Part 1
A Dare-devil of the Clouds Performs the Most Hair-raising Feat of His Life to Prove that He Is a Safe Pilot.
THE AIR SPLASHER
By Rickard Howells Watkins
Author of “Full Throttle”
“LA-ADIES and gentlemun!” bawled Sam Smith, rotating his fat body on the creaking box. “The next feature on the program will be an exhibition flight by King Horn, the wild man of the air! Horn has crashed no less than twelve ships in the course of his death-defying career as ‘Ace of Deuces’--an’ maybe he’ll make it thirteen before your eyes this afternoon!” Sam paused to gulp air with savage intensity; then bellowed on:
“He promises nothing--the Tennant Flying Circus promises nothing--but watch him fly! He’s wild--wild--wild! Watch him fly! He’s as crazy as our passenger-carrying pilots are sane; he’s reckless as they are careful! He’s a cuckoo among eagles! Horn will now take the air and show you how not to fly a ship. No other Tennant plane will leave the ground while Horn is in the air. He’s wild--wild--wild!”
Sam waved an eloquent hand toward an ancient crate that stood apart from the other ships on the field, and sank down onto his box to imbibe more air.
A thin, youngish, carefully dressed man with large and reflective brown eyes, who stood beside the stunt ship, chuckled quietly at Sam’s oration.
“Ta-ra! Tara--ta!” he muttered with a burlesque flourish of his walking stick. “You ought to wear pink-silk tights and learn to curtsy, King.”
King Horn, an agile, long-limbed young man with light-brown hair that in the sun verged on the shade of gold, had already climbed into the rear seat of the old ship. He revved up the motor briskly, but paused to grin at his irreverent friend. It was an honest grin, as broad as a wide mouth would permit, and his eyes joined in it, crinkling at the corners. It was obvious that, whatever else King Horn thought about himself, he did not consider himself an artist.
“You teach me to curtsy and I’ll teach you to fly!” he shouted against the beat of the motor. With a quick, impatient hand he cinched on his helmet. “Want a lesson now? The ship’s sort of loose today.”
Franklin Cross shook his head. “I’ve got to get back to the _Era_ office to write your obit,” he said. “It’s a nuisance, but I’ve got to have it ready.”
King Horn grinned again. “You gave me this reputation as a crasher, Cross,” he said. “It’s only fair to throw in an obituary notice to sort of round it off. ’By!”
He gunned the plane with a lean and confident hand.
Snarling like an unwilling beast, the ship surged ahead and, at the pressure of King’s hand on the control stick, leaped into the air. The motor was hot and the field--part of the broad Hempstead plain that makes Long Island popular among airmen--was flat and free from obstacles. King did not bother to go after altitude; with thirty-six inches of air between his landing wheels and the ground, he started work. He had a reputation to sustain and a pay check to earn.
Giving her all the gas she would take, he set her on end. One wing cut toward earth. The ship spun around in a tight circle with the wing tip always threatening to graze the turf and yet never touching. The slightest contact would have set the ship cartwheeling, a splintering, disintegrating wreck, across the field, but King held every inch of his scant altitude.
Then, fishtailing wildly, he headed for the fence. He zoomed over it, cut back and dived at it, cleared it, seemingly by a miracle, and let his wheels swish through the grasstops. Then he zoomed again and this time went after altitude.
His face, as he handled his ship, held quick, ever changing expressions. He frowned, grinned, looked sad, alert, scared and triumphant. King Horn was living fast as he sent his ship flickering about in the danger zone just above the earth and in a single minute his countenance reflected in its mobility more emotion than he expended during an hour at any other time.
