"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 experimenting with them at San Mateo, near San Francisco, where the grandsons of the Forty-niners play polo. It had been rumored that he would open a school for pilots and build Bleriot-type monoplanes for the American market.

Carl had lain awake for an hour the night before, picturing the wonder of flight that he hoped to see. He rose early, put on his politest garments, and informed grumpy old Jones that he was off for a frolic—he wasn't sure, he said, whether he would get drunk or get married. He crossed the bay, glad of the sea-gulls, the glory of Mt. Tamalpais, and San Francisco's hill behind fairy hill. He consumed a Pacific sundae, with a feeling of holiday, and hummed "Mandalay." On the trolley to San Mateo he read over and over the newspaper accounts of Bagby's monoplanes.

Walking through San Mateo, Carl swung his cocky green hat and scanned the sky for aircraft. He saw none. But as he tramped out on the flying-field he began to run at the sight of two wide, cambered wings, rounded at the ends like the end of one's thumb, attached to a fragile long body of open framework. Men were gathered about it. A man with a short, crisp beard and a tight woolen toboggan-cap was seated in the body, the wings stretching on either side of him. He scratched his beard and gesticulated. A mechanic revolved the propeller, and the unmuffled motor burst out with a trrrrrrrr whose music rocked Carl's heart. Black smoke hurled back along the machine. The draught tore at the hair of two men crouched on the ground holding the tail. They let go. The monoplane ran forward along the ground, and suddenly was off it, a foot up, ten feet up—really flying. Carl could see the aviator calmly staring ahead, working his arms, as the machine turned and slipped away over distant trees.

His first impression of an aeroplane in the air had nothing to do with birds or dragon-flies or the miracle of it, because he was completely absorbed in an impression of Carl Ericson, which he expressed after this wise:

"I—am—going—to—be—an—aviator!"

And later, "Yes, that's what I've always wanted."

He joined the group in front of the hangar-tent. Workmen were hammering on wooden sheds back of it. He recognized the owner, Dr. Bagby, from his pictures: a lean man of sixty with a sallow complexion, a gray mustache like a rat-tail, a broad, black countrified slouch-hat on the back of his head, a gray sack-suit which would have been respectable but unfashionable at any period whatsoever. He looked like a country lawyer who had served two terms in the state legislature. His shoes were black, but not blackened, and had no toe-caps—the comfortable shoes of an oldish man. He was tapping his teeth with a thin corded forefinger and remarking in a monotonous voice to a Mexican youth plump and polite and well dressed, "Wel-l-l-l, Tony, I guess those plugs were better; I guess those plugs were better. Heh?" Bagby turned to the others, marveled at them as if trying to remember who they were, and said, slowly, "I guess those plugs were all right. Heh?"

The monoplane was returning, for a time apparently not moving, like a black mark painted on the great blue sky; then soaring overhead, the sharply cut outlines clear as a pen-and-ink drawing; then landing, bouncing on the slightly uneven ground.

As the French aviator climbed out, Dr. Bagby's sad face brightened and he suggested: "Those plugs went better, Munseer. Heh? I've been thinking. Maybe you been giving her too rich a mixture."

While they were wiping the Gnome engine Carl shyly approached Dr. Bagby. He felt frightfully an outsider; wondered if he could ever be intimate with the magician as was the plump Mexican youth they called "Tony." He said "Uh" once or twice, and blurted, "I want to be an aviator."

"Yes, yes," said Dr. Bagby, gently, glancing away from Carl to the machine. He went over, twanged a supporting-wire, and seemed to remember that some one had spoken to him. He returned to the fevered Carl, walking sidewise, staring all the while at the resting monoplane, so efficient, yet so quiet now and slender and feminine. "Yes, yes. So you'd like to be an aviator. So you'd like—like——(Hey, boy, don't touch that!)——to be an aviator. Yes, yes. They all would, m' boy. They all would. Well, maybe you can be, some day. Maybe you can be.... Some day."

"I mean now. Right away. Heard you were going t' start a school. Want to join."

"Hm, hm," sighed Dr. Bagby, tapping his teeth, jingling his heavy gold watch-chain, brushing a trail of cigar-ashes from a lapel, then staring abstractedly at Carl, who was turning his hat swiftly round and round, so flushed of cheek, so excited of eye, that he seemed twenty instead of twenty-four. "Yes, yes, so you'd like to join. Tst. But that would cost you five hundred dollars, you know."

"Right!"

"Well, you go talk to Munseer about it; Munseer Carmeau. He is a very good aviator. He is a licensed aviator. He knows Henry Farman. He studied under Bleriot. He is the boss here. I'm just the poor old fellow that stands around. Sometimes Munseer takes me up for a little ride in our machine; sometimes he takes me up; but he is the boss. He is the boss, my friend; you'll have to see him." And Dr. Bagby walked away, apparently much discouraged about life.

Carl was not discouraged about life. He swore that now he would be an aviator even if he had to go to Dayton or Hammondsport or France.

He returned to Oakland. He sold his share in the garage for $1,150.

Before the end of January he was enrolled as a student in the Bagby School of Aviation and Monoplane Building.

On an impulse he wrote of his wondrous happiness to Gertie Cowles, but he tore up the letter. Then proudly he wrote to his father that the lost boy had found himself. For the first time in all his desultory writing of home-letters he did not feel impelled to defend himself.



CHAPTER XVIII

Crude were the surroundings where Carmeau turned out some of the best monoplane pilots America will ever see. There were two rude shed-hangars in which they kept the three imported Bleriots—a single-seat racer of the latest type, a Bleriot XII. passenger-carrying machine with the seat under the plane, and "P'tite Marie," the school machine, which they usually kept throttled down to four hundred or five hundred, but in which Carmeau made such spirited flights as the one Carl had first witnessed. Back of the hangars was the workshop, which had little architecture, but much machinery. Here the pupils were building two Bleriot-type machines, and trying to build an eight-cylinder V motor. All these things had Bagby given for the good of the game, expecting no profit in return. He was one of the real martyrs of aviation, this sapless, oldish man, never knowing the joy of the air, yet devoting a lifetime of ability to helping man sprout wings and become superman.

His generosity did not extend to living-quarters. Most of the students lived at the hangars and dined on Hamburg sandwiches, fried eggs, and Mexican enchiladas, served at a lunch-wagon anchored near the field. That lunch-wagon was their club. Here, squatted on high stools, treating one another to ginger-ale, they argued over torque and angles of incidence and monoplanes vs. biplanes. Except for two unpopular aristocrats who found boarding-houses in San Mateo, they slept in the hangars, in their overalls, sprawled on mattresses covered with horse-blankets. It was bed at eight-thirty. At four or five Carmeau would crawl out, scratch his beard, start a motor, and set every neighborhood dog howling. The students would gloomily clump over to the lunch-wagon for a ham-and-egg breakfast. The first flights began at dawn, if the day was clear. At eight, when the wind was coming up, they would be heard in the workshop, adjusting and readjusting, machining down bearings, testing wing strength, humming and laughing and busy; a life of gasoline and hammers and straining attempts to get balance exactly right; a happy life of good fellows and the achievements of machinery and preparation for daring the upper air; a life of very ordinary mechanics and of sheer romance!

