, of course, so the mechanics were about as busy as so many Congressmen.

As I approached the door there cut through the murmur of talk a loud, vulgar voice, heavy as lead, deep as the guile of the heathen Chinee and rough as a Texas boulevard. Unless I was badly mistaken, those vocal cords belonged to nobody but Major George William Marston, and Georgy stood about as high in my estimation as a rattlesnake, and that’s right on the ground.

I wondered what in ---- he was doing at Langham Field. I hadn’t heard his name mentioned. It made the summer prospect look very dark, not to say drear. Add George William to a field which Lamb Johnson was already cluttering up with his presence, and you’ve got a madhouse made to order for any godly young flyer.

George William had been only a first lieutenant when I was one of the scared, diffident young cadets whose lives were made miserable because they stood in constant threat of discharge, and discharge meant that the dream of a lifetime, to fly, was shattered as completely as a glass dropped off the top floor of the Woolworth building.

George William had been in charge of the cross-country stage, and he did his ---- to get me kicked out because I was an hour late on making Seguin, the town I was bound for on my first cross-country trip. I got lost--sure. But I found my course again and I got there.

He disliked me primarily because I am physically, mentally and spiritually unable to feel as if any man who ranks me is automatically first assistant to ----, and one day when he called me a fighting name I took the opportunity to interview him alone and notify him sincerely that the next time he got personal with me I’d endeavor earnestly to hang his nose approximately under his left ear and do a quick job of rough and ready plastic surgery on his entire face.

He had been an old army sergeant, and he was a twenty-minute egg with a yolk made of gall and wormwood and an idea that saluting and saying “sir” were the ends and objects of a cadet’s existence.

In a group of kiwis--the kiwi is a mythical Australian bird which has wings but can’t fly--who were jealous of flyers and made their lives miserable, he was the _non plus ultra_, the _sine qua non_ and likewise anything else which you can think of abutting closely on a total loss.

Well, I had become a full-fledged officer since then, so I ambled in that little tool room. There were two privates sitting there, and a sergeant. And the sarge was none other than my old friend, George William Marston!

I shouldn’t be surprized if I swayed lightly on my feet--a mere suggestion of being knocked slightly off my pins. There he was, same as before--fleshy, dark face, pop eyes of light blue, three creases between his brows and deep-cut lines through the fat around his mouth. He looked more sullen than ever, and his black hair was much thinner.

If I was knocked for a row of Abyssinian applejack barrels, he was at least three laps ahead of me. Just as an ungodly feeling of joy and well-being went frolicking through my hardening arteries, his mouth was working spasmodically in an endeavor to say something. He had leaped to his feet like a shot, the other two being a split-second behind him, and he stood there as stiff as I was at my first Fireman’s Grand Supper Entertainment and Ball back in Utah, where I originated.

“Rest!” I grinned, as the two soldiers relaxed.

But not Marston. He was unable to do anything momentarily.

In a flash I grasped the explanation. Marston had been made an officer from a sergeant during the war, and undoubtedly, when the regular army was formed from the temporary troops, he had been unable to pass the exams on such military matters as Latin, English literature and the biennial theorem. Consequently he, like many others, went back to his former grade.

“So you’re a sergeant now, and you’re to be my flight sergeant all summer!” I observed pleasantly.

* * * * *

How I was going to pay him back for days of mental agony was making a new man of me as I stood and looked at him. You may, brethren, give vent to several loud, uncultivated snorts at the idea of me being in mental agony about anything. To tell the truth, I figured when I was a cadet that the country might struggle along without me in the flying corps, and I didn’t give three whoops in hallelujah whether or not I was an officer.

But I did want to fly, and I wanted to get to France, and I didn’t care whether or not I was carrying gold bars on my shoulders or a corporal’s stripes on my sleeve. Any man who wanted to be an officer could go to a training camp and get the commission in three months. It took a lucky flyer six months and a few broken bones to get his.

Any man who became a flying cadet had his mind set on flying, and George William Marston was the nastiest, meanest obstacle in the way I had ever come across. He gave an order in a way that made it sound like an insult. And he seemed to take delight in rubbing our noses, particularly mine, in the dirt and then trying to discharge us if we objected to the smell. Of course, my nose was unduly prominent. Gents, he sure rode me into the ground.

“I’ll be your flight commander all summer,” I told the congregation. “You can go now--you two. I want to converse in private with Sergeant Marston.”

The two privates filed out silently. Marston was still standing as if concrete had set in his backbone.

“Sit down, Major,” I told him, and I’ll swear the “Major” just slipped out naturally.

He relaxed, but did not subside on the tool chest next to him. His eyes, which popped out so far they could have been knocked off with a stick, met mine steadily. We had instinctively hated each other, I think, from the first time we met.

“Well, this is a rather peculiar situation, Marston,” I told him as I ignited a cheroot. “The man that tried to break me is now under me.”

“And about to be broken himself,” Marston interrupted me.

His face seemed to me to have changed since the time I had seen him before. He looked as if he’d gone through ---- and had become a sullen enemy of life in general. His light blue eyes, staring into mine, were glowing dully. He seemed to be daring me to do my worst as he looked at me.

And all of a sudden I hated myself because I had even considered using my strategic position to get back at him for what he had done to me.

“No, you’re not going to be broken, Marston,” I told him as he stood there like a lion at bay.

