Part 2

As they came closer, I had a funny feeling. He fairly radiated personality; but, somehow, in his slightly small, slightly too close together eyes, I thought I could see meanness. Probably it was because of what Penoch had said, but I seemed to see through a shallow layer of geniality and kindness into a man wherein there was neither moral sense nor unselfishness. Just something as cold and impersonal and impregnable as a rock.

As he approached us, his eyes, which I could now distinguish as green, rested continuously on Shirley. If ever I saw bold admiration, I saw it then. There was something coldly appraising in his stare, and an uncanny hypnotic effect. I’ll swear I had a job pulling my own optics off his.

I made one or two revisions regarding his personal appearance, too. In the first place, his hair was shot with gray; in the second place, his chin seemed a bit weak; in the third place, he was an attractive man, despite everything.

When Penoch introduced Shirley and me, he bowed low--a bit too low--and said:

“Pleased to meet you both. So the boy’s bought himself a buggy, has he? Some car, ‘Peewee,’ some car!”

He looked it over with a wide grin.

“It didn’t go through the war with you, did it?” he inquired, and he chuckled. It was as merry a chuckle as I’ve ever heard, too.

Every second or two his eyes would flicker to Shirley’s, and never did I see her own gaze drop. When she got into her own car, he handed her in with a flourish, then held her hand a little too long, as he stared into her eyes.

“If you--if you aren’t all cluttered up with the well known husband or something, I hope I see more of you, pretty lady,” he said airily.

Shirley didn’t blush so easily, but the man had her on the run. Despite his careful dress and too careful manners, he gave a subtle impression that he was a rough and ready guy at bottom; but one who had a lot of sheer animal power, without much leavening of civilized feeling. And when he stared at you with those green eyes, you forgot, momentarily, that something that I’ve tried to describe; the cold, diamond-hard core within him, I mean, and that the geniality of him was a reflection from the surface.

“Nothing like starting to get the old hooks in right at the start,” he grinned as he got in with us and waved farewell to Shirley. “By the way, Peewee, how’s the old heart been doing lately? Any more of the old dents in it?”

“Nary one,” responded little Penoch. “Well, how’ve you been?”

“Neither here nor there. Not so good lately. Right now, if a house and lot could be bought for a nickel, I couldn’t buy a doorknob; so I decided to let Uncle Samuel take care of me for a while. Heh-heh-heh!”

When he chuckled like that, you thought of him as a jovial, humorous scoundrel. And before that twenty minute ride was over, he’d told Penoch a couple of yarns about himself, and had O’Reilly in hysterics and me laughing like the devil. I noted, likewise, that he slipped into the “I seen” and “I done” manner of speech. Being grammatical was foreign to him, as was his bowing to a woman. All surface polish, poorly done.

He moved into the flight with a careless confidence that was sublime. At the dinner table, under Penoch’s prodding, he talked and talked with agility and abandon. He’d been everywhere and done everything and, as far as I could tell, he’d been a drunkard and a gambler and a Lothario through it all. Whatever business he had afoot rarely interfered with his wassail and debauch.

He could tell a story so vividly, and with such a sense of humor, that one forgot the bad taste it left in the mouth and just capitulated to the bizarre humor of it. Burglars, gangsters, army officers and persons of high degree came casually into his conversation with bewildering effect. To my dying day I’ll never forget his story of a one week’s job as chauffeur to a certain internationally famous family. Carnival life, race driving, hot political campaigns, the low-down on the underworld of three big cities. Before the evening was over all these things had been touched on; Kennedy was jovially drunk, and the flight had sat at his feet and listened with unflagging interest. Never once did he slip and make himself an actor in an illegal episode; he was the looker-on, although admitting to friendship with many a criminal.

* * * * *

Early the next morning I set off on the western patrol. To make a long story short, I ran into some bandits, held them awhile with my machine-guns, but finally lost them, due to a forced landing that resulted in my absence from McMullen for three days. Finally, with my ship repaired, I flew it back to the airdrome just at dusk. As I sat down to a late and lonely dinner, Penoch came in with that dignified, long-striding gait.

“How’s your friend Kennedy?” I asked him promptly.

“Borrowed two hundred bucks for uniforms and such,” he boomed crisply, and sat himself down.

