Part 3

It seemed a year before the ship hit, and I was thinking at top speed, searching for some possible method of saving Kennedy. He could float for two hours; then he’d be sunk--

Just before the ship hit the water I let out a wild yell, which I myself couldn’t hear. Right ahead of Kennedy was a huge, partially submerged thing floating. It looked like a bunch of logs tied together. I guess he never saw it.

The ship crashed into it with its undercarriage. Just what happened I don’t know, because the water rose in a geyser, and I couldn’t see for a moment. But what I saw, when the water subsided, was plenty.

It seemed that the ship had been crumpled completely. It had turned on its back. Kennedy was invisible. The fuselage had broken in half, the wings crumpled back, and the motor, of course, was under water. That little heap of wreckage would become water-soaked in a few minutes. It would sink in a quarter of an hour, instead of in two hours.

I guess I was shaking a little. I remember Penoch, circling and circling. Kennedy had not come to the surface.

“Knocked out and drowning--maybe a mercy,” I was thinking, and four fins, circling, sent cold chills up and down my back.

Then he came to the surface. He struggled weakly to climb up out of the water, but it took him a full two minutes. Even then he was partly submerged. Suddenly the sight of those fins set me crazy, I guess.

“I’ll give him a chance to drown, at least!” I fairly shouted at them; and the next second I was pouring machine-gun bullets into the shadowy green monsters, and they were floating, dead, on the surface of the water.

There was not one single, solitary thing that could be done to save him. Two minutes more, and his frail life-raft would be sunk. There was no time to fly back and get something to which he could cling and drop it to him. He couldn’t swim.

I fairly froze in my seat, as a great mass of water rose from the sea. As it cleared, I saw the tail of Penoch’s DeHaviland, high in the air, less than ten feet from Kennedy. The next second Penoch was clambering up on the wreckage of his own ship. A few seconds later he was stripped to his underwear, and swimming toward the crippled Kennedy.

As the little devil was towing his enemy I came to myself. I circled watchfully above the water, and machine-gunned an approaching shark. As I did that my stunned brain got working. I don’t think I’m either better or worse than the average. I’m franker, that’s all. If I had been sitting in my ship, while my deadly enemy was dying a sure death, I would have been conscious of a sense of relief.

Penoch O’Reilly had landed to give him two hours more of life; it seemed a certainty that at the end of two hours, Penoch, too, would go down to the sharks, with the man who had almost ruined his life.

Then and there that squat, little figure, ho-ho-ho-ing at life, grew into a giant, towering above ordinary mortals, as far as I was concerned.

“There must be some way,” I kept telling myself over and over as I circled them. Maybe I hypnotized myself into an idea. I gave a war-whoop of relief. Anything was better than one hundred per cent. hopelessness.

Kennedy was hurt. That was apparent. Penoch had to drag him up on the fuselage, and then the reserve man lay there as if he were completely out.

I made wild motions to Penoch; he nodded. He was standing up, a small white figure, his feet far apart to brace himself against what fate had in store. As I sped for land, I almost thought I could hear him laughing that deep-toned, Rabelaisian laugh, flinging his challenge to the gods, a small white speck in the dusk.

A moment after I had landed, I’d told my story. Tex MacDowell and Sleepy Spears were in their ships in two seconds less than nothing, and we were off. When we arrived, Penoch had the upper left wing detached, and Kennedy was on it.

From there O’Reilly started his heartbreaking journey, a full mile, pushing that wing slowly through the water, his legs kicking tirelessly. Kennedy, partially recovered, was using the vertical fin as a paddle to help. Three airplanes cruised round and round over the ugly water, and not a shark got within our lines. Every second was a strain, for the sharks could come up from below and get Penoch, but they did not. With so much dead meat in the sea, I guess our outfit was entirely too suspicious for them to bother with.

It was ten minutes after dark when Penoch and Kennedy staggered up on the beach. Kennedy collapsed. When I got out of my plane, I was swaying like a rubber lamp-post, and before Penoch had been taken care of and got back, I had eaten and fallen on a cot, fully dressed, but dead to the world.

* * * * *

Strange as it may seem, I didn’t see either of them next day. Our flyings came at different hours, and when one was on the ground the others were in the air. And at three in the afternoon, when I landed, I found that Penoch and Kennedy and Pete Miller had started back for McMullen. Kennard, Sleepy and Tex and I started home at five o’clock. There were Donovan ships available, and there’d been another bandit raid in our territory. The patrol was needed on the river.