He simply looked at me, without saying a word. My particular and peculiar type of beauty did not appeal to him at all, and as for him, I didn’t like anything about him and never had. In a personal sense, I mean.

“You can make my life a ---- on earth, of course,” he said after a lengthy silence. His voice had a deep husk in it.

“Sure,” I agreed. “Listen, Marston. You always were a good soldier, as far as I know; leaned over backward to live up to regulations, and a hound on discipline. But you were without exception the rottenest officer I ever saw, and the nastiest and most unfair man a poor cadet ever had over him. You were enough all by yourself to ruin the morale of every cadet at Donovan Field. You’ll make a ---- sight better sergeant than you did an officer.”

“And you were about the funniest sample of a soldier that any army, including the Mexican, ever had,” he told me doggedly, and in his brooding light eyes that glow burned brighter. “You came lounging in as though you didn’t give a ---- for any orders or discipline whatever, and tried to do just what you ---- pleased. And you’re no more an army man right now than you were before.

“Oh, I’ve heard plenty about you. You’ve pulled off a few good flying stunts, but you’re not a soldier and never will be. And by ---- if you think I’m going to lick your boots because you, a young squirt who never had any responsibility about him, is an officer and I’m only a sergeant----”

“Pull in your neck, Marston; you’re stretching it,” I advised him. “You’d better thank your lucky stars that I’m not going to try to get even with you for what you put me through. I’m a flyer now, but I can still look back at the months when I was bound up in the effort to get to be a flyer, and the stuff you put me through.

“But Marston, I’m going to relieve the spleen that’s gathered in my system. As long as you’re under me you soldier as you never did before. I’ll show you no favors, but I’ll not pick on you until you slip. Then you’re going to get it right in the neck. Meanwhile, Marston, do you remember the day just before inspection when you dressed me down in front of the troops, and called me a nice, pretty name which cast certain aspersions on my ancestry?”

He stood there and said nothing, but the ferocious gleam in his eyes said plenty. No doubt he had brooded for years after slipping back from the grade of major to that of sergeant. Some drop, I’ll say.

“We’re quiet and alone, Marston. Temporarily I’m taking off these pretty little collar ornaments, and forgetting that I’m a looey in this man’s army. And I’m going to beat you half to death, ---- willing, as between man and man. And whoever wins, we’ll walk out of here and the past’ll be forgotten as long as you’re a soldier.”

He hesitated briefly.

“If I beat you up, Evans, I’ll pay through the nose for it. You’ve got all summer to pay me up for a fight, and you’ll do it. I can’t win.”

“You button up your mouth, Marston,” I told him grimly. “Don’t judge me or any other man by your own standards. I don’t even want to kid myself by pretending that I could ride you all summer for personal reasons and then excuse myself by saying that you need discipline. I wouldn’t be that low, but that’s what you did. Get that shirt off, if you want to, and put up your hands. The personal representative of several thousand cadets whose lives you made miserable, including several dozen that you got kicked out entirely, is standing right in front of you.”

“And is going to get the beating of his life!” bellowed Marston suddenly.

* * * * *

He tore off his O. D. shirt as if possessed. All the accumulated bitterness of the last couple of years, I imagine, added to the natural meanness in him, broke through the dam and turned him into a fighting fool.

He weighed as much as I did, but I was a foot taller and my reach was many inches greater than his. As he came toward me joyfully he sent his powerful, stocky body at me like a cannon ball. I sidestepped, and got in a peach right to the button.

It is not my intention to give a round-by-round story of the battle. I couldn’t. It was too fast and much too furious. We were fighting, remember, in a little tool-room, impeded by toolchests, and with rows of shelves around the walls filled with wrenches, cotter pins and all sorts of spare parts. I didn’t have room enough to dance around and keep him out of reach, and he took blow after blow in order to get into very close quarters.

I floored him in the first ten seconds, but he was back on his feet as if he’d bounced off the floor. Once again he came hurtling in, and again I dropped him. His nose was bleeding profusely, not to say fluently by that time, but he was strong as a bull. The next time in he ducked a hurried right swing which I started from the floor, and the next instant we went crashing against the shelves. With a powerful heave he threw me to the floor, and for about a half minute we fought like wildcats all over the place. He used his feet, too, but luckily I got out of his gorilla-like grip in time and up to my feet.

The next minute or so is just a crimson-tinted haze as far as I’m concerned. We stood toe to toe and swapped blows. Twice he got me to the floor again, and in a brief interval when I kept him away from me, I floored him once more.

He came up more slowly, and I leaped in with a one-two punch that I traded for a trip-hammer swing that caught me just under the ear. I went spinning against a tool chest, and fell over it with a crash just as he dropped himself. I was dazed, dizzy, and somewhat, if not entirely, _non compos mentis_ for a moment.

As I tried to clear my head and get to my feet I saw him getting up groggily. Before I could get further than my knees he hurled himself across that tool chest and on top of me, his huge fingers clutching blindly for my throat.

I felt as if I were fighting in a dream, and for my life or something. What brought me to, paradoxically enough, was a glancing blow from a light wrench. In a second my mind snapped to attention, and for a moment I was a strong man as I saw myself knocked out with a piece of iron. He had evidently grabbed the wrench from one of the shelves as I fell over the chest.