I took one look at him; and that was enough.

“You might as well shoot the works. What’s he been up to?” I inquired. “First, how do the boys like him?”

“They get a great kick out of him. They know he’s not their equal by birth or breeding or anything like that. It’s a sort of patronizing friendship, if you get what I mean. That’s what he gets from most people, and what he resents most when, if and as he gets hep to it.”

I nodded.

“Well, why the woebegone look in your port eye and the stricken stare in the other?” I asked spaciously.

I didn’t want to seem too serious about it. He got to his feet and put one foot on a chair.

“Shirley’s fallen right into his trap,” he barked. “He’s got her hooked tighter than Grant had Richmond; and he’s got to lay off!”

“Peewee! Where’s the boy?”

Penoch’s eyes darted to mine, and his face froze.

“Stick around, and you’ll see some fun,” he barked raucously, and then his voice reverberated thunderously from the rafters.

“In the dining hall! Come in!”

In came Kennedy, resplendent in a uniform as new as the label on a bottle of bootleg whisky. He was washed, polished and highly perfumed, and he looked well.

“’Lo, Slim! Welcome home! Say, Peewee, can you slip me twenty? I’m as flat as near-beer. Until pay-day?”

“No, I can’t. I’m broke myself.”

Penoch was on his feet, legs wide apart, planted solidly. His barrel-like, little body seemed to stretch, until his clothes were drawn tightly over it, and his mustache was bristling fiercely. His eyes were bright and cold.

“I’m a stranger, almost; how about borrowing it for me?”

“No!”

“What’s the matter, kid? Ain’t sore, are you?”

Kennedy seemed really hurt and surprized. As a matter of fact, it was as plain to me as anything could be that Kennedy thought as much of Penoch as he did of any living human. He never missed a chance to slide in a statement that Penoch was a great little guy; and the number of tales he recounted that first evening, to prove what a fighter, thinker and all-round champion Penoch was, were numberless.

“Not exactly. But I’ve got something to say to you, Ralph, and now’s the time. First off, Slim, here, and Slim alone, knows the works. Understand?”

“Who told him?”

Kennedy’s face was a mask, now, and the eyes of a snake looked into mine, then shifted to Penoch.

“I did.”

“Give yourself the best of it?”

There was venom dripping from his tongue when he said that. He backed away slightly, as if fearful of a physical assault.

“What a fine pal you are!” he spat.

“Be that as it may, you listen. You lay off Shirley, Ralph, or I’ll have your history published in the paper! I’ve hinted at it before. Now I tell you!”

Penoch’s were blazing into Kennedy’s, and his right fist was stabbing the air. He was set for the battle, be the result what it might.

“Just where do you think you’d end up in that case? And where do you come in to criticize anybody else?” sneered Kennedy.

His eyes seemed rat-like then, somehow, as if they were flickering about for an opening for escape.

“For the sake of argument, we’ll say nowhere!” Penoch fairly roared. “I’ve paid your bills and hauled you around, and introduced a man I wasn’t sure wouldn’t steal family jewelry, to plenty of people. So far, I haven’t had anything but worry over it. But this is different.”

“So you’re pulling the big blackjack, are you? Rough-stuff, huh? Well, I’m pretty good at that myself, Peewee. So you mind your own damn’ business--or else--”

Kennedy’s eyes were flat and green and cold, his lips drawn back in the suspicion of a smile, and he looked as close to cruelty incarnate as I care to gaze upon. And hard--gosh!

“I’ll do no such thing. And you get just exactly three days to wind up your little affair with Shirley, or I start talking. You can start at the same time, and be damned to you! But we’ll both go down together, big boy. You’ll go down farthest. My resignation’ll be in before I start shooting off my mouth; I figure on that.”

For a long ten seconds Kennedy’s unwinking eyes bored into blazing Penoch’s. The indomitable little flyer, as if carved out of granite, stood there and waited. Kennedy threw his cap on the table. His voice softened, and in a wheedling tone he said:

“What’s all this about, Penoch? Good lord, boy, don’t go off half-cocked. I ain’t done nothin’ to Shirley or her old man.”

