Part 1
Thompson Burtis
tells a story of queer birds of the Border Air Service
SALUTE
Before advancing a few choice bits of philosophy, speculation and what have you, I’m going to introduce myself. I do this so that you may promptly divest my theories of any importance whatever, and let them roll off your knife smoothly and without effort. That being done, you can proceed, if you like, to digest the illustrative anecdote concerning the little matter of Lieutenant Percival Enoch O’Reilly, Air Service, Regular Army, versus Lieutenant Ralph Kennedy, Air Service, Reserve Corps.
My name is “Slim” Evans, and I, in an idle moment in 1917, became a member of the Army Air Service. I still am, for the simple reason that I’d have to work twenty hours a day in civilian life to make twenty dollars a week. When I was constructed, the supply of brains, beauty and good sense was very limited. However, there was an overplus of noses and feet, so I turned out six feet five inches tall; thin enough to chase a fugitive collar-button down a drain pipe; and standing in a stooped position on a pair of feet so large that I couldn’t fall down if I wanted to.
On the credit side of nigh on to ten years as a flyer, I can put the fact that I’ve done practically no work, made much more money than I’m worth, have avoided monotony and lived through moments of great excitement, not to say thrills. Furthermore, I’ve met diversified people and events which, thank God, have kept me from being smug, complacent or bigoted about anything whatever. On the debit side of the ledger, I have only a couple of my own teeth left, and they do not meet; I have a bad left shoulder, three elegant and permanent bumps on my head, and more scars on me than there are on an ice rink after an evening’s skating.
With this background, you can attach as much weight as you want to this statement. People who’ve lived long enough and seen enough to comprehend a little bit of the complexity of human beings and the motives which spur them to their daily performances, will never be too hasty in damning a man to his eternal roast. On the other hand, they’ll be very cautious about attaching a pair of wings and a halo to any living human.
Once I did that. Everything was either good or bad, including people. There was no middle ground. As a result of that asinine viewpoint, there are memories that rise and smite me when the wind is in the east. R. E. Morse overtakes me and makes life a hell for hours at a time, as I think back to the dumb, cruel things I’ve done--and the fact that the same things have been done to me by others doesn’t help. Here, a girl I’ve misjudged; there, a man to whom I’ve said unwarranted things that I’d give my left hand to take back, and--oh, well, you know, I guess, if you’re out of your mental swaddling clothes.
Consequently, there may be some importance to be found in the fact that my own personally buried skeletons fade almost into insignificance before the climax of a situation that I watched on the Rio Grande, in which I, personally, had no part. Furthermore, the things I’ve seen--gone through, some of them, myself--in ten years of flying become almost like unreal, theatrical claptrap, in comparison with one moment, a mile in the air, that changed a couple of lives and made Penoch O’Reilly into a different man.
You gather, I take it, that the affair made an impression on me.
* * * * *
My observation of the episode started one steaming July morning in McMullen, Texas. Mr. P. Enoch O’Reilly and myself were members, in good standing, of the McMullen flight of the Air Service Border patrol. There were a dozen flights, consisting of ten or twelve flyers and observers, scattered along the Border from Brownsville to San Diego.
The duty of the blithe young men was to pilot DeHaviland airplanes up and down that squirming trouble area, taking peeks at any little matters such as smuggling, rustling, or a little plain and fancy banditing. We aimed to be a sort of Texas Ranger outfit, riding airplanes instead of horses and, in some cases, if I do say it myself, the boys did pretty well. Well enough to make the roar of an airplane motor like the voice of doom to many a frisky outlaw.
Eleven o’clock was the hour for the mail to arrive. I’d just got back from the western patrol to Laredo and stalked into the office with my helmet and goggles still on. It was only a gesture--I never get any mail.
Sitting on the edge of a desk in the operations room, underneath the mailboxes, was Penoch O’Reilly. He was holding a letter in his clenched hand, and his eyes were gazing out of the window with a look in them which was not good to see.
Enthroned in the inner office, at their respective desks, were “Pop” Cravan, our adjutant, and Captain George Kennard, our C. O. Pop was round and obese and bald-headed, with a fiery temper, a nasty tongue, a soft heart and a keen mind.
