The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
First a point of palms, then the hospital, the red roofs of the I. C.
C. quarters at Cristobal, and negroes on the sun-blistered wharf.
At last he is free to go ashore in wonderland--a medley of Colon and
Cristobal, Panama and the Canal Zone of 1907; Spiggoty policemen like
monkeys chattering bad Spanish, and big, smiling Canal Zone policemen
in khaki, with the air of soldiers; Jamaica negroes with conical heads
and brown Barbados negroes with Cockney accents; English engineers in
lordly pugrees, and tourists from New England who seem servants of
their own tortoise-shell spectacles; comfortable ebon mammies with
silver bangles and kerchiefs of stabbing scarlet, dressed in starched
pink-and-blue gingham, vending guavas and green Toboga Island
pineapples. Carl gapes at Panamanian nuns and Chilean consuls, French
peasant laborers and indignant Irish foremen and German
concessionaries with dueling scars and high collars. Gold Spanish
signs and Spiggoty money and hotels with American cuspidors and
job-hunters; tin roofs and arcades; shops open to the street in front,
but mysterious within, giving glimpses of the canny Chinese
proprietors smoking tiny pipes. Trains from towns along the Canal, and
sometimes the black funeral-car, bound for Monkey Hill Cemetery.
Gambling-houses where it is considered humorous to play "Where Is My
Wandering Boy To-night?" on the phonograph while wandering boys sit at
poker; and less cleanly places, named after the various states. Negro
wenches in yellow calico dancing to fiddled tunes older than voodoo;
Indian planters coming sullenly in with pale-green bananas; memories
of the Spanish Main and Morgan's raid, of pieces of eight and
cutlasses ho! Capes of cocoanut palms running into a welter of surf;
huts on piles streaked with moss, round whose bases land-crabs scuttle
with a dry rattling that carries far in the hot, moist, still air, and
suggests the corpses of disappeared men found half devoured.
Then, for contrast, the transplanted North, with its seriousness about
the Service; the American avenues and cool breezes of Cristobal, where
fat, bald chiefs of the I. C. C. drive pompously with political guests
who, in 1907, are still incredulous about the success of the military
socialism of the Canal, and where wives from Oklahoma or Boston,
seated in Grand Rapids golden-oak rockers on the screened porches of
bungalows, talk of hats, and children, and mail-orders, and cards, and
The Colonel, and malarial fever, and Chautauqua, and the Culebra
slide.
Colon! A kaleidoscope of crimson and green and dazzling white,
warm-hued peoples and sizzling roofs, with echoes from the high
endeavor of the Canal and whispers from the unknown Bush; drenched
with sudden rain like escaping steam, or languid under the desert
glare of the sky, where hangs a gyre of buzzards whose slow circles
are stiller than death and calmer than wisdom.
"Lord!" sighs Carl Ericson from Joralemon, "this is what I've wanted
ever since I was a kid."
* * * * *
At Pedro Miguel, which the Canal employees always called "Peter
McGill," he found work, first as an unofficial time-keeper; presently,
after examinations, as a stationery engineer on the roll of the I. C.
C. Within a month he showed no signs of his Bowery experiences beyond
a shallow hollow in his smooth cheeks. He lived in quarters like a
college dormitory, communistic and jolly, littered with shoes and
cube-cut tobacco and college banners; clean youngsters dropping in for
an easy chat--and behind it all, the mystery of the Bush. His
room-mate, a conductor on the P. R. R., was a globe-trotter, and
through him Carl met the Adventurers, whom he had been questing ever
since he had run away from Oscar Ericson's woodshed. There was a young
engineer from Boston Tech., who swore every morning at 7.07 (when it
rained boiling water as enthusiastically as though it had never done
such a thing before) that he was going to Chihuahua, mining. There was
Cock-eye Corbett, an ex-sailor, who was immoral and a Lancashireman,
and knew more about blackbirding and copra and Kanakas, and the
rum-holes from Nagasaki to Mombasa, than it is healthy for a civil
servant to know.
Every Sunday a sad-faced man with ash-colored hair and bony fingers,
who had been a lieutenant in the Peruvian navy, a teacher in St.
John's College, China, and a sub-contractor for railroad construction
in Montana, and who was now a minor clerk in the cool, lofty offices
of the Materials and Supplies Department, came over from Colon,
relaxed in a tilted-back chair, and fingered the Masonic charm on his
horsehair watch-guard, while he talked with the P. R. R. conductor and
the others about ruby-hunting and the Relief of Peking, and Where is
Hector Macdonald? and Is John Orth dead? and Shall we try to climb
Chimborazo? and Creussot guns and pig-sticking and Swahili tribal
lore. These were a few of the topics regarding which he had inside
information. The others drawled about various strange things which
make a man discontented and bring him no good.
Carl was full member of the circle because of his tales of the Bowery
and the Great Riley Show, and because he pretended to be rather an
authority on motors for dirigibles, about which he read in
_Aeronautics_ at the Y. M. C. A. reading-room. It is true that at this
time, early 1907, the Wrights were still working in obscurity, unknown
even in their own Dayton, though they had a completely successful
machine stowed away; and as yet Glenn Curtiss had merely developed a
motor for Captain Baldwin's military dirigible. But Langley and Maxim
had endeavored to launch power-driven, heavier-than-air machines;
lively Santos Dumont had flipped about the Eiffel Tower in his
dirigible, and actually raised himself from the ground in a ponderous
aeroplane; and in May, 1907, a sculptor named Delagrange flew over six
hundred feet in France. Various crank inventors were "solving the
problem of flight" every day. Man was fluttering on the edge of his
earthy nest, ready to plunge into the air. Carl was able to make
technical-sounding predictions which caught the imaginations of the
restless children.