“Not yet, maybe! Why she ever fell for you, I don’t know; but she has. And if you’ve got any intentions at all, they’re rotten, and I know it. You couldn’t marry her if you wanted to, and if you could and did, she’d break her heart in six months. You’re a natural born crook and you know it. You’re a great guy in some ways; but there isn’t one gram of honesty in your whole body. You’ll end up broke or in jail, as sure as there’s a jail left. You never gave a woman in love with you a square break in your life, or hesitated at getting everything you could out of any man or woman who got in your power.

“And if you think I’m going to be responsible for getting a kid like Shirley into any mess with you, you’re crazy! If you get her she’ll know what she’s getting, and I don’t mean maybe. You’re no more eligible to wear that uniform or to mix socially with Shirley than I am to be the Grand Gazabo of Guam. Now, by God, you make up your mind. You’re going to do one decent thing in your life, and you’re going to do it within three days, by wiping Shirley off the slate and staying where you belong. If you don’t, you know what I’ll do. That goes just exactly as it lays!”

Penoch had been talking in low, deep tones, but every word was like a muffled bullet. When he had finished, a dangerous human being was crouched, figuratively speaking, with his back to the wall. I put in my horn then, having been stricken with an idea.

“Penoch’s right, big boy,” I told him. “As a matter of fact, why the hesitation? Shirley means nothing to you except a time-passer--a kid like that.”

“Is that so? How do you know so much?” he snarled.

His eyes flashed to Penoch’s.

“Gone back on me, have you? All right, you lousy little double-crosser. Watch yourself, and plenty! I’ll--”

“You’ll what?”

O’Reilly had covered the space between them in one bound, like a bounced ball. Suddenly sheer hatred burned from two pairs of eyes. Kennedy licked his lips, and his smile was mirthless and his eyes indescribable.

“I said to watch yourself,” he said softly. “I don’t like people that talk too much.”

“I guess,” I interrupted slowly, “that it may be time for me to do some talking.”

“Talk all you want to; but you stand the gaff, and don’t forget that, Peewee!”

The look he threw over his shoulder, as he walked out, left no doubt about what he meant. O’Reilly’s body relaxed slightly, but his face remained set and strained.

“I’ve always thought,” he said slowly, “that there weren’t many bozos in the world I’d hate to have as an enemy as much as I would Ralph. And now the wad is shot, Slim. I guess I’m in for it. But what the hell? The fact that I’ve talked to you will be the last straw, as far as he’s concerned. Shirley or no Shirley, he’s doing a lot of low and lofty thinking right now. And he’ll have a way figured to get even with me, if it takes a year, without hurting himself. Three days from now should be interesting, what? Ho-ho-ho! The skeletons’ll be out doing a song and dance for all McMullen to watch, eh?”

Now that the die was cast, Penoch was himself again, daring the world to do its worst. Indomitable, hard-boiled, soft-hearted, he flung his loud, raucous laughter in Kennedy’s face, so to speak, challenging him and the universe in general to get him down.

“Why couldn’t you have talked quietly to Shirley,” I asked him.

“Tried to,” he boomed absently. “She wouldn’t even listen. She’s nuts, I tell you, and the old man likes him. He’s given them a long song and dance about his automobile business in Los Angeles, and all that stuff. If I went to the old man and told him, there’d be hell to pay; the truth would come out that I had peached on him, and then my neck would be chopped neatly. Whichever way it’s done, there’ll be the same result when I expose him. I’m sunk myself.”

“Right now,” I ruminated, “he may not be satisfied with just smearing your reputation and having you tried for that mine salting business, at that. Struck me he’d love to throttle you.”

“I guess he would,” Penoch said calmly. “He served five years for manslaughter in Virginia once.”

* * * * *

I went to bed early. I hadn’t had much sleep for three days, so at ten o’clock in the morning I was still pounding my ear commodiously. I was awakened by long, lean, drawling Tex MacDowell.

“Take a peek at the paper and then arise and shine,” he told me. “We start for the Gulf of Mexico in exactly one hour.”

One peer at the headlines, that took up half the front page, awakened me as thoroughly as a pail of ice water would have.

“Laguna In Ruins!” the paper screamed in letters big enough to put on a signboard.

