Read Ebook: A Viking of the Sky: A Story of a Boy Who Gained Success in Aeronautics by McAlister Hugh

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Ebook has 927 lines and 46754 words, and 19 pages

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.

So the next day, in spite of a few rolling, murky wind clouds in the east, Hal determined to do some gliding on his homemade apparatus. He wanted this chance to get a real aviator's criticism and advice on the board and cloth mechanisms with which he had to satisfy his longings for air flight.

Hal Dane might have wing sense, but he had no money with which to buy engine-powered wings. All he could do was patch up contrivances out of the crude materials that lay to hand.

Long ago Hillton had ceased to throw up its hands and fall in a faint over that "crazy Dane boy" scudding along gully edges propelled by a pair of sheets stretched on some sticks. In fact, Hillton had grown so used to Hal's experimenting that by now the village just accepted him and his stunts as a matter of course.

But with the famous Rex Raynor present and evincing interest in such things, the whole of Hillton turned out to watch this new gliding attempt of Hal's.

Instead of rolling out the battered little glider that reposed in the main workshop, Hal, with considerable help from all the small boys of Hillton, pushed back a section of the opposite wall, revealing that the barn had a second long room--the harness or storage room of the old days. From out of this, scraping and screaking along the ground on its keel skid, was hauled a white monstrosity--a huge thing of wood and cloth, of wires and bars and levers.

Hilltonians who hadn't seen the latest of Hal's handicraft couldn't resist a laugh at the ungainly monster with long, warped-looking stretch of wing.

"Gangway, gangway!" shouted a youngster. "Here comes the Willopus-Wallopus!"

"Willopus, your foot!" snorted Uncle Telemachus. He himself might laugh a bit at Hal, but he wasn't going to stand for anybody else doing it. He silenced the mouthy boy with a glare from his fiery old eyes. "Hi, don't you know a wind bird when you see one?"

Wind bird, indeed! To the uninitiated, this cloth contraption stretched on hay-bale wire and sprucewood sticks, hauled out of its lair on its screakily protesting keel skid, looked more like some waddling antediluvian from the prehistoric past.

But Rex Raynor seemed to find nothing comical in the wind bird. Her slow progress while being dragged to the brow of Hogback Hill gave him a chance to study her every line. To an aviator used to the exquisite finish and polish of a modern factory-built sky boat, Hal's contraption offered a contrast of a rather sketchy aircraft fuselage. A little board, an upright post, some slim sprucewood longerons,--that was the fuselage, if one could call it a fuselage! But for all its homemade roughness, there was an interesting compactness in the way the boy had braced his few wires and uprights down to a "V," converging at the board seat. The one wing was a long cloth-covered affair of wood strips and wires--streamlined after a fashion, for it was narrower at the tips than in the center, and thinner at the back edge than at the front edge. The longerons ended in rudimentary elevators and rudder, connected by wires to a pair of pedals set before the board seat that was fastened at the nose of the fuselage. A broomstick control stuck up before the seat too, and wires hitched it to the wings.

"The boy's worked out something, eh?" grunted Uncle Tel, shuffling rheumatically alongside of Raynor, who seemed bent on studying every inch of the curious, lumbering craft. "Got some technique all his own, eh?"

"Cat's back!" snorted the flyer, "but I'll say the kid's got technique!" He laid a hand on one of the hinged sections that formed the back of each wing tip. "Look at those ailerons he worked out on the wings! He's combined the idea of the German Taube and the French Nomet in that wing lift. Where did he get it?"

"Got it out of his head--and from watching birds fly, too, I reckon," said Uncle Tel. "That boy, he's always snatching time to sit out here on the top of old Hogback Hill, watching buzzards sail, crows flap, and how the lark gives a little spring when she sails up into the sky. Looky here, see that sort of spring, set there where the glider rests on its skid? That's what Buddy calls his 'lark spring up.' It helps him get gliding in a shorter run than he could before he put it there."

The glider and its escort had about reached the crest of the hill now. Raynor stepped a little apart and stood looking down over the lay of the land below him.

"Um--valleys and bare rolling hills," he muttered to himself. "The sort of terrain below to make air currents that rise and flow. The kid's a good picker of gliding country. Reckon though he's been experimenting and studying out this air current business for himself. He's not exactly the kind to leave everything to mere blind chance."