It is a grievous heresy that aviation is most romantic when the aviator is portrayed as a young god of noble rank and a collar high and spotless, carelessly driving a transatlantic machine of perfect efficiency. The real romance is that a perfectly ordinary young man, the sort of young man who cleans your car at the garage, a prosaically real young man wearing overalls faded to a thin blue, splitting his infinitives, and frequently having for idol a bouncing ingenue, should, in a rickety structure of wood and percale, be able to soar miles in the air and fulfil the dream of all the creeping ages.

In English and American fiction there are now nearly as many aeroplanes as rapiers or roses. The fictional aviators are society amateurs, wearers of evening clothes, frequenters of The Club, journalists and civil engineers and lordlings and international agents and gentlemen detectives, who drawl, "Oh yes, I fly a bit—new sensation, y' know—tired of polo"; and immediately thereafter use the aeroplane to raid arsenals, rescue a maiden from robbers or a large ruby from its lawful but heathenish possessors, or prevent a Zeppelin from raiding the coast. But they never by any chance fly these machines before gum-chewing thousands for hire. In England they absolutely must motor from The Club to the flying-field in a "powerful Rolls-Royce car." The British aviators of fiction are usually from Oxford and Eton. They are splendidly languid and modest and smartly dressed in society, but when they condescend to an adventure or to a coincidence, they are very devils, six feet of steel and sinew, boys of the bulldog breed with a strong trace of humming-bird. Like their English kindred, the Americans take up aviation only for gentlemanly sport. And they do go about rescuing things. Nothing is safe from their rescuing. But they do not have Rolls-Royce cars.

Carl and his class at Bagby's were not of this gilded race. Carl's flying was as sordidly real as laying brick for a one-story laundry in a mill-town. Therefore, being real, it was romantic and miraculous.

Among Carl's class was Hank Odell, the senior student, tall, thin, hopelessly plain of face; a drawling, rough-haired, eagle-nosed Yankee, who grinned shyly and whose Adam's apple worked slowly up and down when you spoke to him; an unimaginative lover of dogs and machinery; the descendant of Lexington and Gettysburg and a flinty Vermont farm; an ex-fireman, ex-sergeant of the army, and ex-teamster. He always wore a khaki shirt—the wrinkles of which caught the grease in black lines, like veins—with black trousers, blunt-toed shoes, and a pipe, the most important part of his costume.

There was the round, anxious, polite Mexican, Tony Beanno, called "Tony Bean"—wealthy, simple, fond of the violin and of fast motoring. There was the "school grouch," surly Jack Ryan, the chunky ex-chauffeur. There were seven nondescripts—a clever Jew from Seattle, two college youngsters, an apricot-rancher's son, a circus acrobat who wanted a new line of tricks, a dull ensign detailed by the navy, and an earnest student of aerodynamics, aged forty, who had written marvelously dull books on air-currents and had shrinkingly made himself a fair balloon pilot. The navy ensign and the student were the snobs who lived away from the hangars, in boarding-houses.

There was Lieutenant Forrest Haviland, detailed by the army—Haviland the perfect gentle knight, the well-beloved, the nearest approach to the gracious fiction aviator of them all, yet never drawling in affected modesty, never afraid of grease; smiling and industrious and reticent; smooth of hair and cameo of face; wearing khaki riding-breeches and tan puttees instead of overalls; always a gentleman, even when he tried to appear a workman. He pretended to be enthusiastic about the lunch-wagon, and never referred to his three generations of army officers. But most of the others were shy of him, and Jack Ryan, the "school grouch," was always trying to get him into a fight.

Finally, there was Carl Ericson, who slowly emerged as star of them all. He knew less of aerodynamics than the timid specialist, less of practical mechanics than Hank Odell; but he loved the fun of daring more. He was less ferocious in competition than was Jack Ryan, but he wasted less of his nerve. He was less agile than the circus acrobat, but knew more of motors. He was less compactly easy than Lieutenant Haviland, but he took better to overalls and sleeping in hangars and mucking in grease—he whistled ragtime while Forrest Haviland hummed MacDowell.

* * * * *

Carl's earliest flights were in the school machine, "P'tite Marie," behind Carmeau, the instructor. Reporters were always about, talking of "impressions," and Carl felt that he ought to note his impressions on his first ascent, but all that he actually did notice was that it was hard to tell at what instant they left the ground; that when they were up, the wind threatened to crush his ribs and burst his nostrils; that there must be something perilously wrong, because the machine climbed so swiftly; and, when they were down, that it had been worth waiting a whole lifetime for the flight.

For days he merely flew with the instructor, till he was himself managing the controls. At last, his first flight by himself.

He had been ordered to try a flight three times about the aerodrome at a height of sixty feet, and to land carefully, without pancaking—"and be sure, Monsieur, be veree sure you do not cut off too high from the ground," said Carmeau.

It was a day when five reporters had gathered, and Carl felt very much in the limelight, waiting in the nacelle of the machine for the time to start. The propeller was revolved, Carl drew a long breath and stuck up his hand—and the engine stopped. He was relieved. It had seemed a terrific responsibility to go up alone. He wouldn't, now, not for a minute or two. He knew that he had been afraid. The engine was turned over once more—and once more stopped. Carl raged, and never again, in all his flying, did real fear return to him. "What the deuce is the matter?" he snarled. Again the propeller was revolved, and this time the engine hummed sweet. The monoplane ran along the ground, its tail lifting in the blast, till the whole machine seemed delicately poised on its tiptoes. He was off the ground, his rage leaving him as his fear had left him.

He exulted at the swiftness with which a distant group of trees shot at him, under him. He turned, and the machine mounted a little on the turn, which was against the rules. But he brought her to even keel so easily that he felt all the mastery of the man who has finally learned to be natural on a bicycle. He tilted up the elevator slightly and shot across a series of fields, climbing. It was perfectly easy. He would go up—up. It was all automatic now—cloche toward him for climbing; away from him for descent; toward the wing that tipped up, in order to bring it down to level. The machine obeyed perfectly. And the foot-bar, for steering to right and left, responded to such light motions of his foot. He grinned exultantly. He wanted to shout.

He glanced at the barometer and discovered that he was up to two hundred feet. Why not go on?

He sailed out across San Mateo, and the sense of people below, running and waving their hands, increased his exultation. He curved about at the end, somewhat afraid of his ability to turn, but having all the air there was to make the turn in, and headed back toward the aerodrome. Already he had flown five miles.

Half a mile from the aerodrome he realized that his motor was slackening, missing fire; that he did not know what was the matter; that his knowledge had left him stranded there, two hundred feet above ground; that he had to come down at once, with no chance to choose a landing-place and no experience in gliding. The motor stopped altogether.

The ground was coming up at him too quickly.

He tilted the elevator, and rose. But, as he was volplaning, this cut down the speed, and from a height of ten feet above a field the machine dropped to the ground with a flat plop. Something gave way—but Carl sat safe, with the machine canted to one side.

He climbed out, cold about the spine, and discovered that he had broken one wheel of the landing-chassis.

All the crowd from the flying-field were running toward him, yelling. He grinned at the foolish sight they made with their legs and arms strewn about in the air as they galloped over the rough ground. Lieutenant Haviland came up, panting: "All right, o' man? Good!" He seized Carl's hand and wrung it. Carl knew that he had a new friend.

Three reporters poured questions on him. How far had he flown? Was this really his first ascent by himself? What were his sensations? How had his motor stopped? Was it true he was a mining engineer, a wealthy motorist?

