Part 2

Sergeant Galladay couldn’t hear the words but the agonized look on Weaver’s face struck him like a dash of cold water, startled him back into reality as if from a nightmare. His mind, which had been stricken numb, suddenly began to race like the motor. The predicament he had created flashed in a searing flame across his brain. Buck fever! He, the old-timer, veteran of a dozen campaigns had been stricken with buck fever like the rawest recruit! But not for long. No, sir! Hadn’t he promised that yellow-haired girl to bring her man back safe and sound? Hadn’t he? And here was her man, good old Buck Weaver, in desperate straits.

With the quickness of a cat the old sergeant bent low in the cockpit and swung his guns to bear on the nearest Fokker. Emboldened by the apparent defenselessness of the De Haviland, the German plane was diving straight upon its prey.

“Damn you! Damn you!” Dad Galladay screamed. “Shoot the kid, will you? Well, I’ll get you for that!”

_Rat--tat--tat--tat!_

The double Lewises jabbered staccato death. Tracer bullets streaked upward. Sergeant Galladay saw them pour into the fuselage of the Fokker, saw the plane lurch into a spin, motor full on. That was all he needed to see in that quarter. In a flash he swung his guns to bear on the Fokker to the right. The German, observing the fate of his companion, desperately whipped his plane into an Immelman turn. Again Galladay’s double Lewises jabbered one short burst, but the bullets went wild and the sergeant swore coldly, violently, at his own marksmanship.

Buck Weaver, weakened and dazed by loss of blood, fighting back the blackness of unconsciousness, sat bolt upright in the front cockpit and the De Haviland flew as if a mechanical man were at the controls--flew a level course without effort to maneuver, without effort to escape. It was an invitation to the two remaining German planes. They circled and dived again, one from each side, meaning to strike the death blow to this stubborn American plane and the American ace.

Crouched low in the gunner’s cockpit, Sergeant Galladay waited. The Fokkers were already firing. A burst of bullets ripped through the De Haviland’s tail assembly; one glanced off the gun barrel not six inches from the old sergeant’s head, but still he withheld his fire. Buck Weaver cried out again. His leg was shattered this time.

“Dad! Dad!” he shouted. “I’m going--going----” His voice ceased, but his white lips slowly formed two other words: “Ruth--good-by----”

Dad Galladay was sighting along the barrels of the double Lewises, waiting, waiting. He could see the German pilot on the right peering over the side of the plane and it seemed to him that the man was laughing.

“Laugh, will you?” he muttered. “All right, laugh now!” He aimed high, allowing for distance. It was a long shot but he had made as hard ones before in his life. He pressed the trigger.

_Rat--tat--tat--tat!_

The Fokker lurched sidewise, hesitated a moment; then, in slow, lazy circles it swung downward, the pilot hanging over the side of his cockpit.

Dad Galladay shook his fist at the doomed plane. “Next!” he shouted. “Who’s next? Bring on your whole damned air force! We licked them, eh, Buck, my boy?”

But Buck Weaver did not hear the shouted words. A black veil, spotted with crimson dots, was closing down over his eyes. He felt tired, very tired. Slowly he slumped down in his seat. The pilotless plane nosed over into a dive.

Dad Galladay, clinging to his guns, at first thought that the sudden dive was a maneuver of Buck Weaver’s. Then some inner sense warned him. One glance at the front cockpit told him the desperate state of affairs. Weaver was “out”; the plane was going down out of control. Just then something stung the old gunner in the leg. He glanced upward. The third Fokker, fearing a ruse or wishing to make sure of his kill, was following the American plane down, pouring lead into it. The German was so sure of his prey that he was making not the slightest effort to protect his own plane.

“Gotta get him!” Sergeant Galladay told himself. Once more he squinted along the barrels of his double weapon until the sights were on the vital section of the German plane. “Gotta get him!”

He pressed the trigger, felt the beloved vibration of his machine guns. But the plunging plane destroyed his aim and the bullets flew wild. Cursing, he pressed the trigger again. The guns fired twice--_put-put!_--and were silent. Out of ammunition! With the swiftness of a magician, the deftness of a card shark, Dad Galladay whipped a pan of cartridges from the rack at his side and fitted it on the guns. None too soon, either. The German plane was not thirty yards distant. Without aiming, almost instinctively, he threw the muzzles of the guns at the German and pressed the trigger. Above him the Fokker wavered; it burst into flames; it shrieked earthward.