I saw Penoch in the mess-hall, at dinner, and sat next to him. We were all ready to drop, and hadn’t even washed. Kennard went to sleep over his soup. Sleepy Spears gave up after the meat course, and stumbled out to bed.

“Where’s Kennedy?” I asked Penoch.

“In at Shirley’s--for dinner,” he said tersely and, as our eyes met, I guess our thoughts were the same.

“Then what you did for him had no effect, eh?” I finally asked him. “How’d he act?”

“Avoids me.”

“I see. Come clean, Penoch. It must have been a temptation to leave him down there, even if you figured you’d have a good chance of saving him.”

Penoch buttered some bread thoughtfully.

“I just couldn’t; and I’d never thought of that wing gag. Just had an idea that there ought to be some way out--”

“So you tossed a few sharks right out of your mind, eh?” I interrupted.

“Oh, hell, I didn’t think of anything, except how nice it would be if he was dead. Well, old-timer, he’s sure slapped me in the face tonight by going back there. Shows what he is. Hell, I’ve been doing things for him all my life, and he’s willing to blackmail me. Guess I was a damn’ fool back over the Gulf, eh? Well, there’ll be excitement about in a few days, I guess. Better get some sleep tonight. Ho-ho-ho!”

I knew then that he had fully made up his mind, that he’d considered everything, and was ready to go. And when that crisis was passed with Penoch O’Reilly, he feared not man, devil or circumstances. Right at that moment he figured that the Army was a thing of the past and that the world was waiting to be bucked by a man in disgrace. The tougher it was, the louder he’d laugh.

The next day we both saw Kennedy at breakfast. He greeted us with a straight stare, said, “Hello,” in his customary breezy manner, ate with relish, and was absolutely himself. His eyes were as cold a green as ever, except for that surface shine that came when he laughed. He told a good story about Noah and the Johnstown flood, indulged in his reminiscences of the Columbus raid and likewise the Galveston flood, in all of which he had participated with considerable gusto.

I just sat there and watched him. That clear-cut, hard face and those fishy eyes made as impenetrable a mask as I’ve ever seen.

“The hell it’s a mask!” I finally told myself. “He just hasn’t any feelings that can’t be expressed in a grin or a laugh or a snarl. He couldn’t hate anybody real hard any more than he could like anybody very much. Except himself.”

At lunch he came breezing in with:

“Well, well, the good old feedbag’ll be fastened round my snoot _pronto_. The meal ain’t been cooked that I can’t clean up by myself.”

He shook out his napkin, grasped his fork firmly and started in at the salad. His eating was not a pronouncedly delicate proceeding. It was audible for miles around when he wasn’t trying to act unnaturally elegant; and I believe that in a straight contest Kennedy’s eating anything could drown out my snoring.

“By the way, Peewee, my lad, how about a bit of poker at Shirley’s Old Man’s house tonight? I was given instructions to ask you and Slim to come out. Sheriff Trowbridge’ll be there, too. Come, and bring your checkbook, because it’s my night to howl!”

Penoch just looked at him. Kennedy stared back with a mirthless smile.

“Risk a few nickels!” he gibed. “I ain’t seen your game for years. How about it? Shirley’ll be glad to see you both, she said. She ain’t had much time--”

“Yes, I’ll go.”

Simple, those words. But I knew as surely as I knew that I was at the table that Penoch’s deliberate interruption was a threat. He stared straight at Kennedy, and the implication in his statement was plain for me to see. That poker game that night was to include some unscheduled fireworks. Shirley and her father were to hear some hitherto unknown episodes in the lives of Ralph Kennedy and Percival Enoch O’Reilly.

“Fine! A good time’ll be had by all,” Kennedy came back. “You act as though you’d been invited to risk your life, or attend your own funeral. Heh-heh-heh! Didja hear him say that, boys? Peewee don’t think any more of a nickel lost at cards than he does his left eye.”

There he sat, gibing at the man who had saved his life. It was apparent to any one that there was a deadly undercurrent in the conversation between the two. I saw Kennard and Tex and the others looking at them speculatively.

Directly after the meal I put it up to Penoch.

“You’re going to lay your information on the line tonight, eh?” I asked him.