Hank Odell, the shy, eagle-nosed Yankee, running up as jerkily as a cow in a plowed field, silently patted Carl on the shoulder and began to examine the fractured landing-wheel. At last the instructor, M. Carmeau.

Carl had awaited M. Carmeau's praise as the crown of his long flight. But Carmeau pulled his beard, opened his mouth once or twice, then shrieked: "What the davil you t'ink you are? A millionaire that we build machines for you to smash them? I tole you to fly t'ree time around—you fly to Algiers an' back—you t'ink you are another Farman brother—you are a damn fool! Suppose your motor he stop while you fly over San Mateo? Where you land? In a well? In a chimney? Hein? You know naut'ing yet. Next time you do what I tal' you. Zut! That was a flight, a flight, you make a flight, that was fine, fine, you make the heart to swell. But nex' time you break the chassis and keel yourself, nom d'un tonnerre, I scol' you!"

Carl was humble. But the Courier reporter spread upon the front page the story of "Marvelous first flight by Bagby student," and predicted that a new Curtiss was coming out of California. Under a half-tone ran the caption, "Ericson, the New Hawk of the Birdmen."

The camp promptly nicknamed him "Hawk." They used it for plaguing him at first, but it survived as an expression of fondness—Hawk Ericson, the cheeriest man in the school, and the coolest flier.



CHAPTER XIX

Not all their days were spent in work. There were mornings when the wind would not permit an ascent and when there was nothing to do in the workshop. They sat about the lunch-wagon wrangling endlessly, or, like Carl and Forrest Haviland, wandered through fields which were all one flame with poppies.

Lieutenant Haviland had given up trying to feel comfortable with the naval ensign student, who was one of the solemn worthies who clear their throats before speaking, and then speak in measured terms of brands of cigars and weather. Gradually, working side by side with Carl, Haviland seemed to find him a friend in whom to confide. Once or twice they went by trolley to San Francisco, to explore Chinatown or drop in on soldier friends of Haviland at the Presidio.

* * * * *

From the porch of a studio on Telegraph Hill, in San Francisco, they were looking down on the islands of the bay, waiting for the return of an artist whom Haviland knew. Inarticulate dreamers both, they expressed in monosyllables the glory of bluewater before them, the tradition of R. L. S. and Frank Norris, the future of aviation. They gave up the attempt to explain the magic of San Francisco—that city-personality which transcends the opal hills and rare amber sunlight, festivals, and the transplanted Italian hill-town of Telegraph Hill, liners sailing out for Japan, and memories of the Forty-niners. It was too subtle a spirit, too much of it lay in human life with the passion of the Riviera linked to the strength of the North, for them to be able to comprehend its spell.... But regarding their own ambitions to do, they became eloquent.

"I say," hesitated Haviland, "why is it I can't get in with most of the fellows at the camp the way you can? I've always been chummy enough with the fellows at the Point and at posts."

"Because you've been brought up to be afraid to be anything but a gentleman."

"Oh, I don't think it's that. I can get fond as the deuce of some of the commonest common soldiers—and, Lord! some of them come from the Bowery and all sorts of impossible places."

"Yes, but you always think of them as 'common.' They don't think of each other that way. Suppose I'd worked——Well, just suppose I'd been a Bowery bartender. Could you be loafing around here with me? Could you go off on a bat with Jack Ryan?"

"Well, maybe not. Maybe working with Jack Ryan is a good thing for me. I'm getting now so I can almost stand his stories! I envy you, knocking around with all sorts of people. Oh, I wish I could call Ryan 'Jack' and feel easy about it. I can't. Perhaps I've got a little of the subaltern snob some place in me."

"You? You're a prince."

"If you've elevated me to a princedom, the least I can do is to invite you down home for a week-end—down to the San Spirito Presidio. My father's commandant there."

"Oh, I'd like to, but——I haven't got a dress-suit."

"Buy one."

"Yes, I could do that, but——Oh, rats! Forrest, I've been knocking around so long I feel shy about my table manners and everything. I'd probably eat pie with my fingers."

"You make me so darn tired, Hawk. You talk about my having to learn to chum with people in overalls. You've got to learn not to let people in evening clothes put anything over on you. That's your difficulty from having lived in the back-country these last two or three years. You have an instinct for manners. But I did notice that as soon as you found out I was in the army you spent half the time disliking me as a militarist, and the other half expecting me to be haughty—Lord knows what over. It took you two weeks to think of me as Forrest Haviland. I'm ashamed of you! If you're a socialist you ought to think that anything you like belongs to you."

"That's a new kind of socialism."

"So much the better. Me and Karl Marx, the economic inventors.... But I was saying: if you act as though things belong to you people will apologize to you for having borrowed them from you. And you've got to do that, Hawk. You're going to be one of the best-known fliers in the country, and you'll have to meet all sorts of big guns—generals and Senators and female climbers that work the peace societies for social position, and so on, and you've got to know how to meet them.... Anyway, I want you to come to San Spirito."

To San Spirito they went. During the three days preceding, Carl was agonized at the thought of having to be polite in the presence of ladies. No matter how brusquely he told himself, "I'm as good as anybody," he was uneasy about forks and slang and finger-nails, and looked forward to the ordeal with as much pleasure as a man about to be hanged, hanged in a good cause, but thoroughly.

Yet when Colonel Haviland met them at San Spirito station, and Carl heard the kindly salutation of the gracious, fat, old Indian-fighter, he knew that he had at last come home to his own people—an impression that was the stronger because the house of Oscar Ericson had been so much house and so little home. The colonel was a widower, and for his only son he showed a proud affection which included Carl. The three of them sat in state, after dinner, on the porch of Quarters No. 1, smoking cigars and looking down to a spur of the Santa Lucia Mountains, where it plunged into the foam of the Pacific. They talked of aviation and eugenics and the Benet-Mercier gun, of the post doctor's sister who had come from the East on a visit, and of a riding-test, but their hearts spoke of affection.... Usually it is a man and a woman that make home; but three men, a stranger one of them, talking of motors on a porch in the enveloping dusk, made for one another a home to remember always.

They stayed over Monday night, for a hop, and Carl found that the officers and their wives were as approachable as Hank Odell. They did not seem to be waiting for young Ericson to make social errors. When he confessed that he had forgotten what little dancing he knew, the sister of the post doctor took him in hand, retaught him the waltz, and asked with patent admiration: "How does it feel to fly? Don't you get frightened? I'm terribly in awe of you and Mr. Haviland. I know I should be frightened to death, because it always makes me dizzy just to look down from a high building."

Carl slipped away, to be happy by himself, and hid in the shadow of palms on the porch, lapped in the flutter of pepper-trees. The orchestra began a waltz that set his heart singing. He heard a girl cry: "Oh, goody! the 'Blue Danube'! We must go in and dance that."

"The Blue Danube." The name brought back the novels of General Charles King, as he had read them in high-school days; flashed the picture of a lonely post, yellow-lighted, like a topaz on the night-swathed desert; a rude ball-room, a young officer dancing to the "Blue Danube's" intoxication; a hot-riding, dusty courier, hurling in with news of an Apache outbreak; a few minutes later a troop of cavalry slanting out through the gate on horseback, with a farewell burning the young officer's lips.... He was in just such an army story, now!