“Hell!” he snorted loudly. “Another of those reserve officers ordered here for three months active duty at his own request! I suppose he’ll crack up three ships and be more trouble than a case of hives.”
“Who is he?” demanded the stocky, spike-haired little captain in his raucous voice.
“Name is Ralph Kennedy, and he’s a shavetail in the reserve.”
“I know him!” barked Penoch O’Reilly suddenly. “Here’s a letter from him, in fact.”
“Enter into the sanctum, sirrah, and make him known to me,” the C. O. invited him spaciously.
Penoch strode in with ludicrously long steps. He was so short that he’d have to stand on a stepladder to kick a duck in the stomach.
I drifted in lazily, but my curiosity was alive. If I wasn’t wrong, the look on Penoch’s face, as he brooded over that letter, did not indicate ungovernable enthusiasm about the arrival of the new man.
“I knew him a little before the war,” O’Reilly stated in that deep bass voice of his.
Coming from his little body, that voice was as surprizing as it would be to get a brass band effect by blowing on a harmonica.
“He’s not so bad, I guess. Lived an eventful life, anyhow. Was a sergeant in the Air Service--in my outfit a lot of the time during the war--and learned to fly then. Got a commission in the reserve when the war was over. He’s a wonderful mechanic, and he can tell interesting yarns.”
“How well can he fly?” demanded Pop truculently. “With these bandits raising hell, and with scarcely enough crates to get flying time in on, we can’t afford to let amateurs spread D.H.’s all over the landscape!”
“Pretty good,” Penoch admitted grudgingly. “He was an automobile race driver at one time, a trick motorcycle artist at another, and all that.”
“Due in this afternoon,” remarked Pop, examining the orders in his hand. “Well, I hope he can play bridge.”
Penoch’s set face relaxed into the ghost of a grin.
“He’s pretty good at most card games,” he said mysteriously. “Going back to the tents, Slim?”
“Uh-huh. All quiet along the river, Cap.”
“I’ll go with you,” Penoch said evenly, and we marched out.
We were surely a comedy team together; and we frequently were together, because Penoch and I had become close friends as a result of several imbroglios in which we had engaged. He was just an inch over five feet, so you can readily realize that I could have worn the little squirt for a watch-charm.
“Anything special on your mind?” I inquired casually.
“Yeah; but I’ll wait until we get to the tent,” he told me.
We marched on down the line of buildings that bounded the southern end of the small sandy airdrome. To the east and west were big black corrugated iron hangars, baking in the sun. Northward, a fence was the rim of the field, and a few miles farther north was the rim of one hundred and fifty solid miles of mesquite.
While we are galloping down the line toward the tents, take a look at one of the most amazing chunks of humanity I’ve ever met. Penoch, as I’ve said, was short, but his torso was round as a barrel, and his legs straight and thick and sturdy. His muscles, I’d found, were like steel cables, and his strength was as much out of proportion to his size as his voice was.
It was his face, though, that made him prominent in any company. It was square and brown; and a pair of the largest, keenest, brightest blue eyes you ever saw sparkled forth from it and reflected an unquenchable joy in life for its own sake. His hair was red--not pink or sandy or auburn, but red. His eyebrows had been bleached by the sun to a pale yellow; and below his short, turned-up nose, a cocky little mustache, waxed to pin-points, was a similar tint.
His teeth were big and strong and white, and between them, on occasions, there rolled a loud, Rabelaisian “Ho-ho-ho!” that made the welkin ring. Everyone in hearing distance chuckled with him. He looked a bit like a burly little elf--but when he was serious and worried, as he was now, wrinkles leaped into being, and those eyes got hard as diamonds. Then age and experience and hard competence were written for all the world to read.
He is, was, and will be until he dies, one of the most famous characters in the Army. Some of the highlights of his Army career include being stranded in a West Virginia town, where the miners, on strike, were hostile; declaring martial law without authority and running the town for thirteen days, until he could get out; being captured in the Philippines by hostile Moros, given up for lost, and finally returning, safe and sound, an honorary chieftain of the tribe; and numberless other accomplishments of renown. He had been court-martialed a hundred times, due to his peculiar sense of humor, and had always been acquitted, because a board of officers who’ve laughed steadily for hours at the testimony can’t get tough.