As he climbed away from the ground that had so closely menaced his wings and wheels, his face smoothed out, becoming less the face of a hard-pressed, nervy fencer and more the face of a pilot. He relaxed, sat back in his seat and loosened slightly his grip upon the stick. His eyes swept the horizon automatically, then dropped to the fields round about the one he had risen from. He did not bother to look at the crowd he was thrilling. Thousands of men and women, millions of kids--the crowd was always the same. Tennant’s circus was by no means the only outfit operating on that warm June Saturday afternoon. There were ships in front of a score of hangars near and far, and more ships in the air. His eyes roved among them.
Abruptly, with a jerk of his head, he dismissed other ships and devoted himself to his own. It was time to thrill the spectators again. He flung the plane into a quick medley of contortion--loops, rolls, Immelmans, a whipstall, spirals and dives. And steadily throughout the maze of air splashes he let the ship drift earthward, so that what had been mere routine stunting at a reasonable altitude began again a grim, breath-taking challenge to gravity and death. Again a wingtip flicked over the grass; again the wheels seemed about to plow into the hard surface of the field.
At last, after long, hazardous seconds, King Horn climbed for his final stunt. At less than a thousand feet he pulled the ship’s nose higher and higher, until it stalled. Then he kicked over the rudder. The ship reeled downward in a tail spin. When it seemed certain that nothing could save the gyrating ship from plunging into the ground, King Horn got it out. That was his business, getting ships out of impossible positions, he reflected, with a grin, as he felt the diving ship responding to his insistent, steady hand on the stick.
Out of the spin, with the earth a few feet below, he ruddered the ship around into the wind, throttled and leveled off. The work was over. His wheels had already bumped once when, dead ahead, a small boy with a camera apparently rose out of the ground.
King Horn could have dodged the youngster easily enough, but out from the edge of the field there raced half a dozen would-be rescuers. They strung out in a human barrier ahead of the ship that had virtually lost its flying speed.
With an imprecation King Horn gunned his ship. It hung sluggishly in the air, wheels still reaching for the ground. King flung it over in a quick bank to avoid the men ahead. The ship reeled sidewise. Then the thing that King Horn had risked several times that day happened. The wingtip scored the ground.
King’s leaping hand snapped off the ignition switch. The ship, swirling like a curving knife over the heads of the people below, hit the ground. The wingspars went to pieces first; then the landing gear and prop in a volley of splintering sounds. The heavy motor in the nose of the fuselage ended the tune of the cracking wood with its ponderous thud. The pilot felt his safety belt cut into his middle as he was flung about. Then came sudden stillness.
King Horn jerked the fire extinguisher out of the bracket below the instrument board. Then he climbed out of a thoroughly wrecked ship. He was somewhat groggy from the jolt and something had got him in the left arm, for the sleeve of his gray shirt was ripped from wrist to shoulder, revealing bloody flesh.
Training the extinguisher, he sent spurt after spurt of fire-killing liquid on the hot exhaust pipe. He was still at this when Franklin Cross, pale of face, big Walt Tennant, the boss of the circus, and a wave of pilots and mechanics reached him.
“That was a quick one,” Walt Tennant commented. The circus boss inspected his pilot and his plane with the same equanimity. The wreckage did not distress him, for he knew that the story which Franklin Cross and other newspaper men would write would bring greater crowds to his field in the days to come.
“For a moment I thought I was going to lose a few cash customers, King,” he added.
“For a moment I thought you were going to lose a damn good pilot, Mr. Tennant,” said Franklin Cross sharply. He seemed thinner, more insignificant than ever as he turned his white, wrathful face on the tall boss of the circus.
“Losing a pilot is all in the game, Frank,” King Horn interposed, flashing his quick smile upon his ruffled friend. “Nobody’d kick about one less--the sky is crawling with ’em.”
King handed over the fire extinguisher to a mechanic.
“She isn’t apt to flame up now,” he told the man. Nodding to the others, he added: “I’ll be moving up to the shack to get Miss Lyle to put some soothing sirup on this scratch.”
“I’ll go with you,” Franklin Cross declared.
King Horn laughed quietly as they walked together through the crowd on the edge of the field. He was paying no attention to the stares and sporadic cheering that greeted him.
