The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
in our jeans to get out of town, and we'll miss the big Riverport
purse.... Still, suit yourself, old man. Maybe I can get some money by
wiring to Chicago."
"Oh, let's get it over!" Carl sighed. "I'd love to disappoint
Onamwaska. We'll make fifteen thousand dollars this month and next,
anyway, and we can afford to spit 'em in the eye. But I don't want to
leave you in a hole.... Here you, mechanic, open up that tent-flap.
All the way across.... No, not like _that_, you boob!... So.... Come
on, now, help me push out the machine. Here you, Mr. Secretary, hustle
me a couple of men to hold her tail."
The crowd rose, the fickle crowd, scenting the promised blood, and
applauded as the monoplane was wheeled upon the track and turned to
face the wind. The mechanic and two assistants had to hold it as a
dust-filled gust caught it beneath the wings. As Carl climbed into the
seat and the mechanic went forward to start the engine, another squall
hit the machine and she almost turned over sidewise.
As the machine righted, the manager ran up and begged: "You never in
the world can make it in this wind, Hawk. Better not try it. I'll wire
for some money to get out of town with, and Onamwaska can go soak its
head."
"Nope. I'm gettin' sore now, Dick.... Hey you, mechanic: hurt that
wing when she tipped?... All right. Start her. Quick. While it's
calm."
The engine whirred. The assistants let go the tail. The machine
labored forward, but once it left the ground it shot up quickly. The
head-wind came in a terrific gust. The machine hung poised in air for
a moment, driven back by the gale nearly as fast as it was urged
forward by its frantically revolving propeller.
Carl was as yet too doubtful of his skill to try to climb above the
worst of the wind. If he could only keep a level course----
He fought his way up one side of the race-track. He crouched in his
seat, meeting the sandy blast with bent head. The parted lips which
permitted him to catch his breath were stubborn and hard about his
teeth. His hands played swiftly, incessantly, over the control as he
brought her back to even keel. He warped the wings so quickly that he
balanced like an acrobat sitting rockingly on a tight-wire. He was too
busy to be afraid or to remember that there was a throng of people
below him. But he was conscious that the grand stand, at the side of
the track, half-way down, was creeping toward him.
More every instant did he hate the clamor of the gale and the stream
of minute drops of oil, blown back from the engine, that spattered his
face. His ears strained for misfire of the engine, if it stopped he
would be hurled to earth. And one cylinder was not working. He forgot
that; kept the cloche moving; fought the wind with his will as with
his body.
Now, he was aware of the grand stand below him. Now, of the people at
the end of the track. He flew beyond the track, and turned. The whole
force of the gale was thrown behind him, and he shot back along the
other side of the race-track at eighty or ninety miles an hour.
Instantly he was at the end; then a quarter of a mile beyond the
track, over plowed fields, where upward currents of warm air
increased the pitching of the machine as he struggled to turn her
again and face the wind.
The following breeze was suddenly retarded and he dropped forty feet,
tail down.
He was only forty feet from the ground, falling straight, when he got
back to even keel and shot ahead. How safe the nest of the nacelle
where he sat seemed then! Almost gaily he swung her in a great
wavering circle--and the wind was again in his face, hating him,
pounding him, trying to get under the wings and turn the machine
turtle.
Twice more he worked his way about the track. The conscience of the
beginner made him perform a diffident Dutch roll before the grand
stand, but he was growling, "And that's all they're going to get.
See?"
As he soared to earth he looked at the crowd for the first time. His
vision was so blurred with oil and wind-soreness that he saw the
people only as a mass and he fancied that the stretch of slouch-hats
and derbies was a field of mushrooms swaying and tilted back. He was
curiously unconscious of the presence of women; he felt all the
spectators as men who had bawled for his death and whom he wanted to
hammer as he had hammered the wind.
He was almost down. He cut off his motor, glided horizontally three
feet above the ground, and landed, while the cheers cloaked even the
honking of the parked automobiles.
Carl's manager, fatly galloping up, shrilled, "How was it, old man?"
"Oh, it was pretty windy," said Carl, crawling down and rubbing the
kinks out of his arms. "But I think the wind 's going down. Tell the
announcer to tell our dear neighbors that I'll fly again at five."
"But weren't you scared when she dropped? You went down so far that
the fence plumb hid you. Couldn't see you at all. Ugh! Sure thought
the wind had you. Weren't you scared then? You don't look it."
"Then? Oh! Then. Oh yes, sure, I guess I was scared, all right!...
Say, we got that seat padded so she's darn comfortable now."
The crowd was collecting. Carl's manager chuckled to the president of
the fair association, "Well, that was some flight, eh?"
"Oh, he went down the opposite side of the track pretty fast, but why
the dickens was he so slow going up my side? My eyes ain't so good now
that it does me any good if a fellow speeds up when he's a thousand
miles away. And where's all these tricks in the air----"
"That," murmured Carl to his manager, "is the i-den-ti-cal man that
stole the blind cripple's crutch to make himself a toothpick."