The scent of royal climbing-roses enveloped Carl as that picture changed into others. San Spirito Presidio became a vast military encampment over which Hawk Ericson was flying.... From his monoplane he saw a fairy town, with red roofs rising to a tower of fantastic turrets. (That was doubtless the memory of a magazine-cover painted by Maxfield Parrish.)... He was wandering through a poppy-field with a girl dusky of eyes, soft black of hair, ready for any jaunt.... Pictures bright and various as tropic shells, born of music and peace and his affection for the Havilands; pictures which promised him the world. For the first time Hawk Ericson realized that he might be a Personage instead of a back-yard boy.... The girl with twilight eyes was smiling.

* * * * *

The Bagby camp broke up on the first of May, with all of them, except one of the nondescript collegians and the air-current student, more or less trained aviators. Carl was going out to tour small cities, for the George Flying Corporation. Lieutenant Haviland was detailed to the army flying-camp.

Parting with Haviland and kindly Hank Odell, with Carmeau and anxiously polite Tony Bean, was as wistful as the last night of senior year. Till the old moon rose, sad behind tulip-trees, they sat on packing-boxes by the larger hangar, singing in close harmony "Sweet Adeline," "Teasing," "I've Been Working on the Railroad."... "Hay-ride classics, with barber-shop chords," the songs are called, but tears were in Carl's eyes as the minors sobbed from the group of comrades who made fun of one another and were prosaic and pounded their heels on the packing-boxes—and knew that they were parting to face death. Carl felt Forrest Haviland's hand on one shoulder, then an awkward pat from tough Jack Ryan's paw, as Tony Bean's violin turned the plaintive half-light into music, and broke its heart in the "Moonlight Sonata."



CHAPTER XX

"Yuh, piston-ring burnt off and put the exhaust-valve on the blink. That means one cylinder out of business," growled Hawk Ericson. "I could fly, maybe, but I don't like to risk it in this wind. It was bad enough this morning when I tried it."

"Oh, this hick town 's going to be the death of us, all right—and Riverport to-morrow, with a contract nice as pie, if we can only get there," groaned his manager, Dick George, a fat man with much muscle and more diamonds. "Listen to that crowd. Yelling for blood. Sounds like a bunch of lumber-jacks with the circus slow in starting."

The head-line feature of the Onamwaska County spring fair was "Hawk Ericson, showing the most marvelous aerial feats of the ages with the scientific marvels of aviation, in his famous French Bleriot flying-machine, the first flying-machine ever seen in this state, no balloon or fake, come to Onamwaska by the St. L. & N." The spring fair was usually a small gathering of farmers to witness races and new agricultural implements, but this time every road for thirty-five miles was dust-fogged with buggies and democrat wagons and small motor-cars. Ten thousand people were packed about the race-track.

It was Carl's third aviation event. A neat, though not imposing figure, in a snug blue flannel suit, with his cap turned round on his head, he went to the flap of the rickety tent which served as his hangar. A fierce cry of "Fly! Fly! Why don't he fly?" was coming from the long black lines edging the track, and from the mound of people on the small grand stand; the pink blur of their faces turned toward him—him, Carl Ericson; all of them demanding him! The five meek police of Onamwaska were trotting back and forth, keeping them behind the barriers. Carl was apprehensive lest this ten-thousandfold demand drag him out, make him fly, despite a wind that was blowing the flags out straight, and whisking up the litter of newspapers and cracker-jack boxes and pink programs. While he stared out, an official crossing the track fairly leaned up against the wind, which seized his hat and sailed it to the end of the track.

"Some wind!" Carl grunted, stolidly, and went to the back of the silent tent, to reread the local papers' accounts of his arrival at Onamwaska. It was a picturesque narrative of the cheering mob following him down the street ("Gee! that was me they followed!"), crowding into the office of the Astor House and making him autograph hundreds of cards; of girls throwing roses ("Humph! geraniums is more like it!") from the windows.

"A young man," wrote an enthusiastic female reporter, "handsome as a Greek god, but honestly I believe he is still in his twenties; and he is as slim and straight as a soldier, flaxen-haired and rosy-cheeked—the birdman, the god of the air."

"Handsome as a Greek——" Carl commented. "I look like a Minnesota Norwegian, and that ain't so bad, but handsome——Urrrrrg!... Sure they love me, all right. Hear 'em yell. Oh, they love me like a dog does a bone.... Saint Jemima! talk about football rooting.... Come on, Greek god, buck up."

He glanced wearily about the tent, its flooring of long, dry grass stained with ugly dark-blue lubricating-oil, under the tan light coming through the canvas. His manager was sitting on a suit-case, pretending to read a newspaper, but pinching his lower lip and consulting his watch, jogging his foot ceaselessly. Their temporary mechanic, who had given up trying to repair the lame valve, squatted with bent head, biting his lip, harkening to the blood-hungry mob. Carl's own nerves grew tauter and tauter as he saw the manager's restless foot and the mechanic's tension. He strolled to the monoplane, his back to the tent-opening.

He started as the manager exclaimed: "Here they come! After us!"

Outside the tent a sound of running.

The secretary of the fair, a German hardware-dealer with an automobile-cap like a yachting-cap, panted in, gasping: "Come quick! They won't wait any longer! I been trying to calm 'em down, but they say you got to fly. They're breaking over the barriers into the track. The p'lice can't keep 'em back."

Behind the secretary came the chairman of the entertainment committee, a popular dairyman, who was pale as he demanded: "You got to play ball, Mr. Ericson. I won't guarantee what 'll happen if you don't play ball, Mr. Ericson. You got to make him fly, Mr. George. The crowd 's breaking——"

Behind him charged a black press of people. They packed before the tent, trying to peer in through the half-closed tent-opening, like a crowd about a house where a policeman is making an arrest. Furiously:

"Where's the coward? Fake! Bring 'im out! Why don't he fly? He's a fake! His flying-machine's never been off the ground! He's a four-flusher! Run 'im out of town! Fake! Fake! Fake!"

The secretary and chairman stuck out deprecatory heads and coaxed the mob. Carl's manager was an old circus-man. He had removed his collar, tie, and flashy diamond pin, and was diligently wrapping the thong of a black-jack about his wrist. Their mechanic was crawling under the side of the tent. Carl caught him by the seat of his overalls and jerked him back.

As Carl turned to face the tent door again the manager ranged up beside him, trying to conceal the black-jack in his hand, and casually murmuring, "Scared, Hawk?"

"Nope. Too mad to be scared."

The tent-flap was pulled back. Tossing hands came through. The secretary and chairman were brushed aside. The mob-leader, a red-faced, loud-voiced town sport, very drunk, shouted, "Come out and fly or we'll tar and feather you!"

"Yuh, come on, you fake, you four-flusher!" echoed the voices.

The secretary and chairman were edging back into the tent, beside Carl's cowering mechanic.

Something broke in Carl's hold on himself. With his arm drawn back, his fist aimed at the point of the mob-leader's jaw, he snarled: "You can't make me fly. You stick that ugly mug of yours any farther in and I'll bust it. I'll fly when the wind goes down——You would, would you?"

As the mob-leader started to advance, Carl jabbed at him. It was not a very good jab. But the leader stopped. The manager, black-jack in hand, caught Carl's arm, and ordered: "Don't start anything! They can lick us. Just look ready. Don't say anything. We'll hold 'em till the cops come. But nix on the punch."