“Thought you had to get to the office to write my obit?” he prodded Cross.
The aviation editor of the _Era_ turned very red. He struck out vigorously with his stick at a dandelion.
“That will wait now,” he said. “I guess you’re good for the day, since you’ve come through a crash.”
“Thanks for the respite,” said King Horn politely. “I certainly appreciate the way you hang around the Tennant outfit just to do press-agent work for me. That’s what you do hang around for, isn’t it, Frank?”
Franklin Cross, still very red in the face, consigned the other man to the conventional place and switched more mercilessly than ever at the grass. As they drew near the small operations office that cowered beside one of the big hangars, he stopped suddenly, his eyes fixed upon the doorway.
Lyle Tennant was standing there. Her hands were hidden behind her back, but Cross could tell by tiny, jerky movements of her arms that they were intertwining and clutching at each other. Her lips were compressed and her face was no less pale than the white throat revealed by the small V of her dress. But all this seemed to accentuate her fragile beauty. Her eyes, the blue, scintillant eyes that Franklin Cross had studied so earnestly since the Tennant circus leased this field, were not upon him, but upon King Horn.
“Here I am again, Lyle!” King greeted her cheerily. “I’ve bust out in a new place--left arm. Are you all out of iodine and sympathy?”
“I’ll wait here,” Cross muttered and veered toward the corner of the hangar.
“Come in,” Lyle Tennant said in an even voice to King.
Inside the cramped little office the girl made him sit down in a chair beside the desk. Silently she set about cleaning the long, shallow wound.
King Horn found himself oppressed by her wordlessness. He realized that it had been some time since she had last urged him to be more careful.
“This really wasn’t my fault,” he explained, with a laugh that didn’t sound right even in his own ears. “I was all through the stunt stuff when I cracked.”
“I saw what happened,” Lyle Tennant said. She bent closer over his arm with her cotton swab. “I saw the whole flight.”
King Horn moved uneasily. Of course, he _had_ been pushing the ship a bit that day.
“That confounded kid!” he grumbled unconvincingly. His eyes rested upon the back of her neck, with its tendrils of curly, fair hair.
Lyle Tennant worked on. Her fingers were cool--very cool--on his arm. She used the swab gently but the iodine stung like a tongue of flame.
In silence she bound up the arm. The cut jumped from the forearm to the bulge of the biceps, so she made two bandages of it, leaving his elbow free.
“If you’ll wait a moment I’ll sew up your sleeve,” she said tonelessly.
“Thanks, Lyle,” he said, as she finished knitting the bandage. He fumbled at the torn shirt. “Never mind this. I’ve got some other shirts. If I keep on cracking ’em up like this your dad will run out of planes before I run out of shirts.” He grinned at her hopefully, alert for the first symptoms of an answering smile in the corners of her mouth.
Suddenly Lyle Tennant flung the roll of bandage onto the desk. Her eyes raised suddenly to meet his. They blazed at him as she lifted her hands in a single gesture of despair.
“Oh, I can stand a fool so much better than a man who plays the fool!” she exclaimed. She dropped into the chair that he had sat in and buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook with sudden, uncontrollable sobs.
Startled, utterly bewildered, King Horn stared at her. She looked so much smaller than usual in that attitude of complete abandonment to grief. He touched her on the shoulder feebly, humbly. “Lyle,” he muttered. “Lyle!”
“Go away!” she gasped, recoiling from his fingers. “Go away!” She covered her face in her arms on the desk and continued to weep.
Every word, every frantic effort King Horn made to soothe her merely intensified her grief and his alarm. Finally, in response to one of those choked commands, he rushed out of the office. Unseeingly he passed Frank Cross at the corner of the hangar, pushed through the crowd and made for the road. He walked down the concrete much more dazed than he had been when the ship had cracked up.
