: A Viking of the Sky: A Story of a Boy Who Gained Success in Aeronautics by McAlister Hugh - Aeronautics Juvenile fiction

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de, but around those eyes anxiety had etched its own lines too.

"Umph, Mary, she's got sense--if I do say it," grunted Uncle Telemachus. "She knows it ain't any more use to try to keep an air-minded boy out of the air than it is to try to keep a water-minded duck out of the water. Mary, she's shed tears over his busted head and banged-up shoulders considerable times. But shedding tears didn't keep Mary from giving her wing-sprouting offspring all ten of the linen sheets she heired off her Grandma Harrison. Real linen sheets and a silver spoon or two was all there was left to descend to Mary. Grandma Harrison would turn over in her grave if she knew just what an end her good hand-woven cloth had come to. A whole sheet ragged up on a hawthorn bush where Glider Number One went gefluey in a gulley and spilled Hal for a row of head wallops. Another burned to a crisp when some invention of wing lacquer combustulated and liked to have fired us all out of house and home. There's four on that glider contraption, and the rest of 'em--the rest of 'em--" With a guilty look, Uncle Tel clapped a hand to mouth and went off into a hasty fit of coughing. He turned away and stamped down the length of the shop where he began to putter with some spruce sticks and a lathe.

When he rejoined the others, Raynor was saying:

"Didn't Hal drop a few hints that he was going to do some gliding for my benefit to-morrow?"

"I fear so." Mary Dane's lips quirked up in a smile, but her hand was flung out nervously. "And just look at that innocent little wind cloud lazying out there on the horizon! It could roll up into anything. I tell Hal that every time he even plans a glide, his subconscious mind stirs up a wind somewhere."

"What's he going to take off in--this?" Raynor touched the battered glider.

"Gosh, no--er-r--" Uncle Tel joined the conversation, then sputtered off distractedly, "er-r--well, you just wait and see!"

FLYING HOPE

Interborough got wind of the near-robbery, the wild sky-ride, the subsequent crash of a great plane on the outskirts of Hillton. A horde of reporters swarmed over to interview the crashees, to get pictures of them and the wreck. For the first time in his life, Hal Dane saw himself staring, with the usual garbled, wood-cut expression of newspaper pictures, from the front page of a metropolitan paper. But if the picture was poor, Harry Nevin, the young reporter for the Interborough Star, had at least wielded a kindly pencil. In spite of the crash, he gave Hal Dane credit for "unusual wing sense."

In reality as well as in the smeary newspaper picture the wrecked plane showed up as a dismal mess. To the uninitiated eye, this grotesque thing with its tail in the air and its nose in the mud had all the appearances of having flown its last flight. But when mechanics from Interborough, with Raynor to direct them, began to dig out the ship, it was found that the actual damage was done only to the propeller, although the fuselage and wings were covered with mud and some of the wing fabric would have to be patched and "doped."

"It's that ditch that did it," consoled Raynor, going over the various aspects of the "cracked-up" landing with Hal. "In the night that grass-covered ditch couldn't have looked much different from the rest of the field. But a ditch for a landing place can turn most any sky bus into a bronco-bucking affair. Nearly every pilot mixes in with something of the kind sooner or later. Settling in a little gully out in Texas about seven years ago gave me a wallop in the bean that I won't be forgetting any time soon," and Raynor ducked his head to show Hal a jagged white scar that persistently parted his black hair unevenly at the crown.

As soon as a new propeller could be shipped out and adjusted, one of the flyer's friends from the air mail route was coming down to pilot off both Raynor and his ship.

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