Incidentally, he usually hauled his friends into any trouble which he found for himself. I myself had been court-martialed, along with him and Charley De Shields, just a month before. All due to his funny ideas. It gives a little sidelight on a man who is tough to describe, so I’ll tell it.
* * * * *
The three of us were in San Antonio on a week-end leave, and at one in the morning we were a bit tight, so to speak. Penoch called up a couple of girls for the purpose of throwing a roadhouse dance party. Being respectable young ladies and in bed, they haughtily bawled him out for calling at such an hour. That made Penoch decide upon vengeance. Charley De Shields is just as nutty as Penoch, and I’m no paragon of dignity.
It was Penoch’s idea, though. The apartment house was a small one, in a quiet section of town, and it boasted a small, cozily furnished lobby. We proceeded to divest that lobby of all its furniture. When we finished, we had chairs on top of Charley’s sedan, a davenport on the hood, and everything from potted palms to rugs and bric-a-brac inside the car. The lobby was furnished with a telephone, when we left.
Out at Donovan Field we rang the doorbells of our friends, presenting each one with a tasty bit of house-furnishing, as a token of esteem. At five in the morning we retired, to be awakened at two in the afternoon by the news that the owner of the apartment house was after our scalps, and that returning the furniture might knock off a couple of years from our sentences.
We’d forgotten just where we’d left the stuff. However, we secured a big truck and went from house to house, collecting. At dark we set forth for town, between cheering lines of unregenerate flyers. Penoch was on the front seat, clasping a large and ornate vase lovingly, to keep it from breaking. Artificial flowers were in his other hand. Charley tended three standing lamps carefully in the body of the truck and I, at the rear end, blushingly chaperoned a frail chair of the vintage of Louis Quinze, a plant in a glass container, and three spittoons.
* * * * *
Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it; but _that_ was Penoch. He radiated more energy than his weight in radium; he could fight like three wildcats rolled into one, and he laughed at, and with, life twenty-four hours a day--usually.
Which made his present preoccupation all the more impressive. We said not a word, until we were in my little two-by-four tent.
“Shoot,” I commanded, and he set himself for that purpose.
Whenever he had anything of importance to say, he always planted himself with his legs wide apart, as if setting himself against an onslaught, and he talked with his body motionless, except for a stabbing, emphatic finger.
“It’s about this bird Ralph Kennedy,” he stated, “and I need advice.”
This admission from the self-sufficient Penoch was remarkable in itself. It became even more so as I took a good look at his face. It was hard and set, pugnacious jaw outthrust, and his eyes were a curious mixture of cold savagery and dazed bewilderment.
“I guess you didn’t exactly shoot your wad to Kennard, then,” I said as casually as I could.
“No, I didn’t. I never have to any one, except you; and that was because I had to. I’m afraid I’ve got to now!”
He just clipped those last words off, with snaps of his teeth.
“You know considerable about me,” he went on, seeming to plant himself more solidly, as his eyes met mine squarely.
“Not so damn’ much,” I came back. “You were in France, of course, and left the army to join the Kosciusko squadron in Poland. Then you were an instructor in the Mexican Air Service, and finally got back into the Army and went to the Philippines for two years. Now here you are. That’s all I know.”
“Well, you know I’ve got into trouble in my life,” he stated. “Anyhow, Slim, I’m up against it now. To make a long story short, I come of a wonderful family, I suppose, but I ran away from home, and between the years of fifteen and twenty went through a sort of hell, I guess. That’s when I met this bird Kennedy. He picked me up when I was a starving hobo, and he proceeded to use me for his own purpose. I was valuable to him in a lot of ways. He’s a sort of crooked adventurer--or was. But I’ll swear I was innocent as a baby at the time!”
“The soup begins to thicken,” I said slowly. “Well, what happened? What was his line?”
“The first thing he had me do was go around and place a bunch of punch-boards in saloons in Buffalo,” Penoch said in that fog-horn voice of his. “There were two hundred dollars’ worth of punches on each board, and the saloon-keeper was to put up a regulation number of cash prizes--so many twenty-dollar bills, so many tens, and so on, totaling two hundred bucks. When the board was punched out, I was to come around and collect ten dollars for the use of it. We furnished a list of prize-winning numbers, a board to exhibit the prizes on and the punchboard itself.”