Obviously this required thinking out, and yet he didn’t seem to be able to think, except in snatches. Was he in love with Lyle Tennant? Certainly not. He saw her nearly every day and enjoyed seeing her, and felt vaguely uneasy when she did not come to the field. But that wasn’t love--it couldn’t be.
Was she in love with him? That was absurd. She was fond of him, of course, just as he was fond of her. Theirs was a pleasant companionship in the rough and not always pleasant business of working for a flying circus. Probably it was just the shock of his crash that had brought from her that emotional outburst.
He reflected that she had called him a fool; then he remembered that she had not. She had said that she could stand fools better than she could stand men who played the fool. Played the fool! Well, in a way that was just. He hadn’t thought of it in that way, but certainly a man who could fly a ship with the best of them was a fool when he flew like a crazy kid or a drunken sot. And yet, he had been the exhibition pilot for this circus not for the applause or the notoriety or the money in it, but simply because none of the other pilots were so adept at the stick or in the least eager for the job. He understood their viewpoint and sympathized with it. They preferred the dull round of passenger carrying; he had been willing enough to sling a ship around a bit to attract a crowd and win the circus a decent notice in the newspapers.
“I guess lately I’ve been sort of reckless,” he muttered. “Since we leased this field--since Frank Cross and the other newspaper men have been doing that stuff about me being the Ace of Deuces--the ‘King of Crashers’--well, I guess I must have been trying to outdo myself.”
He nodded his head. “A man can’t compete against himself and win,” he reasoned. “That way the flying gets wilder every day. Then some time gravity steps on you or you get a puff of wind when you aren’t wanting a puff, and you lose.”
He thought some more. Most--in fact, about all--the circus stunt pilots, wing walkers and crowd catchers of every sort that he knew were avid for admiration, applause, hero worship. That was what kept them going--the sort of stuff about defying death that Frank Cross wrote about him.
“Can’t say I’m crazy about having a crowd’s eyes pop out as if they were on sticks at the sight of me,” he told himself. “And I certainly don’t get anything but sort of an ashamed feeling out of reading about myself in the newspapers. What am I doing this stuff for, anyhow? To please Walt Tennant and the rest of the bunch, I guess.”
He swung around suddenly and headed rapidly for the field again. “When little Lyle gets as upset about me as all that, then to hell with what the rest of ’em want!” he growled. A surge of tenderness swept over him. Lyle! What would the Tennant circus --the rest of the world--be without Lyle? Nothing! He had seen so much of her that he had not realized how much she meant in his life.
“I’m in love with her--in love!” he muttered. “I’ve been in love with Lyle a long, long time. And--maybe she’s in love with me! What a dumb fool I am!”
For King Horn the time to do things was always now. He broke into a run. Overhead, the ships of the circus were circling on ten-minute hops. Sam Smith had made it plain to the spectators that these pilots, unlike King Horn, were safe and sane.
Back at the field, King cut a straight line through the crowd to the office. But the little room where he had left Lyle was empty. The roll of bandage was still on the desk. The sight of it made King feel strange. He laid a hand gently on the arm she had bound up.
King sought her on the field, but she was not there. Walt Tennant was, however. The boss of the circus stood just inside the ropes, slowly chewing an unlit cigar. He kept a keen eye upon the knot of waiting customers who had already bought tickets for flights, but he did not fail to see King Horn as the stunt pilot walked toward him.
“Fixed up?” he asked, glancing at King’s arm.
“Sure. Look here, Walt--I’m quitting.”
Walt Tennant transferred all his attention to his pilot.
“You? What for? Somebody been telling you that flying’s dangerous?”
“My kind of flying--yes. I’m quitting the rough stuff, Walt. How about a job carrying passengers?”
Tennant laughed. “I’ll bet Lyle’s been talking to you.”
King Horn ignored this and looked away in some resentment when Tennant’s keen eyes probed his face. He didn’t want to talk about Lyle to anyone--not even to her own father.