Within a moment I had the details. One of those tidal waves, estimated as at least a hundred feet high and two miles in width, had swept in from the Gulf. Doubtless the result of a volcanic eruption on the sea floor. According to the meager reports available, every house, structure and living thing existing in the portion of Laguna, within a half mile of the beach, had been doomed by that vast crush of water. The remainder of the town, back farther from the beach, had been inundated; but houses were standing, and many of the people had escaped alive. The low country--marshy ground, a lot of it, anyway--was under three feet of water, and Laguna, as well as small settlements along the beach, which had likewise been demolished, was a marooned and ruined little city. Telegraph lines down, railroads washed out, telephones useless, and at least one thousand people dead or washed out to sea.

“We go over to patrol the Gulf for survivors,” Tex said tersely. “Donovan Field ships will ferry food and water and medical supplies down. We leave in an hour. Get a move on!”

All I could think of, as I made passes at my whiskers and leaped into my clothes and gulped some food was this--how must it feel to look up and see millions of tons of water about to fall on you? A ten foot wave in a storm makes me feel like an ant bucking a steam roller.

Four men were to be left at the field for patrol. Six ships were warming up, as I ran out on the field. The roar of the half-dozen four hundred and fifty horsepower Libertys fairly shook the earth, and their propellers send clouds of dust swirling upward. As I approached the line, a car tore into the airdrome. There was Shirley, her hair blowing in the wind, as she streaked down the road toward the ships.

As I got closer, I saw her fling herself out of the roadster and make a beeline for none other than Kennedy. Penoch O’Reilly was standing near by, his face a study.

“Kennedy going down?” I asked him, noting meanwhile that Shirley and Kennedy were holding hands.

“Begged to,” boomed O’Reilly. “He’s got guts, all right, and a craving for excitement.”

“How’s he acting--toward you, I mean?”

“Doesn’t speak. Hardly speaks to anybody. I think he’s afraid some of the rest are wise to him.”

Just then I saw Shirley lean forward, as if to kiss him good-by. He looked around almost furtively and held her off. Mr. Ralph Kennedy, for the moment, was very unsure of his ground. As Penoch and I passed him on our way to our ships, his eyes rested on us for just a moment. They were passionless, but when his face was serious the meanness in it seemed to be intensified. Funny what an effect eyes too close together can give. Add that mouth--and my imagination--and perhaps you can see what I mean. Somehow, I shivered.

A moment later I was in my ship, giving her the last look-over, as she strained against the wheel-blocks. Oil pressure, air pressure, rotations per minute, battery-charging rate, temperature--all were O. K. Captain Kennard was already swinging out on the field; I being Number Two followed him, and the others took up the parade in their proper positions. One by one we took off, circling the field for altitude in single file. At a thousand feet the C. O. zoomed, and I slid in, twenty-five feet behind him, twenty-five feet to one side, and ten feet higher than he. Tex MacDowell came in on the left, and the others followed, until a V of ships, three on one side and four on the other, turned eastward and thundered their way toward the Gulf.

* * * * *

Formation is tricky stuff. You hold your position by throttle-handling alone. There are no brakes on airplanes, as you may have heard. It’s no time to commence mooning upon the whichness of the what, nor the why of the how. You ’tend to your knitting, if you don’t want a collision, and I ’tended to mine plenty. Subsconsciously I noted that Kennedy, at the rear of the left side, was holding his position well. Pretty fair flyer, he was. Penoch was behind me.

In an hour we were on the outskirts of the flood district. Ten minutes later I was stealing looks at the ground. We seemed to be flying over a shallow lake, from which houses and barns and cattle protruded. About two feet of water, I should say, covered the ground, and dozens of people were gathered on each knoll. Houses were down here and there, but not until we reached the outskirts of Laguna itself, did the real devastation become apparent.

As we circled that town, it seemed as if I couldn’t move. It looked like some gigantic canvas, whereon some artist had painted his idea of a shambles. The back part of the town still had buildings; the streets, clogged with small débris and overturned automobiles, was the sole evidence, save for broken chimneys, of the water. The beach section was nothing but one gigantic rubbish pile. Ten-story buildings had toppled and fallen in ruins, and for a space of at least a square mile, it seemed, there was not even a lane through the wreckage. Try to picture a heap of rubbish, so gigantic that a hundred automobiles, or more, flung upon it looked like so many flies. Dozens of boats, ranging from oil-tankers to canoes, had been flung hundreds of feet inland, like so many children’s toys flung on a dump.