* * * * *
The adventurers kept moving. The beach-combing ex-sailor said that he
was starting for Valparaiso, started for San Domingo, and landed in
Tahiti, whence he sent Carl one post-card, worded, "What price T. T.?"
The engineer from Boston Tech. kept his oath about mining in
Chihuahua. He got the appointment as assistant superintendent of the
Tres Reyes mine--and he took Carl with him.
Carl reached Mexico and breathed the air of high-lying desert and
hill. He found rare days, purposeless and wonderful as the voyages of
ancient Norse Ericsens; days of learning Spanish and sitting quietly
balancing a .32-20 Marlin, waiting for bandits to attack; the joy of
repairing machinery and helping to erect a new crusher, nursing peons
with broken legs, and riding cow-ponies down black mountain trails at
night under an exhilarating splendor of stars. It never seemed to him
that the machinery desecrated the mountains' stern grandeur.
Stolen hours he gave to the building of box-kites with cambered
wings, after rapturously learning, in the autumn of 1908, that in
August a lanky American mechanic named Wilbur Wright had startled the
world by flying an aeroplane many miles publicly in France; that
before this, on July 4, 1908, another Yankee mechanic, Glenn Curtiss,
had covered nearly a mile, for the _Scientific American_ trophy, after
a series of trials made in company with Alexander Graham Bell, J. A.
D. McCurdy, "Casey" Baldwin, and Augustus Post.
He might have gone on until death, dealing with excitable greasers and
hysterical machinery, but for the coming of a new mine superintendent--one
of those Englishmen, stolid, red-mustached, pipe-smoking, eye-brow-lifting,
who at first seem beefily dull, but prove to have known every one from
George Moore to Marconi. He inspected Carl hundreds of times, then told him
that the period had come when he ought to attack a city, conquer it, build
up a reputation cumulatively; that he needed a contrast to Platonians and
Bowery bums and tropical tramps, and even to his beloved engineers.
"You can do everything but order a _petit diner a deux_, but you must
learn to do that, too. Go make ten thousand pounds and study Pall Mall
and the boulevards, and then come back to us in Mexico. I'll be sorry
to have you go--with your damned old silky hair like a woman's and
your wink when Guittrez comes up here to threaten us--but don't let
the hinterland enslave you too early."
A month later, in January, 1909, aged twenty-three and a half, Carl
was steaming out of El Paso for California, with one thousand dollars
in savings, a beautiful new Stetson hat, and an ambition to build up a
motor business in San Francisco. As the desert sky swam with orange
light and a white-browed woman in the seat behind him hummed Musetta's
song from "La Boheme" he was homesick for the outlanders, whom he was
deserting that he might stick for twenty years in one street and grub
out a hundred thousand dollars.
CHAPTER XVII
On a grassy side-street of Oakland, California, was "Jones & Ericson's
Garage: Gasoline and Repairs: Motor Cycles and Bicycles for Rent:
Oakland Agents for Bristow Magnetos."
It was perhaps the cleverest garage in Oakland and Berkeley for the
quick repairing of motor-cycles; and newly wed owners of family
runabouts swore that Carl Ericson could make a carburetor out of a
tomato-can, and even be agreeable when called on for repairs at 2 A.M.
He had doubled old Jones's business during the nine months--February
to November, 1909--that they had been associated.
Carl believed that he thought of nothing but work and the restaurants
and theaters of civilization. No more rolling for him until he had
gathered moss! He played that he was a confirmed business man. The
game had hypnotized him for nearly a year. He whistled as he cleaned
plugs, and glanced out at the eucalyptus-trees and the sunny road,
without wanting to run away. But just to-day, just this glorious
rain-cleansed November day, with high blue skies and sunlight on the
feathery pepper-trees, he was going to sneak away from work and have a
celebration all by himself.
He was going down to San Mateo to see his first flying-machine!
November, 1909. Bleriot had crossed the English Channel; McCurdy had,
in March, 1909, calmly pegged off sixteen miles in the "Silver Dart"
biplane; Paulhan had gone eighty-one miles, and had risen to the
incredible height of five hundred feet, to be overshadowed by Orville
Wright's sixteen hundred feet; Glenn Curtiss had won the Gordon
Bennett cup at Rheims.
California was promising to be in the van of aviation. She was
remembering that her own Montgomery had been one of the pioneers. Los
Angeles was planning a giant meet for January. A dozen cow-pasture
aviators were taking credulous young reporters aside and confiding
that next day, or next week, or at latest next month, they would
startle the world by ascending in machines "on entirely new and
revolutionary principles, on which they had been working for ten
years." Sometimes it was for eight years they had been working. But
always they remarked that "the model from which the machine will be
built has flown perfectly in the presence of some of the most
prominent men in the locality." These machines had a great deal to do
with the mysterious qualities of gyroscopes and helicopters.
Now, Dr. Josiah Bagby, the San Francisco physician and
oil-burning-marine-engine magnate, had really brought three genuine
Bleriot monoplanes from France, with Carmeau, graduate of the Bleriot
school and licensed French aviator, for working pilot; and was