"Right, Cap'n," said Carl.

It was a strain to stand motionless, facing the crowd, not answering their taunts, but he held himself in, and in two minutes the yell came: "Cheese it! The cops!" The mob unwillingly swayed back as Onamwaska's heroic little band of five policemen wriggled through it, requesting their neighbors to desist.... They entered the tent and, after accepting cigars from Carl's manager, coldly told him that Carl was a fake, and lucky to escape; that Carl would better "jump right out and fly if he knew what was good for him." Also, they nearly arrested the manager for possessing a black-jack, and warned him that he'd better not assault any of the peaceable citizens of beautiful Onamwaska....

When they had coaxed the mob behind the barriers, by announcing that Ericson would now go up, Carl swore: "I won't move! They can't make me!"

The secretary of the fair, who had regained most of his courage, spoke up, pertly, "Then you better return the five hundred advance, pretty quick sudden, or I'll get an attachment on your fake flying-machine!"

"You go——Nix, nix, Hawk, don't hit him; he ain't worth it. You go to hell, brother," said the manager, mechanically. But he took Carl aside, and groaned: "Gosh! we got to do something! It's worth two thousand dollars to us, you know. Besides, we haven't got enough cash 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, Grahame-White, Hoxsey, and the rest. He was in the afterglow of the meet, for with Titherington, the Englishman, and Tad Warren, the Wright flier, he was going to race from Belmont Park to New Haven for a ten-thousand-dollar prize jointly offered by a New Haven millionaire and a New York newspaper. At New Haven the three competitors were to join with Tony Bean (of the Bagby School) and Walter MacMonnies (flying a Curtiss) in an exhibition meet.

Enveloped in baggy overalls over the blue flannel suit which he still wore when flying, Carl was directing Martin Dockerill in changing his spark-plugs, which were fouled. About him, the aviators were having their machines packed, laughing, playing tricks on one another—boys who were virile men; mechanics in denim who stammered to the reporters, "Oh, well, I don't know——" yet who were for the time more celebrated than Roosevelt or Harry Thaw or Bernard Shaw or Champion Jack Johnson.

Before 9.45 A.M., when the race to New Haven was scheduled to start, the newspaper-men gathered; but there were not many outsiders. Carl felt the lack of the stimulus of thronging devotees. He worked silently and sullenly. It was "the morning after." He missed Forrest Haviland.

He began to be anxious. Could he get off on time?

Exactly at 9.45 Titherington made a magnificent start in his Henry Farman biplane. Carl stared till the machine was a dot in the clouds, then worked feverishly. Tad Warren, the second contestant, was testing out his motor, ready to go. At that moment Martin Dockerill suggested that the carburetor was dirty.

"I'll fly with her the way she is," Carl snapped, shivering with the race-fever.

A cub reporter from the City News Association piped, like a fox-terrier, "What time 'll you get off, Hawk?"

"Ten sharp."

"No, I mean what time will you really get off!"

Carl did not answer. He understood that the reporters were doubtful about him, the youngster from the West who had been flying for only six months. At last came the inevitable pest, the familiarly suggestive outsider. A well-dressed, well-meaning old bore he was; a complete stranger. He put his podgy hand on Carl's arm and puffed: "Well, Hawk, my boy, give us a good flight to-day; not but what you're going to have trouble. There's something I want to suggest to you. If you'd use a gyroscope——"

"Oh, beat it!" snarled Carl. He was ashamed of himself—but more angry than ashamed. He demanded of Martin, aside: "All right, heh? Can I fly with the carburetor as she is? Heh?"

"All right, boss. Calm down, boss, calm down."

"What do you mean?"

"Look here, Hawk, I don't want to butt in. You can have old Martin for a chopping-block any time you want to cut wood. But if you don't calm down you'll get so screwed up mit nerves that you won't have any control. Aw, come on, boss, speak pretty! Just keep your shirt on and I'll hustle like a steam-engine."

"Well, maybe you're right. But these assistant aviators in the crowd get me wild.... All right? Hoorray. Here goes.... Say, don't stop for anything after I get off. Leave the boys to pack up, and you hustle over to Sea Cliff for the speed-boat. You ought to be in New Haven almost as soon as I am."

Calmer now, he peeled off his overalls, drew a wool-lined leather jacket over his coat, climbed into the cockpit, and inspected the indicators. As he was testing the spark Tad Warren got away.

Third and last was Carl. The race-fever shook him.

He would try to save time. Like the others, he had planned to fly from Belmont Park across Long Island to Great Neck, and cross Long Island Sound where it was very narrow. He studied his map. By flying across to the vicinity of Hempstead Harbor and making a long diagonal flight over water, straight over to Stamford, he would increase the factor of danger, but save many miles; and the specifications of the race permitted him to choose any course to New Haven. Thinking only of the new route, taking time only to nod good-by to Martin Dockerill and Hank Odell, he was off, into the air.

As the ground dropped beneath him and the green clean spaces and innumerous towns of Long Island spread themselves out he listened to the motor. Its music was clear and strong. Here, at least, the wind was light.

He would risk the long over-water flight—very long they thought it in 1910.

In a few minutes he sighted the hills about Roslyn and began to climb, up to three thousand feet. It was very cold. His hands were almost numb on the control. He descended to a thousand feet, but the machine jerked like a canoe shooting rapids, in the gust that swept up from among the hills. The landscape rose swiftly at him over the ends of the wings, now on one side, now on the other, as the machine rolled.

His arms were tired with the quick, incessant wing-warping. He rose again. Then he looked at the Sound, and came down to three hundred feet, lest he lose his way. For the Sound was white with fog.... No wind out there!... Water and cloud blurred together, and the sky-line was lost in a mass of somber mist, which ranged from filmy white to the cold dead gray of old cigar-ashes. He wanted to hold back, not dash out into that danger-filled twilight. But already he was roaring over gray-green marshes, then was above fishing-boats that were slowly rocking in water dully opaque as a dim old mirror. He noted two men on a sloop, staring up at him with foolish, gaping, mist-wet faces. Instantly they were left behind him. He rose, to get above the fog. Even the milky, sulky water was lost to sight.

He was horribly lonely, abominably lonely.

At five hundred feet altitude he was not yet entirely above the fog. Land was blotted out. Above him, gray sky and thin writhing filaments of vapor. Beneath him, only the fog-bank, erupting here and there like the unfolding of great white flowers as warm currents of air burst up through the mist-blanket.

Completely solitary. All his friends were somewhere far distant, in a place of solid earth and sun-warmed hangars. The whole knowable earth had ceased to exist. There was only slatey void, through which he was going on for ever. Or perhaps he was not moving. Always the same coil of mist about him. He was horribly lonely.

He feared that the fog was growing thicker. He studied his compass with straining eyes. He was startled by a gull's plunging up through the mist ahead of him, and disappearing. He was the more lonely when it was gone. His eyebrows and cheeks were wet with the steam. Drops of moisture shone desolately on the planes. It was an unhealthy shine. He was horribly lonely.