The American plane was in little better circumstances. It, too, seemed utterly doomed. It had gone into a tailspin now, the fuselage whipping around viciously. A dozen more turns and the structure, weakened by German bullets, would fly to pieces. The earth where the flaming German lay was racing up at an incredible rate. Nearer, nearer--a matter of a few hundred feet now, a few seconds--and then eternity.

Sergeant Galladay snatched the auxiliary control stick from its brackets in the gunner’s cockpit; unerringly he thrust it into the socket which connected with the auxiliary controls. His motions were cool, precise, his blue eyes were icy cold. And his mind, working with that incredible swiftness which sometimes precedes death, recorded impressions as the whirling tape of a moving-picture camera records pictures--Buck Weaver’s lifeless, bobbing head, the flaming skeleton of the German plane, a trench with men in pot-shaped helmets peering upward, a dead man on the barbed wire in front of the crowded trench.

He pulled the stick back gently. A weakened flying wire snapped like a tightened harp string. Every strut, every member of the wounded plane screamed under the stress. Would she stand it? Would she fly to pieces? And then gracefully the De Haviland righted itself, barely above ground, just over the heads of those white-faced men in the queer, zigzag trench.

A shout sounded, a strange mingling of exultation and savage battle cry. Dad Galladay, “too old to fly,” was soloing at last! Soloing over No Man’s Land, with a wounded pilot in the front cockpit!

* * * * *

Lieutenant Buck Weaver sat propped up in bed in the convalescent ward of a Belgian hospital, just behind the front lines. Around him lingered a faint aroma of perfume and his eyes were fixed upon the door through which Ruth Childers had just left.

Suddenly the doorway framed a wheel chair in which sat Sergeant Galladay. His face was as red as ever and contrasted vividly with the white sheets and white walls of the ward; his grizzled hair rose stubbornly around his bald spot. At sight of Buck Weaver the cold, blue eyes of the old sergeant seemed to become several degrees warmer.

He pushed his wheel chair forward rapidly with his hands until he was beside Buck’s bed, and for a long moment the two sat close, grinning sheepishly at each other.

“Well, I reckon I better congratulate you,” Sergeant Galladay said at last. He threw a stubby thumb toward the door. “I met her outside.”

“What did she tell you?” demanded Buck Weaver, his face beaming.

“Aw----”

“About the congressional medal of honor you have been recommended for, eh?”

“Medal be damned!” burred Sergeant Galladay. “She--she kissed me. I reckon that was for bringing you back alive, eh?”

“And all the time you had those two bullets in you.”

“Aw,” protested Sergeant Galladay, “I never felt ’em. I was too scared to feel ’em.”

“Yes, you were!”

For a moment more there was silence, broken again by Sergeant Galladay. “I reckon you aren’t half engaged any more,” he said, fingering the blanket which was wrapped around his legs. “I reckon you’re all engaged, eh?”

“Yes, Dad,” Weaver said reverentially. “She’s the finest, sweetest, prettiest, nicest----”

“Tell that to the newspapers,” interrupted Sergeant Galladay brusquely. “I heard it all once before, anyway.” He pointed an accusing finger at the young flyer. “Say! I bet you promised her to give up flyin’--get transferred to the damn infantry or somethin’! Didn’t yuh?”

Buck Weaver nodded, but the spasm of mingled disgust and indignation which twisted the old-timer’s face caused him to burst out laughing.

“It isn’t so bad as all that, Dad,” he chuckled. “We compromised. I promised never to climb into a ship again--after the war.”

The expression of righteous indignation on Dad Galladay’s face faded to a sheepish grin. Suddenly his eyes hardened, blue metal between two slits. In his imagination his wheel chair became the gunner’s cockpit of a battle plane, the crutch across his lap a machine gun. Buck Weaver was in the pilot’s cockpit; twenty Boche fighting planes were swooping down upon them. Dad Galladay waved the crutch wildly.

“Bang! Bang! Bang!” he shouted gleefully. “Take that, and that, and that!”

A water bottle on the bed table was knocked to the floor. Its thud brought Sergeant Galladay back to earth, and the wheel chair became a wheel chair, the crutch merely a crutch. Dad Galladay leaned over and touched Buck Weaver on the arm.

“Say, Buck, old-timer,” he confided in an awed voice, “we’ll sure give ’em hell when we’re out of here and flying together, eh?” His voice dropped. “Gosh, it ain’t hardly fair, Buck. No, sir, it ain’t right. We’re jest too damn good for them Heinies.”

[Transcriber’s Notes: 1. This story appeared in The Popular Magazine, November 7, 1929. 2. Author consistenly used "De Haviland" to describe "De Havilland". 3. "Paris Island" is the original name of what is now "Parris Island" ]