Hal Dane jammed his old cap down on his head nearly to the ears, stood a moment beside his glider. He was a tall, fair boy--fair at least if he hadn't been so outrageously tanned. His eyes had the Norse hint of "blue fire" to them, like the blue fire of the ice glint of the far north. For a fact, the boy had more than a hint of the old Norse Viking look to him as he stood there beside his wind ship.

His mother, in the fore-edge of the crowd, hands nervously twisting but chin up and eyes steady, might have been the mother of a Viking. Only, instead of watching a son take boat for unknown sea currents, this mother was watching a son mount the even more unknown air currents.

Ducking down to get in under the overhanging wing, Hal seated himself on the board, rammed his back against the upright post that formed the main member of his skeleton fuselage, then doubled up his long legs to set feet on the pair of pedals.

It was rather good sport, this starting Hal off on a flight. The Hillton youngsters had plenty of experience in their end of the matter--which was the pushing and pulling off. On this occasion, when there were so many onlookers, it was a matter to be fought over. Fuz McGinnis, acting as master of ground ceremonies, straightened affairs out and selected those that had already had some experience in pulling off.

At a signal from Hal, half a dozen fellows, three to the left and three to the right, walked away with the ends of a rope that led back in a "V" to the front of the wind bird. At the tip of one wing a tall boy trotted along to hold the wings level. Behind the wind bird, Fuz and another fellow came ambling along, pulling back slightly on a tail rope.

At twenty steps down the hill, Hal shouted, "Run!"

The contraption, which had been slipping along the ground on its keel skid, rose a few feet as the runners picked up speed.

Ten paces more, and the pilot crouching up there under the wing yelled, "Turn loose! Let her go!"

Already the fellow at the wing had stood away. At the yell "Let her go!" the others dropped ropes, which fell free from the down-pointed hooks they had been merely held against by pressure. Now with the back pull relaxed, the glider shot upward and forward like a stone hurled from a catapult.

Wedged between some spruce sticks under a stretch of cloth, Hal was off on his motorless flight.

When on the ground this contraption of wood and wires had seemed an ungainly, waddling freak. But now as it soared upward on air currents in its sky-element, it swooped with a marvel of grace.

Instead of a short flight and a mere slide down a wind hill, the boy began to twist and turn to take advantage of every rising current of air so as to ascend to a greater height than that from which he had started.

Though he couldn't hear it, the crowd below him let out a gasp of admiration. Rex Raynor stood, head bent back so as not to miss a movement of the rider of the wind.

Already the wind bird had climbed a hundred feet above the take-off; it banked again for another climb. Now it circled, swept in a series of loops, and began to drift easily down a landing at the foot of the starting hill.

Then through the valley swept a gust from the wind clouds that had been rolling up all day. Like a leaf the lazily dropping wind machine was caught up in the blast, swept high again, hurled this way and that, dipping crazily.

"Gosh!" shrieked Fuz McGinnis in a bleat of terror. "Oh, my gosh! He's going to head on his stand!" Fuz always said his words hind part before when he got excited.

WINDS OF CHANCE

Caught in a swirl of air currents, Hal Dane and his craft were hurled this way and that like some toy shot from a giant's hand. Watchers below held their breath.

Although a hundred feet and more intervened between them, those on the ground could see that the boy in the air was exerting every ounce of craftsmanship in his battle with the wind. He banked to the right, now dipped and rose, as though striving to ride the twist of air currents flowing about him, instead of drifting helplessly in their battering clutch. At times the wind ship seemed to whirl completely around, yet mostly it was held to an even keel.

Then the heavens opened and the rain came down in torrents; preluded by lightning and thunder, a cold blast swept down the valley with something of the fury of a small cyclone. Caught in this tempest, the crude plane bucked and went rearing upward like an affrighted horse.

"There goes the last of Grandma Harrison's sheets," roared Uncle Tel, hardly conscious of what he was saying and charging through the crowd as though he, on his rheumatic old limbs, would keep up with that flying white in the sky above.

"There goes my boy!" thought Mary Dane. It was a silent prayer.

Higher than it had ever gone before surged the wind bird. Storm, darkness, and rain seemed to cut it off from men's sight.

The crowd began to run down the valley, letting the push of the wind guide them in the direction the aircraft must surely be following also. Clinging wet garments and the rain torrent made progress heartbreakingly slow.

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