“That seems all right,” I told him.
“Sure.” For a second his face lightened, and he was the sparkling, zestful boy again. “But Ralph went around to every saloon and punched out all the prize-winning numbers! Ho-ho-ho!”
I had scarcely started laughing, when his face suddenly turned bleak and cold again, and my laugh, somehow, died in my throat.
“I realized later that I’d been an accomplice in a good many things outside of the law--getting him acquainted with people he could fleece, and all that sort of thing. Finally, he worked the old mine salting racket; but, Slim, he worked it on me! I thought the thing was a cinch, and I persuaded two well-off men I’d got to know to invest a lot of money in it. It was a plain swindle--me innocent, and those men are looking for me yet, I guess. Slim, he can blast me right out of the Army and--well, jail’s a cinch, I think.”
I could understand all the implications in his words. My own life hasn’t been so easy. And when a man hits the open road, to lick the world from a standing start, and is thrown with the scum of that same world through necessity, often with starvation stalking at his side, there are bound to be episodes which the smug people of this world, who’ve never missed a meal or had a fight, think damn one to eternity. There are ghosts in the closet of every wanderer that ever lived.
“You think he’s out to do you dirt,” I said finally.
“Not exactly. As a matter of fact, Slim, I think he likes me a lot. But he’s for Number One all the time. As cold and unmoral a snake of a man as ever breathed. He’d throw his family, if he had one, to the lions to save himself. And from the time he caught up with me, during the war, to the time I got out, he haunted me. He got himself made a sergeant assigned to my outfit. He borrowed my money, made me introduce him to people I didn’t want to know him, because I distrusted him; he took it for granted that he could have special privileges. And now that he’s found me again, he aims to be a parasite for the rest of his life. I know it!”
“The short and ugly word,” I observed casually, “is blackmail. A bullet is a merciful death for one of that stripe.”
Penoch’s hand stabbed out at me.
“I know it. And yet the man is likable in a lot of ways, as you’ll see. Maybe he thinks I owe him plenty. In a lot of ways he defers to me, admires me and likes me. But, as I say, when he gets in any kind of trouble, or wants anything for himself, there isn’t a thing in the world as important as himself. He’d loan me money, if he had it, and he’d sell me into jail for five thousand dollars, if he was broke. The only reason in this world that he’s coming here is to live off of me. He must be broke, or a fugitive, or something. He’ll draw his pay, borrow mine, if he needs it, and never pay it back. He’ll take it for granted that I’ll do everything in the world for him. If I refuse, he’ll use the club he has over me without mercy.”
“And he’s a reserve officer,” I ruminated aloud. “Listen, Penoch. You’ve got the goods on him. You can plaster him behind the bars. Why not call his hand and take your chances? You were young, innocent--”
“It would kill the folks,” O’Reilly said steadily, “and the Army and flying right now means a hell of a lot to me. It’s not so easy, Slim.”
Which it wasn’t, of course.
“Aside from the money angle, Penoch--and say, that needn’t be so bad, at that! If that bozo starts to blackmail you out of your dough, there’s no reason why ‘Tex’ MacDowell, ‘Sleepy’ Spears and myself each can’t fix up a bit of a game and get it back from him by fair means or foul. We’ll--”
“Won’t do, Slim,” he told me. “That is, it might, if it was worked cagily. But if he thought for a minute that I’d given him away he’d plaster me to a fare-you-well. And that isn’t the worst of it--the money, I mean. He’s funny. He’s got a hell of a lot of false pride, or maybe he really thinks he’s fit to enter any home in the country. He’d just move right in with me, and he’d be so sore he’d never let up on me, if he so much as suspected that I was stalling him off from meeting any of my friends. And there I am! In a position of having to introduce a man I’m not sure won’t cheat at cards, make love to a man’s wife, or anything else. And if I don’t, it’s out of the Army in disgrace, and--”
“It’s a tough spot,” I said unnecessarily, and he stared morosely at me as he said--
“It’s no Paradise.”