He pictured what would happen if the motor should stop and he should plunge down through that flimsy vapor. His pontoonless frail monoplane would sink almost at once.... It would be cold, swimming. How long could he keep up? What chance of being found? He didn't want to fall. The cockpit seemed so safe, with its familiar watch and map-stand and supporting-wires. It was home. The wings stretching out on either side of him seemed comfortingly solid, adequate to hold him up. But the body of the machine behind him was only a framework, not even inclosed. And cut in the bottom of the cockpit was a small hole for observing the earth. He could see fog through it, in unpleasant contrast to the dull yellow of the cloth sides and bottom. Not before had it daunted him to look down through that hole. Now, however, he kept his eyes away from it, and, while he watched the compass and oil-gauge, and kept a straight course, he was thinking of how nasty it would be to drop, drop down there, and have to swim. It would be horribly lonely, swimming about a wrecked monoplane, hearing steamers' fog-horns, hopeless and afar.

As he thought that, he actually did hear a steamer hoarsely whistling, and swept above it, irresistibly. He started; his shoulders drooped.

More than once he wished that he could have seen Forrest Haviland again before he started. He wished with all the poignancy of man's affection for a real man that he had told Forrest, when they were dining at the Brevoort, how happy he was to be with him. He was horribly lonely.

He cursed himself for letting his thoughts become thin and damp as the vapor about him. He shrugged his shoulders. He listened thankfully to the steady purr of the engine and the whir of the propeller. He would get across! He ascended, hoping for a glimpse of the shore. The fog-smothered horizon stretched farther and farther away. He was unspeakably lonely.

Through a tear in the mist he saw sunshine reflected from houses on a hill, directly before him, perhaps one mile distant. He shouted. He was nearly across. Safe. And the sun was coming out.

Two minutes later he was turning north, between the water and a town which his map indicated as Stamford. The houses beneath him seemed companionable; friendly were the hand-waving crowds, and factory-whistles gave him raucous greeting.

Instantly, now that he knew where he was, the race-fever caught him again. Despite the strain of crossing the Sound, he would not for anything have come down to rest. He began to wonder how afar ahead of him were Titherington and Tad Warren.

He spied a train running north out of Stamford, swung over above it, and raced with it. The passengers leaned out of the windows, trainmen hung perilously from the opened doors of vestibuled platforms, the engineer tooted his frantic greetings to a fellow-mechanic who, above him in the glorious bird, sent telepathic greetings which the engineer probably never got. The engineer speeded up; the engine puffed out vast feathery plumes of dull black smoke. But he drew away from the train as he neared South Norwalk.

He was ascending again when he noted something that seemed to be a biplane standing in a field a mile away. He came down and circled the field. It was Titherington's Farman biplane. He hoped that the kindly Englishman had not been injured. He made out Titherington, talking to a group about the machine. Relieved, he rose again, amused by the ant-hill appearance as hundreds of people, like black bugs, ran toward the stalled biplane, from neighboring farms and from a trolley-car standing in the road.

He should not have been amused just then. He was too low. Directly before him was a hillside crowned with trees. He shot above the trees, cold in the stomach, muttering, "Gee! that was careless!"

He sped forward. The race-fever again. Could he pass Tad Warren as he had passed Titherington? He whirled over the towns, shivering but happy in the mellow, cool October air, far enough from the water to be out of what fog the brightening sun had left. The fields rolled beneath him, so far down that they were turned into continuous and wonderful masses of brown and gold. He sang to himself. He liked Titherington; he was glad that the Englishman had not been injured; but it was good to be second in the race; to have a chance to win a contest which the whole country was watching; to be dashing into a rosy dawn of fame. But while he sang he was keeping a tense lookout for Tad Warren. He had to pass him!

With the caution of the Scotchlike Norwegian, he had the cloche constantly on the jiggle, with ceaseless adjustments to the wind, which varied constantly as he passed over different sorts of terrain. Once the breeze dropped him sidewise. He shot down to gain momentum, brought her to even keel, and, as he set her nose up again, laughed boisterously.

Never again would he be so splendidly young, never again so splendidly sure of himself and of his medium of expression. He was to gain wisdom, but never to have more joy of the race.

He was sure now that he was destined to pass Tad Warren.

The sun was ever brighter; the horizon ever wider, rimming the saucer-shaped earth. When he flew near the Sound he saw that the fog had almost passed. The water was gentle and colored like pearl, lapping the sands, smoking toward the radiant sky. He passed over summer cottages, vacant and asleep, with fantastic holiday roofs of red and green. Gulls soared like flying sickles of silver over the opal sea. Even for the racer there was peace.

He made out a mass of rock covered with autumn-hued trees to the left, then a like rock to the right. "West and East Rock—New Haven!" he cried.

The city mapped itself before him like square building-blocks on a dark carpet, with railroad and trolley tracks like flashing spider-webs under the October noon.

So he had arrived, then—and he had not caught Tad Warren. He was furious.

He circled the city, looking for the Green, where (in this day before the Aero Club of America battled against over-city flying) he was to land. He saw the Yale campus, lazy beneath its elms, its towers and turrets dreaming of Oxford. His anger left him.

He plunged down toward the Green—and his heart nearly stopped. The spectators were scattered everywhere. How could he land without crushing some one? With trees to each side and a church in front, he was too far down to rise again. His back pressed against the back of the little seat, and seemed automatically to be trying to restrain him from this tragic landing.

The people were fleeing. In front there was a tiny space. But there was no room to sail horizontally and come down lightly. He shut off his motor and turned the monoplane's nose directly at the earth. She struck hard, bounced a second. Her tail rose, and she started, with dreadful deliberateness, to turn turtle. With a vault Carl was out of the cockpit and clear of the machine as she turned over.

Oblivious of the clamorous crowd which was pressing in about him, cutting off the light, replacing the clean smell of gasoline and the upper air by the hot odor of many bodies, he examined the monoplane and found that she had merely fractured the propeller and smashed the rudder.

Some one was fighting through the crowd to his side—Tony Bean—Tony the round, polite Mexican from the Bagby School. He was crying: "Hombre, what a landing! You have saved lives.... Get out of the way, all you people!"

Carl grinned and said: "Good to see you, Tony. What time did Tad Warren get here? Where's——"

"He ees not here yet."

"What? Huh? How's that? Do I win? That——Say, gosh! I hope he hasn't been hurt."

"Yes, you win."

A newspaper-man standing beside Tony said: "Warren had to come down at Great Neck. He sprained his shoulder, but that's all."

"That's good."

"But you," insisted Tony, "aren't you badly jarred, Hawk?"

"Not a bit."

The gaping crowd, hanging its large collective ear toward the two aviators, was shouting: "Hoorray! He's all right!"—As their voices rose Carl became aware that all over the city hundreds of factory-whistles and bells were howling their welcome to him—the victor.

The police were clearing a way for him. As a police captain touched a gold-flashing cap to him, Carl remembered how afraid of the police that hobo Slim Ericson had been.

Tony and he completed examination of the machine, with Tony's mechanician, and sent it off to a shop, to await Martin Dockerill's arrival by speed-boat and racing-automobile. Carl went to receive congratulations—and a check—from the prize-giver, and a reception by Yale officials on the campus. Before him, along his lane of passage, was a kaleidoscope of hands sticking out from the wall of people—hands that reached out and shook his own till they were sore, hands that held out pencil and paper to beg for an autograph, hands of girls with golden flowers of autumn, hands of dirty, eager, small boys—weaving, interminable hands. Dizzy with a world peopled only by writhing hands, yet moved by their greeting, he made his way across the Green, through Phelps Gateway, and upon the campus. Twisting his cap and wishing that he had taken off his leather flying-coat, he stood upon a platform and heard officials congratulating him.