The Gulf itself held a scum of débris of all kinds, and its shore, as far as we could see, was a rim of ruins.

I had not seen a single spot where a landing was possible. Kennard had wigwagged his ship, and one by one we fell into single file. Down below, thousands of people--the survivors--had their heads turned upward. Down in the ruins I could see bodies, now, and out in the bay unnumbered corpses were floating.

Suddenly Kennard started down, and then I saw what had been done. There had been other disasters and floods in Texas, when the airplanes had saved lives. Laguna had prepared. A force of hundreds of men was just finishing the job of clearing a hundred-foot runway down the hard-packed beach on the outskirts of the town; and it was there, one by one, that we landed, to face haggard, hollow-eyed men, steeped in tragedy.

* * * * *

Much happened during our days at Laguna; but that has nothing to do with Penoch O’Reilly and Ralph Kennedy. Anyway, twenty minutes later we were all back in the air, carrying packages of food and water, put up to float. Each of us had a sector assigned. We went roaring out over the open Gulf, spotting survivors who were floating on improvised rafts or clinging to planks. Kennard’s ship, with Jack Beaman at the radio key, was flashing information to San Antonio. Soon the Donovan ships would be coming in, carrying supplies.

As we got out over the water, I turned to look at George Hickman, pointing downward. He’s big and blond and nerveless; but his face was strained, and there was the closest thing to fear, that I’ve ever seen in his eyes.

As for me, I was one jump ahead of a fit. Down below, flashing along between carcasses of human beings and animals, were what seemed like untold hundreds of fins, cutting the water and feeding on their prey. Six times we swooped low to drop food and water to those poor wretches down below us. We could almost look into sharks’ eyes, and time after time the flash of a white belly announced another mouthful.

Remember this, too. If we came down in the water, we could float two hours. There was not a single serviceable boat to rescue a soul.

I flew six solid hours that day, as did every one of the others. It was just before the last patrol, and getting dusk, when I ran into Kennedy for the first time. Our landings hadn’t synchronized before.

“God!” I heard him mumble in an unutterably tired voice. “This’ll drive me nuts! I can’t even swim, if I come down.”

“No difference, my boy,” Jimmy Jennings told him with an attempt at jauntiness. “None of us could swim over a mile. Who thinks he could make five hundred feet through that forest of fins?”

And he was right. It seemed as if every shark in the Atlantic ocean had come to the picnic. But there were still unexplored sections, little towns along the shore which needed help, and on we went. Twenty Donovan ships were ferrying supplies; one came in almost every ten minutes. God knows we were willing to fly until we dropped. Those poor devils down in the water will haunt me to my dying day, I guess.

* * * * *

The sun was setting, when I turned around from a spot ten miles out in the Gulf, my last package dropped and my patrol over. My twelve-cylinder Liberty had never missed a lick, and I remembered saying over and over to the rhythm of the motors:

“If you’ll only keep it up--if you’ll only keep it up--”

My ears were ringing from a day’s bombardment; my face was so sun-burnt with sun and wind that it was sore as a boil, and I was more tired than I’ve ever been in my life. Two other D.H.’s, one a mile to my right and the other on beyond, were coming home across the vile, befouled water.

I was two thousand feet high, and land was six or seven miles ahead, when Hickman grabbed me with a grip like a vise. My heart did a backflip, and I turned as if I’d been shot. He was pointing to the right. In a second I had swung my ship and was flying wide-open toward that middle D.H.

It was coming down in a shallow dive. The propeller was turning as slowly as a water-wheel. One look was enough to tell me that the motor was dead, and that only the air-stream was moving the stick.

Two of the boys were going to the sharks.

I was diving now, motor full on. I don’t know why. I guess I had some wild idea that I could help them out. The other ship was heading for the falling D.H., too. We ranged alongside it almost together. The pilot in the crippled plane was Ralph Kennedy. The man in the third ship was Penoch O’Reilly.

Everyone was flying alone, except me, for two reasons. One was to leave more room for supplies to drop; the other was to conserve manpower as much as possible. I had George along to work the radio. We’d reconnoitered some outlying towns on the trip.