“Right. And my resignation’ll be written. He doesn’t intend to back away from Shirley. I can see that. Maybe what I say won’t change a thing; but she’ll go into it with her eyes open.”

“Damn’ funny, at that,” I said in considerable bewilderment. “I don’t see why a girl--any girl--could mean so much to Kennedy that he’s willing to run the risk of exposure as a criminal. I--”

“He doesn’t think I’ll go through with it,” rasped Penoch. “Well, I’m going to take a nap.”

He strode away, his short legs twinkling through the dust, toward his tent. He didn’t sleep, though, because I peeked in a few times. He wrote reams of letters, setting his house in order, as it were, before he moved out. And he didn’t seem so downcast. In fact, the devil-may-careness of his face had increased, and there was hard recklessness there. He had taken his hundredth knockout blow from fate; and he was still standing erect, unbeaten.

It was a long and tough afternoon for me. Kennedy flew a patrol, and then took a long time dressing for dinner. At the meal he was in excellent form, holding the floor continuously with ribald tales, which were good. And Penoch O’Reilly, his eyes bright, seemed strung to a high nervous pitch. His roaring “Hoho-ho!” rolled forth continuously, and he and his enemy fought a silent battle of eyes beneath the laughter. I was depressed and silent, but possessed with such infinite hatred and repulsion when I thought of Kennedy that I could have stuck the bread-knife in his throat and enjoyed it.

* * * * *

I felt as if I were riding deliberately into disaster, when we went to the Curran house. Sheriff Trowbridge, Gargantuan old-timer, who had been friend and aid to the flight since its inception, was already there. He was six feet two, with a shock of iron-gray hair, a great mustache, and a genial old face tanned to mahogany. He and Mr. Curran had been friends for years and, as we came up on the porch, Mr. Curran yelled in stentorian tones--

“Three new customers, sugar!”

He was tall and thin and bald, with piercing eyes and an aquiline nose, all of which gave him the appearance of a soft-hearted old eagle.

In a moment Shirley came out, bearing three long, cold drinks. Her eyes were on Kennedy. When I saw the smile on her lips and the look in those eyes, I sort of caught my breath. I don’t know much about love, but almost anybody can recognize it when it stares them right in the face.

She was all in white, her golden hair slicked back, throwing her features into bold relief. Slim and lithe and tall, she looked every inch a thoroughbred. Kennedy, as he bent over her, was a good-looking officer, too. You couldn’t see those mean eyes, in profile.

“And women are supposed to have intuition!” I groaned.

At that, there was a sort of new note in Kennedy’s smile--a trace of real feeling--when he looked at her; and his eyes were a little less hard, maybe.

But the adulation was principally on her part. From the time the game started he seemed to avoid even looking at her. He played quietly, as did everybody. Every man around that table was a lover of poker and a hater of conversation when the pasteboards were being wooed. Even Shirley had had it bred in the bone, I guess, and never said a word. She tended to the ash receivers, brought us drinks, and finally went out on the porch to throw a ten-minute sop to a boy friend who had called on her.

The game was twenty-dollar take out, table stakes, and either draw or stud, to be played at the option of the dealers. Penoch watched Kennedy like a hawk, and so did I, on general principles. Not that I really thought he’d try his tricks there.

The most amazing thing to me was his utter nonchalance. He knew what Penoch was going to do before the evening was over; and he grinned into the little flyer’s face and dared him with his eyes.

It was close to ten o’clock, and I was about fifty dollars ahead, Penoch even, and Kennedy sixty dollars winner. We’d been taking the two old-timers over the jumps, to our great glee and their humorous disgust.

It was Kennedy’s deal. He shuffled them, and I saw him casually put an ace on the bottom before he started. When he finished, he gave the cards a rapid double cut--bottom half of the deck placed on top, but a little forward of the other half of the deck. Then he simply cut again, and that little shelf between the two halves of the deck enabled him to replace the cards exactly. That is, after two cuts, the cards lay exactly as they had before he’d cut them, the first time.

It was my cut, and he did not offer it, but started dealing.

My eyes were busy from that moment on. My heart was pounding as I visualized the possibilities. Maybe I could get Penoch out of the mess.