CHAPTER XXI
The great Belmont Park Aero Meet, which woke New York to aviation, in
October, 1910, was coming to an end. That clever new American flier,
Hawk Ericson, had won only sixth place in speed, but he had won first
prize in duration, by a flight of nearly six hours, driving round and
round and round the pylons, hour on hour, safe and steady as a train,
never taking the risk of sensational banking, nor spiraling like
Johnstone, but amusing himself and breaking the tedium by keeping an
eye out on each circuit for a fat woman in a bright lavender top-coat,
who stood out in the dark line of people that flowed beneath. When he
had descended--acclaimed the winner--thousands of heads turned his way
as though on one lever; the pink faces flashing in such October
sunshine as had filled the back yard of Oscar Ericson, in Joralemon,
when a lonely Carl had performed duration feats for a sparrow. That
same shy Carl wanted to escape from the newspaper-men who came running
toward him. He hated their incessant questions--always the same: "Were
you cold? Could you have stayed up longer?"
Yet he had seen all New York go mad over aviation--rather, over news
about aviation. The newspapers had spread over front pages his name
and the names of the other fliers. Carl chuckled to himself, with
bashful awe, "Gee! can you beat it?--that's _me_!" when he beheld
himself referred to in editorial and interview and picture-caption as
a superman, a god. He heard crowds rustle, "Look, there's Hawk
Ericson!" as he walked along the barriers. He heard cautious
predictions from fellow-fliers, and loud declarations from outsiders,
that he was the coming cross-country champion. He was introduced to
the mayor of New York, two Cabinet members, an assortment of Senators,
authors, bank presidents, generals, and society rail-birds. He
regularly escaped from them--and their questions--to help the
brick-necked Hank Odell, from the Bagby School, who had entered for
the meet, but smashed up on the first day, and ever since had been
whistling and working over his machine and encouraging Carl, "Good
work, bud; you've got 'em all going."
With vast secrecy and a perception that this was twice as stirring as
steadily buzzing about in his Bleriot, he went down to the Bowery and,
in front of the saloon where he had worked as a porter four years
before, he bought a copy of the _Evening World_ because he knew that
on the third page of it was a large picture of him and a signed
interview by a special-writer. He peered into the saloon windows to
see if Petey McGuff was there, but did not find him. He went to the
street on which he had boarded in the hope that he might do something
for the girl who had been going wrong. The tenement had been torn
down, with blocks of others, to make way for a bridge-terminal, and he
saw the vision of the city's pitiless progress. This quest of old
acquaintances made him think of Joralemon. He informed Gertie Cowles
that he was now "in the aviation game, and everything is going very
well." He sent his mother a check for five hundred dollars, with
awkward words of affection.
A greater spiritual adventure was talking for hours, over a small
table in the basement of the Brevoort, to Lieutenant Forrest Haviland,
who was attending the Belmont Park Meet as spectator. Theirs was the
talk of tried friends; droning on for a time in amused comment, rising
to sudden table-pounding enthusiasms over aviators or explorers, with
exclamations of, "Is that the way it struck you, too? I'm awfully glad
to hear you say that, because that's just the way I felt about it."
They leaned back in their chairs and played with spoons and
reflectively broke up matches and volubly sketched plans of controls,
drawing on the table-cloth.
Carl took the sophisticated atmosphere of the Brevoort quite for
granted. Why _shouldn't_ he be there! And after the interest in him at
the meet it did not hugely abash him to hear a group at a table behind
him ejaculate: "I think that's Hawk Ericson, the aviator! Yes, sir,
that's--who--it--is!"
Finally the gods gave to Carl a new mechanic, a prince of mechanics,
Martin Dockerill. Martin was a tall, thin, hatchet-faced,
tousle-headed, slow-spoken, irreverent Irish-Yankee from Fall River;
the perfect type of American aviators; for while England sends out its
stately soldiers of the air, and France its short, excitable geniuses,
practically all American aviators and aviation mechanics are either
long-faced and lanky, like Martin Dockerill and Hank Odell, or slim,
good-looking youngsters of the college track-team type, like Carl and
Forrest Haviland.
Martin Dockerill ate pun'kin pie with his fingers, played "Marching
through Georgia" on the mouth-organ, admired burlesque-show women in
sausage-shaped pink tights, and wore balbriggan socks that always
reposed in wrinkles over the tops of his black shoes with frayed
laces. But he probably could build a very decent motor in the dark,
out of four tin cans and a crowbar. In A.D. 1910 he still believed in
hell and plush albums. But he dreamed of wireless power-transmission.
He was a Free and Independent American Citizen who called the Count de
Lesseps, "Hey, Lessup." But he would have gone with Carl aeroplaning
to the South Pole upon five minutes' notice--four minutes to devote to
the motor, and one minute to write, with purple indelible pencil, a
post-card to his aunt in Fall River. He was precise about only two
things--motor-timing and calling himself a "mechanician," not a
"mechanic." He became very friendly with Hank Odell; helped him
repair his broken machine, went with him to vaudeville, or stood with
him before the hangar, watching the automobile parties of pretty girls
with lordly chaperons that came to call on Grahame-White and Drexel.
"Some heart-winners, them guys, but I back my boss against them and
ev'body else, Hank," Martin would say.
* * * * *
The meet was over; the aviators were leaving. Carl had said farewell
to his new and well-loved friends, the pioneers of aviation--Latham,
Moisant, Leblanc, McCurdy, Ely, de Lesseps, Mars, Willard, Drexel,