“D’you think you could put me on carrying passengers?” he repeated.
Walt Tennant continued to appraise the younger man. “You?” he said at last. “You carry passengers!”
King Horn looked at his employer, puzzled by his tone.
“Why not?” he asked. “You’re not trying to tell me you think I’m a poor pilot, are you?”
Walt Tennant clapped King suddenly on the back.
“The best in the world!” he declared heartily. “The best--bar none, otherwise you’d have killed yourself in a crash long ago instead of just cracking up a few ships.”
“Well----” King paused questionings.
“How could I give you a job as a regular pilot when your friend Cross and these other newspaper men have got you labeled all over the country as the craziest, crashingest pilot in the game?” Walt Tennant demanded. “How many customers would come near this circus if they thought they might draw you to take ’em for a ride? You--a man that’s crashed or cracked thirteen ships! How long would I have a circus, do you suppose?”
King Horn was stunned by this volley of questions. He had never doubted his own ability as a pilot and none of the other airmen, he knew, had ever denied his skill at the stick. He had proved that often enough and in ways that no other pilot would follow. But the public--he saw Tennant’s point.
His reputation had not only pressed him into taking more and more risks every day. It had also cut him off from the chance of earning a living in any other way than by continuing to take risks. He was a pilot apart--a specialist in the air who was being pushed steadily toward death by his specialty. There was no job for him with the Tennant circus but the job of flying fool.
And right now, he realized, he needed a job more than he had ever needed one before. Unless Lyle put up an overwhelming defense, she was going to marry him. But she wasn’t going to marry him while he was still a crasher. He’d see to that and so--he grinned rather ruefully to himself--would she.
“I understand how you’re placed, Walt,” he said to the boss of the circus and contrived to smile as he said it. “No hard feelings about my quitting suddenly, I hope?”
Walt Tennant laughed. “I always figured you’d quit sudden--one way or another,” he said. “If I can’t keep you, I can’t. And anyhow, a young fellow that sort of fancies the way he throws a ship around has been plaguing me for a job.”
King Horn flushed at that last sentence. He did not notice that Tennant was surveying him keenly from under his thick, black eyebrows.
“It’s easy to fill a fool’s job, I guess,” King said slowly. “They’re sort of plentiful. Well, see you later, Walt.”
“So long,” Tennant replied. “Any time you change your mind, King-- There’s nobody that can throw thrills and chills into a crowd like you.”
King Horn took another turn about the edge of the field, just to make sure that Lyle had really gone. While he searched he came upon Franklin Cross glumly punching holes in the ground with his stick.
“Frank,” King Horn greeted him grasping him by the arm, “please forget about this last crash of mine, will you? And get those other reporters to drop it, too, if you can. I’m through being a fool.”
Cross looked up. The aviation editor’s thin face was full of lines--lines that made it rather harsh and old.
“What made you decide that?” he asked.
King Horn remembered that less than half an hour ago he had twitted the newspaper man for spending time about the field so that he could see Lyle. It had seemed funny to him, then. Half an hour! And now he was in love--had realized he was in love--with Lyle. That made him Frank Cross’ rival.
“Lyle did,” he said frankly. “She called me worse than a fool. And--well, I found out somehow that I cared about what she thought of me.”
Cross nodded. “All right,” he said emotionlessly. “I understand. I can’t suppress your crash. Thousands of people saw it. You’re noted for that sort of thing. It’s news. Can’t suppress it. But I’ll say you’ve quit.”
Syd Scoggins, second in command of the circus, and a flying man himself, came up to them.
“King’s quit, Scoggins,” Franklin Cross told him.
“Quit!” Scoggins repeated. He shook his head at King. “That’s good. I was thinkin’ of borrowing a gun and shootin’ you full of holes, King, just to save your life. You’ve been headed for hell in a hurry quite a while, now.”
“All I’m headed for now is a regular piloting job,” King Horn said. “Know of any?”