Then his face seemed to harden. It was all in his eyes, and they were bleak and cold.
“But that devil had better not get gay. If worst comes to worst, I’ll kick him out of the Army, resign myself, and hit the road.”
He sort of grated that out, and I cut in hastily:
“As a matter of fact, he’d better not slip on the cards or the rest of it, or I’ll personally get him. He doesn’t strike me as any credit to the Army.”
“He’ll be too smart for that--around the field, anyway. I suppose I’m a coward; but I’ll be miserable while he’s here. I’m hoping he won’t be tempted to do his stuff. Honest, Slim, what do you think? That I’ll be a damn’ heel to introduce him around? That I ought to give him away to start?”
“No,” I told him, after no thought whatever. “Maybe he’s reformed. Anybody you introduce him to will be free, white, twenty-one and able to look out for himself. And I see no reason for you to open up a knife, sharpen it and stick it in your own gizzard before it’s necessary.”
“Well, it won’t take long to make it necessary. He’ll hang around my neck just once too often.”
With that I left him for the bath-house, there to get washed, polished and highly perfumed. During the rest of the day no loud “ho-ho-ho!” rang out over the field. If I had any tendency to forget the situation, Penoch’s set face was a constant reminder. Consequently, you won’t find it hard to believe that I accepted Penoch’s invitation to become a member of the welcoming committee. I accepted agilely, as a matter of fact, and the witching hour of three forty-five found us tooling his dilapidated old roadster down the thronged main street of McMullen, as quietly as a flock of tanks.
* * * * *
McMullen is one of those new, shiny, progressive little Texas cities, where transportation includes cow-ponies and Rolls Royces. It is a mixture of the old and the new. A completely equipped, honest-to-God old cowboy will tie up his horse in front of a store that sells Parisian gowns.
The depot, as always, held a considerable crowd to greet the one daily train from San Antone. No sooner had Penoch guided his panting monster into parking space, and its wheezes and moans died, than a shiny eight-cylinder speedster appeared in the next stall. A feminine voice was yelling:
“Hello, flyers! Who’s arriving?”
“Reserve officer; friend of mine,” Penoch was forced to say. “How’s my secret sorrow?”
“Fine,” returned Miss Shirley Curran airily, hopping out of her car and into ours. “Well, I suppose I might as well look him over.”
She was nineteen--one of these slightly dizzy, somewhat confusing flappers that senile old men of thirty-odd like myself had a hard time getting used to a few years back. She was slim and thin-faced and good-looking, with boyishly bobbed blond hair, snapping blue eyes, and agile tongue. She was tireless--a slim streak of flame, who could dance all night, ride all day, smoke seven packages of cigarets, and look as fresh as a daisy.
Her dad was a great old Texan, who’d played a lot of poker, drunk a lot of liquor and had been a great ladies’ man in his time. She was the apple of his eye--and a good apple, too. She was a pal to many of the flyers; although, for real playmates, she preferred less mature samples of the male sex--college boys and that sort, who could fling a mean hoof.
She chatted along until the train rattled in and Penoch left the car.
“What’s the matter with him?” she demanded.
“Just moody, I guess; he gets that way.”
“He does not. He’s about as moody as our cow.”
“Well, you ask him, then,” I told her.
As if sensing my own curiosity, she fell silent, and both of us searched the crowd eagerly. We weren’t more than thirty feet from the steps of the single battered Pullman, so I could note every line in the face of the man who shook hands so enthusiastically with doughty little Penoch.
That greeting surprized me. Kennedy’s eyes were shining; his face held a genial and infectious grin, and I’ll swear that it was plain as the nose on my face that he liked Penoch a lot. And Penoch, too, seemed to melt. I guess the memories of a thousand times, good and bad, creates a bond, even between enemies, when they meet after a long separation.
“Isn’t he good-looking!” exclaimed Shirley with zest. “That’s the cutest mustache!”
And she was right. He was of medium height, dressed in blue serge and a jaunty straw hat. He removed the hat, as they approached the car, talking eagerly. His hair was black as night, wiry and wavy. His eyes were gray or blue, his nose long and straight; the carefully tailored mustache softened a thin mouth. His shoulders were broad, and his body looked as hard as rock.