The reception was over. But the people did not move. And he was very tired. He whispered to a professor: "Is that a dormitory, there behind us? Can I get into it and get away?"

The professor beckoned to one of the collegians, and replied, "I think, Mr. Ericson, if you will step down they will pass you into Vanderbilt Courtyard—by the gate back of us—and you will be able to escape."

Carl trusted himself to the bunch of boys forming behind him, and found himself rushed into the comparative quiet of a Tudor courtyard. A charming youngster, hatless and sleek of hair, cried, "Right this way, Mr. Ericson—up this staircase in the tower—and we'll give 'em the slip."

From the roar of voices to the dusky quietude of the hallway was a joyous escape. Suddenly Carl was a youngster, permitted to see Yale, a university so great that, from Plato College, it had seemed an imperial myth. He stared at the list of room-occupants framed and hung on the first floor. He peeped reverently through an open door at a suite of rooms.

He was taken to a room with a large collection of pillows, fire-irons, Morris chairs, sets of books in crushed levant, tobacco-jars and pipes—a restless and boyish room, but a real haven. He stared out upon the campus, and saw the crowd stolidly waiting for him. He glanced round at his host and waved his hand deprecatingly, then tried to seem really grown up, really like the famous Hawk Ericson. But he wished that Forrest Haviland were there so that he might marvel: "Look at 'em, will you! Waiting for me! Can you beat it? Some start for my Yale course!"

In a big chair, with a pipe supplied by the youngster, he shyly tried to talk to a senior in the great world of Yale (he himself had not been able to climb to seniorhood even in Plato), while the awed youngster shyly tried to talk to the great aviator.

He had picked up a Yale catalogue and he vaguely ruffled its pages, thinking of the difference between its range of courses and the petty inflexible curriculum of Plato. Out of the pages leaped the name "Frazer." He hastily turned back. There it was: "Henry Frazer, A.M., Ph.D., Assistant Professor in English Literature."

Carl rejoiced boyishly that, after his defeat at Plato, Professor Frazer had won to victory. He forgot his own triumph. For a second he longed to call on Frazer and pay his respects. "No," he growled to himself, "I've been so busy hiking that I've forgotten what little book-learnin' I ever had. I'd like to see him, but——By gum! I'm going to begin studying again."

Hidden away in the youngster's bedroom for a nap, he dreamed uncomfortably of Frazer and books. That did not keep him from making a good altitude flight at the New Haven Meet that afternoon, with his hastily repaired machine and a new propeller. But he thought of new roads for wandering in the land of books, as he sat, tired and sleepy, but trying to appear bright and appreciative, at the big dinner in his honor—the first sacrificial banquet to which he had been subjected—with earnest gentlemen in evening clothes, glad for an excuse to drink just a little too much champagne; with mayors and councilmen and bankers; with the inevitable stories about the man who was accused of stealing umbrellas and about the two skunks on a fence enviously watching a motor-car.

Equally inevitable were the speeches praising Carl's flight as a "remarkable achievement, destined to live forever in the annals of sport and heroism, and to bring one more glory to the name of our fair city."

Carl tried to appear honored, but he was thinking: "Rats! I'll live in the annals of nothin'! Curtiss and Brookins and Hoxsey have all made longer flights than mine, in this country alone, and they're aviators I'm not worthy to fill the gas-tanks of.... Gee! I'm sleepy! Got to look polite, but I wish I could beat it.... Let's see. Now look here, young Carl; starting in to-morrow, you begin to read oodles of books. Let's see. I'll start out with Forrest's favorites. There's David Copperfield, and that book by Wells, Tono-Bungay, that's got aerial experiments in it, and Jude the Ob—, Obscure, I guess it is, and The Damnation of Theron Ware (wonder what he damned), and McTeague, and Walden, and War and Peace, and Madame Bovary, and some Turgenev and some Balzac. And something more serious. Guess I'll try William James's book on psychology."

He bought them all next morning. His other belongings had been suited to rapid transportation, and Martin Dockerill grumbled, "That's a swell line of baggage, all right—one tooth-brush, a change of socks, and ninety-seven thousand books."

Two nights later, in a hotel at Portland, Maine, Carl was plowing through the Psychology. He hated study. He flipped the pages angrily, and ran his fingers through his corn-colored hair. But he sped on, concentrated, stopping only to picture a day when the people who honored him publicly would also know him in private. Somewhere among them, he believed, was the girl with whom he could play. He would meet her at some aero race, and she would welcome him as eagerly as he welcomed her.... Had he, perhaps, already met her? He walked over to the writing-table and scrawled a note to Gertie Cowles—regarding the beauty of the Yale campus.



CHAPTER XXII

(Editor's Note: The following pages are extracts from a diary kept by Mr. C. O. Ericson in a desultory fashion from January, 1911, to the end of April, 1912. They are reprinted quite literally. Apparently Mr. Ericson had no very precise purpose in keeping his journal. At times it seems intended as materia for future literary use; at others, as comments for his own future amusement; at still others, as a sort of long letter to be later sent to his friend, Lieut. Forrest Haviland, U.S.A. I have already referred to them in my Psycho-Analysis of the Subconscious with Reference to Active Temperaments, but here reprint them less for their appeal to us as a scientific study of reactions than as possessing, doubtless, for those interested in pure narrative, a certain curt expression of somewhat unusual exploits, however inferior is their style to a more critical thesis on the adventurous.)

May 9, (1911). Arrived at Mineola flying field, N. Y. to try out new Bagby monoplane I have bought. Not much accomodation here yet. Many of us housed in tents. Not enough hangars. We sit around and tell lies in the long grass at night, like a bunch of kids out camping. Went over and had a beer at Peter McLoughlin's today, that's where Glenn Curtiss started out from to make his first flight for Sci. Amer. cup.

Like my new Bagby machine better than Bleriot in many respects, has non-lifting tail, as should all modern machines. Rudder and elevator a good deal like the Nieuport. One passenger. Roomy cockpit and enclosed fuselage. Bleriot control. Nearer streamline than any American plane yet. Span, 33.6 ft., length 24, chord of wing at fuselage 6' 5''. Chauviere propeller, 6' 6'', pitch 4' 5''. Dandy new Gnome engine, 70 h.p., should develop 60 to 80 m.p.h.

Martin Dockerill my mechanician is pretty cute. He said to me to-day when we were getting work-bench up, "I bet a hat the spectators all flock here, now. Not that you're any better flier than some of the other boys, but you got the newest plane for them to write their names on."

Certainly a scad of people butting in. Come in autos and motor cycles and on foot, and stand around watching everything you do till you want to fire a monkey wrench at them.

Hank Odell has joined the Associated Order of the Pyramid and just now he is sitting out in front of his tent talking to some of the Grand Worthy High Mighties of it I guess—fat old boy with a yachting cap and a big brass watch chain and an Order of Pyramid charm big as your thumb, and a tough young fellow with a black sateen shirt and his hat on sideways with a cigarette hanging out of one corner of his mouth.