Card after card fell. Kennedy was high, with a king showing, and held the bet until the fourth card had dropped, when Sheriff Trowbridge drew an ace. I stayed, and Kennedy raised ten dollars. That dropped Penoch and Mr. Curran. The sheriff came back with a thirty-dollar re-raise, and I, with a pair of fours, dropped and devoted myself to watching. Had that cut been an accident? If it hadn’t, how had Kennedy stacked them for himself? Or did his crookedness merely include the placing of one lone ace to use if necessary?

He came back with a fifty-dollar raise--his stack. The sheriff, who had bought four times already and had plenty of chips in front of him, saw the raise.

Every eye was concentrated on Kennedy. I was peering so hard it hurt, and somehow my mouth felt dry. Shirley came in, her eyes widening at the size of the pot. She stood back of Kennedy, without saying a word. I knew that she comprehended the hands perfectly--the sheriff with ace, queen, ten showing; Kennedy with king, queen, deuce.

Slowly Kennedy flipped the sheriff’s card. A seven. Kennedy studied his own hand a moment, and his eyes flickered around the table, a curious light in them. Suddenly he dealt. An ace! And from the bottom of the deck, so clumsily done that any one in the world could have caught it.

“Pair of aces!” he crowed, showing his hole card.

The silence was like a physical substance, throbbing and heavy and packed with evil. My eyes rested on Shirley’s face. Her eyes were wide and horror-stricken, and she looked as if she were about to scream.

Suddenly the silence was shattered by the blow of Curran’s fist on the table. As if it had set a spring into action, every man around that table, except Kennedy, was on his feet.

“Out of this house, you thieving, yellow, sneaking crook!” thundered the old man furiously. “There ain’t a man here didn’t see you take that ace from the bottom! Git out, I tell you, or I’ll--”

He choked with his own wrath, as he crouched as if to leap across the table.

Kennedy got up leisurely, his eyes hard enough to make one’s flesh crawl. They held an expression that I can not describe, but this I was sure of, crazy as it seemed--there was no rage in them. Perhaps he couldn’t feel deeply enough to wax furious. It was as if he were dead.

“I guess you caught me,” he said evenly.

He pulled down his blouse and ran his hand through his hair. Penoch was like a statue. Not one sound broke the stillness.

Then there came a strangled sob from Shirley. She rushed from the room, and from somewhere in the hall, before she got out of earshot, we heard her weeping.

I licked my lips with my tongue. I saw Curran’s face twitch, and such demonaic fury leap into his eyes that I was afraid of murder. I believe he’d have sprung at Kennedy in another second.

“Sorry. Good night,” Kennedy said slowly, almost as if he were playing a part.

He walked out without haste, and without a word or a look to any one of us.

“God! I’m sorry!”

Penoch’s deep bass seemed to reverberate from the walls. As the sheriff broke into deep curses, Penoch interrupted him.

“Please, Sheriff, let me get this off my chest. Maybe you’ll be through with me, now, too.”

They sank into their chairs, Mr. Curran wiping his brow with a shaking hand. As Penoch made a clean breast of his relationship with Kennedy, I half listened, but I didn’t pay close attention at that. A thousand crazy ideas were running through my head, and suddenly it seemed as if I couldn’t wait to get Penoch alone. I had a queer hunch.

Those old-timers understood the little flyer’s position, and the sheriff summed up the general sentiment, when he put his hand on Penoch’s shoulder and told him:

“Mike, here, and me, ain’t blamin’ you a bit, son. And you was ready to prevent any trouble. You couldn’t be blamed, any way you take it, for givin’ him the benefit of the doubt for a while. Gosh! What a snake in the grass he is! And I aim to git him in jail. We’ll plaster him for life--”

“And me with him,” barked O’Reilly.

“Not a bit of it. Say, young feller, he can go up for a long time right in this country for what he done! More’n he deserves for this trick; but we’ll sort o’ consider his other crimes, see?”

“Listen Sheriff,” I found myself saying. “Some way or another I’ve got a funny idea. Let me talk it over with Penoch and call you back, eh?”

The leonine old man peered at me through puckered eyes.

“Shore,” he commented. “But what’s the secret?”

“I’ll tell you when I’m sure of it myself,” I told him. “Good night, Mr. Curran. I sure hope Shirley won’t take it too hard.”

“She will, for awhile. But when I think o’ what might ’a’ happened if he hadn’t give himself away--say, I ought to be thankful for this night!”

We had no sooner got out the door and into the car than I said:

“Don’t start her for a minute. Penoch, my boy, just how good it was, or ought to be Kennedy with his fingers and a deck of cards?”

“Used to be a wonder!”

“And he deliberately, before five people, does the clumsiest piece of cheating a man ever did in the world! If he’d wanted to be caught, he couldn’t have done it more openly.”

“By God!”

It was almost a prayer from Penoch. Then he faced me, tense and strained, and his attempted whisper couldn’t have been heard more than a hundred feet.

“He couldn’t have done it deliberately! I know what you think--that because of what I did for him at Laguna he decided to give up Shirley and took that way. But all he had to do was walk out on her, without putting himself in disgrace.”

“Let’s talk to him,” I suggested, and we started immediately to make a new speed record between McMullen and the flying field.

It did seem ridiculous. For what possible reason, short of sheer insanity, would a man brand himself a card-cheat? A man who’d do that would cut off his head to cure an earache. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, but I was exuding curiosity in corpulent chunks. I aimed to get at the bottom of things, and quickly.

* * * * *

We found him in his tent, alone, holding communion with a large bottle of _tequila_.

He stared at us, as we came in, and I’ll swear his eyes brought me up short. There was suffering in them, and a sort of bewilderment. It changed the whole aspect of the man. It was his eyes that repelled one, ordinarily. Now that there was something human in them, the change was magical.

Penoch O’Reilly planted himself, as per usual, his mustache turned upward belligerently, and his eyes snapping.

“Regardless of anything else, Ralph, how the ’ell did you happen to cheat so clumsily? The cheating I can understand; the way it was done I can’t.”

Kennedy took a big drink, gave us one and, as he poured them, said sardonically:

“You give me credit for knowing better, then? You ought to.”

“If you did it deliberately, why?” I broke in. “If you wanted to do what Penoch asked, and lay off the girl--”

“We both happened to be in love,” he said calmly, as if laughing up his sleeve. His eyes, however, were averted.

“Huh?” snorted Penoch scathingly. “You in love?”

“For the first and only time in my life,” Kennedy admitted casually, his back toward us. “In fact, I’m so nuts about her that I couldn’t let her in for what she’d be in for with me. Don’t flatter yourself, Peewee. It wasn’t for you I did it. It was for her.”

“But why that way?” I barked.

“If I just broke off,” he said, eying a new glass of _tequila_ with narrowed eyes, “she’d have taken a long while to get over it. Might as well cut everything off clean, show her what I am all at once, and blackjack her into hating me. Make it easier all around.”

For a moment his eyes met mine, and the mask was off. I don’t get sentimental as a rule, but I was looking at a man whose whole life had come up to torture him, and who was going through an accumulation of suffering.

“By the way, Peewee, I’m resigning, of course, and leaving tomorrow on the five o’clock. Probably’ll have to borrow some dough. I’d like to take a last ride, so keep things quiet until I get it, eh?”

Penoch nodded wordlessly. Cocky as he was ordinarily, and sure of himself, he was nonplussed now. Kennedy had turned into a strange species of animal to him, and he couldn’t believe it.

“And now,” grinned Kennedy, keeping up his bluff to the last, “will you two get the hell out of here and let a gentleman and a scholar get drunk in peace and quiet?”

“Don’t want any company?” Penoch asked him, and there was real pleading in his tone.

For the first time in our acquaintance I saw actual softness in Kennedy’s eyes, as he looked at the man he had liked and admired as much as it had been possible for him to feel those emotions for anybody.

“Nope. Let’s shuck the past, eh what? What the hell? And I’ve got to do a little high-powered thinking. ’Night.”

We walked thoughtfully out into the starlight. Then I made a profound remark.

“I’ve heard of the miracles that love is supposed to work, but this is the first one I’ve seen. I think the combination of you risking your life for him, and a real unselfish feeling for a girl, has sort of opened up a new world to Kennedy. He’s got guts, hasn’t he?”

“Never lacked those,” boomed Penoch. “At that, you may be right. I guess he’s always figured every hand was against him--and now that he’s found out there’s a little white in the world he doesn’t know what to make of it. He proved himself, all right, tonight, but if he’d told me that this afternoon I’d have laughed as hard as I would over a romantic yarn about the honeymoon of a salmon.”