Since I wrote the above a party of sports, the women in fade-away gowns made to show their streamline forms came butting in, poking their fingers at everything, while the slob that owned their car explained everything wrong. "This is a biplane," he says, "you can see there's a plane sticking out on each side of the place where the aviator sits, it's a new areoplane (that's the way he pronounced it), and that dingus in front is a whirling motor." I was sitting here at the work-bench, writing, hot as hell and sweaty and in khaki pants and soft shirt and black sneakers, and the Big Boss comes over to me and says, "Where is Hawk Ericson, my man." "How do I know," I says. "When will he be back," says he, as though he was thinking of getting me fired p. d. q. for being fresh. "Next week. He ain't come yet."

He gets sore and says, "See here, my man, I read in the papers to-day that he has just joined the flying colony. Permit me to inform you that he is a very good friend of mine. If you will ask him, I am quite sure that he will remember Mr. Porter Carruthers, who was introduced to him at the Belmont Park Meet. Now if you will be so good as to show the ladies and myself about——" Well, I asked Hawk, and Hawk seemed to be unable to remember his friend Mr. Carruthers, who was one of the thousand or so people recently introduced to him, but he told me to show them about, which I did, and told them the Gnome was built radial to save room, and the wires overhead were a frame for a little roof for bad weather, and they gasped and nodded to every fool thing I said, swallowed it hook line and sinker till one of the females showed her interest by saying "How fascinating, let's go over to the Garden City Hotel, Porter, I'm dying for a drink." I hope she died for it.

May 10: Up at three, trying out machine. Smashed landing chassis in coming down, shook me up a little. Interesting how when I rose it was dark on the ground but once up was a little red in the east like smoke from a regular fairy city.

Another author out to-day bothering me for what he called "copy."

Must say I've met some darn decent people in this game though. To-day there was a girl came out with Billy Morrison of the N. Y. Courier, she is an artist but crazy about outdoor life, etc. Named Istra Nash, a red haired girl, slim as a match but the strangest face, pale but it lights up when she's talking to you. Took her up and she was not scared, most are.

May 11: Miss Istra Nash came out by herself. She's thinking quite seriously about learning to fly. She sat around and watched me work, and when nobody was looking smoked a cigarette. Has recently been in Europe, Paris, London, etc.

Somehow when I'm talking to a woman like her I realize how little I see of women with whom I can be really chummy, tho I meet so many people at receptions etc. sometimes just after I have been flying before thousands of people I beat it to my hotel and would be glad for a good chat with the night clerk, of course I can bank on Martin Dockerill to the limit but when I talk to a person like Miss Nash I realize I need some one who knows good art from bad. Though Miss Nash doesn't insist on talking like a high-brow, indeed is picking up aviation technologies very quickly. She talks German like a native.

Think Miss Nash is perhaps older than I am, perhaps couple of years, but doesn't make any difference.

Reading a little German to-night, almost forgot what I learned of it in Plato.

May 14, Sunday: Went into town this afternoon and went with Istra to dinner at the Lafayette. She told me all about her experiences in Paris and studying art. She is quite discontented here in N. Y. I don't blame her much, it must have been bully over in Paree. We sat talking till ten. Like to see Vedrines fly, and the Louvre and the gay grisettes too by heck! Istra ought not to drink so many cordials, nix on the booze you learn when you try to keep in shape for flying, though Tad Warren doesn't seem to learn it. After ten we went to studio where Istra is staying on Washington Sq. several of her friends there and usual excitement and fool questions about being an aviator, it always makes me feel like a boob. But they saw Istra and I wanted to be alone and they beat it.

This is really dawn but I'll date it May 14, which is yesterday. No sleep for me to-night, I'm afraid. Going to fly around NY in aerial derby this afternoon. Must get plenty sleep now.

May 15: Won derby, not much of an event though. Struck rotten currents over Harlem River, machine rolled like a whale-back.

Istra out here to-morrow. Glad. But after last night afraid I'll get so I depend on her, and the aviator that keeps his nerve has to be sort of a friendless cuss some ways.

May 16: Istra came out here. Seems very discontented. I'm afraid she's the kind to want novelty and attention incessantly, she seems to forget that I'm pretty busy.

May 17: Saw Istra in town, she forgot all her discontent and her everlasting dignity and danced for me then came over and kissed me, she is truly a wonder, can hum a French song so you think you're among the peasants, but she expects absolute devotion and constant amusing and I must stick to my last if a mechanic like me is to amount to anything.

May 18: Istra out here, she sat around and looked bored, wanted to make me sore, I think. When I told her I had to leave to-morrow morning for Rochester and couldn't come to town for dinner etc. she flounced home. I'm sorry, I'm mighty sorry; poor kid she's always going to be discontented wherever she is, and always getting some one and herself all wrought up. She always wants new sensations yet doesn't want to work, and the combination isn't very good. It'd be great if she really worked at her painting, but she usually stops her art just this side of the handle of a paint-brush.

Curious thing is that when she'd gone and I sat thinking about her I didn't miss her so much as Gertie Cowles. I hope I see Gertie again some day, she is a good pal.

Istra wanted me to name my new monoplane Babette, because she says it looks "cunning" which the Lord knows it don't, it may look efficient but not cunning. But I don't think I'll name it anything, tho she says that shows lack of imagination.

People especially reporters are always asking me this question, do aviators have imagination? I'm not sure I know what imagination is. It's like this stuff about "sense of humor." Both phrases are pretty bankrupt now. A few years ago when I was running a car I would make believe I was different people, like a king driving through his kingdom, but when I'm warping and banking I don't have time to think about making believe. Of course I do notice sunsets and so on a good deal but that is not imagination. And I do like to go different places; possibly I take the imagination out that way—I guess imagination is partly wanting to be places where you aren't—well, I go when I want to, and I like that better.

Anyway darned if I'll give my monoplane a name. Tad Warren has been married to a musical comedy soubrette with ringlets of red-brown hair (Istra's hair is quite bright red, but this woman has dark red hair, like the color of California redwood chips, no maybe darker) and she wears a slimpsy bright blue dress with the waist-line nearly down to her knees, and skirt pretty short, showing a lot of ankle, and a kind of hat I never noticed before, must be getting stylish now I guess, flops down so it almost hides her face like a basket. She's a typical wife for a 10 h.p. aviator with exhibition fever. She and Tad go joy riding almost every night with a bunch of gasoline and alcohol sports and all have about five cocktails and dance a new Calif. dance called the Turkey Trot. This bunch have named Tad's new Wright "Sammy," and they think it's quite funny to yell "Hello Sammy, how are you, come have a drink."

I guess I'll call mine a monoplane and let it go at that.

* * * * *

July 14: Quebec. Lost race Toronto to Quebec. Had fair chance to win but motor kept misfiring, couldn't seem to get plugs that would work, and smashed hell out of elevator coming down on tail when landing here. Glad Hank Odell won, since I lost. Hank has designed new rocker-arm for Severn motor valves. All of us invited to usual big dinner, never did see so many uniforms, also members of Canadian parliament. I don't like to lose a race, but thunder it doesn't bother me long. Good filet of sole at dinner. Sat near a young lieutenant, leftenant I suppose it is, who made me think of Forrest Haviland. I miss Forrest a lot. He's doing some good flying for the army, flying Curtiss hydro now, and trying out muffler for military scouting. What I like as much as anything about him is his ease, I hope I'm learning a little of it anyway. This stuff is all confused but must hustle off to reception at summer school of Royal College for Females. Must send all this to old Forrest to read some day—if you ever see this, Forrest, hello, dear old man, I thought about you when I flew over military post.