Salute

My observation of the episode started one steaming July morning in McMullen, Texas. Mr. P. Enoch O’Reilly and myself were members, in good standing, of the McMullen flight of the Air Service Border patrol. There were a dozen flights, consisting of ten or twelve flyers and observers, scattered along the Border from Brownsville to San Diego.

The duty of the blithe young men was to pilot DeHaviland airplanes up and down that squirming trouble area, taking peeks at any little matters such as smuggling, rustling, or a little plain and fancy banditing. We aimed to be a sort of Texas Ranger outfit, riding airplanes instead of horses and, in some cases, if I do say it myself, the boys did pretty well. Well enough to make the roar of an airplane motor like the voice of doom to many a frisky outlaw.

Eleven o’clock was the hour for the mail to arrive. I’d just got back from the western patrol to Laredo and stalked into the office with my helmet and goggles still on. It was only a gesture--I never get any mail.

Sitting on the edge of a desk in the operations room, underneath the mailboxes, was Penoch O’Reilly. He was holding a letter in his clenched hand, and his eyes were gazing out of the window with a look in them which was not good to see.

Enthroned in the inner office, at their respective desks, were “Pop” Cravan, our adjutant, and Captain George Kennard, our C. O. Pop was round and obese and bald-headed, with a fiery temper, a nasty tongue, a soft heart and a keen mind.

“Hell!” he snorted loudly. “Another of those reserve officers ordered here for three months active duty at his own request! I suppose he’ll crack up three ships and be more trouble than a case of hives.”

“Who is he?” demanded the stocky, spike-haired little captain in his raucous voice.

“Name is Ralph Kennedy, and he’s a shavetail in the reserve.”

“I know him!” barked Penoch O’Reilly suddenly. “Here’s a letter from him, in fact.”

“Enter into the sanctum, sirrah, and make him known to me,” the C. O. invited him spaciously.

Penoch strode in with ludicrously long steps. He was so short that he’d have to stand on a stepladder to kick a duck in the stomach.

I drifted in lazily, but my curiosity was alive. If I wasn’t wrong, the look on Penoch’s face, as he brooded over that letter, did not indicate ungovernable enthusiasm about the arrival of the new man.

“I knew him a little before the war,” O’Reilly stated in that deep bass voice of his.

Coming from his little body, that voice was as surprizing as it would be to get a brass band effect by blowing on a harmonica.

“He’s not so bad, I guess. Lived an eventful life, anyhow. Was a sergeant in the Air Service--in my outfit a lot of the time during the war--and learned to fly then. Got a commission in the reserve when the war was over. He’s a wonderful mechanic, and he can tell interesting yarns.”

“How well can he fly?” demanded Pop truculently. “With these bandits raising hell, and with scarcely enough crates to get flying time in on, we can’t afford to let amateurs spread D.H.’s all over the landscape!”

“Pretty good,” Penoch admitted grudgingly. “He was an automobile race driver at one time, a trick motorcycle artist at another, and all that.”

“Due in this afternoon,” remarked Pop, examining the orders in his hand. “Well, I hope he can play bridge.”

Penoch’s set face relaxed into the ghost of a grin.

“He’s pretty good at most card games,” he said mysteriously. “Going back to the tents, Slim?”

“Uh-huh. All quiet along the river, Cap.”

“I’ll go with you,” Penoch said evenly, and we marched out.

We were surely a comedy team together; and we frequently were together, because Penoch and I had become close friends as a result of several imbroglios in which we had engaged. He was just an inch over five feet, so you can readily realize that I could have worn the little squirt for a watch-charm.

“Anything special on your mind?” I inquired casually.

“Yeah; but I’ll wait until we get to the tent,” he told me.

We marched on down the line of buildings that bounded the southern end of the small sandy airdrome. To the east and west were big black corrugated iron hangars, baking in the sun. Northward, a fence was the rim of the field, and a few miles farther north was the rim of one hundred and fifty solid miles of mesquite.

While we are galloping down the line toward the tents, take a look at one of the most amazing chunks of humanity I’ve ever met. Penoch, as I’ve said, was short, but his torso was round as a barrel, and his legs straight and thick and sturdy. His muscles, I’d found, were like steel cables, and his strength was as much out of proportion to his size as his voice was.

It was his face, though, that made him prominent in any company. It was square and brown; and a pair of the largest, keenest, brightest blue eyes you ever saw sparkled forth from it and reflected an unquenchable joy in life for its own sake. His hair was red--not pink or sandy or auburn, but red. His eyebrows had been bleached by the sun to a pale yellow; and below his short, turned-up nose, a cocky little mustache, waxed to pin-points, was a similar tint.

His teeth were big and strong and white, and between them, on occasions, there rolled a loud, Rabelaisian “Ho-ho-ho!” that made the welkin ring. Everyone in hearing distance chuckled with him. He looked a bit like a burly little elf--but when he was serious and worried, as he was now, wrinkles leaped into being, and those eyes got hard as diamonds. Then age and experience and hard competence were written for all the world to read.

He is, was, and will be until he dies, one of the most famous characters in the Army. Some of the highlights of his Army career include being stranded in a West Virginia town, where the miners, on strike, were hostile; declaring martial law without authority and running the town for thirteen days, until he could get out; being captured in the Philippines by hostile Moros, given up for lost, and finally returning, safe and sound, an honorary chieftain of the tribe; and numberless other accomplishments of renown. He had been court-martialed a hundred times, due to his peculiar sense of humor, and had always been acquitted, because a board of officers who’ve laughed steadily for hours at the testimony can’t get tough.

Incidentally, he usually hauled his friends into any trouble which he found for himself. I myself had been court-martialed, along with him and Charley De Shields, just a month before. All due to his funny ideas. It gives a little sidelight on a man who is tough to describe, so I’ll tell it.

The three of us were in San Antonio on a week-end leave, and at one in the morning we were a bit tight, so to speak. Penoch called up a couple of girls for the purpose of throwing a roadhouse dance party. Being respectable young ladies and in bed, they haughtily bawled him out for calling at such an hour. That made Penoch decide upon vengeance. Charley De Shields is just as nutty as Penoch, and I’m no paragon of dignity.

It was Penoch’s idea, though. The apartment house was a small one, in a quiet section of town, and it boasted a small, cozily furnished lobby. We proceeded to divest that lobby of all its furniture. When we finished, we had chairs on top of Charley’s sedan, a davenport on the hood, and everything from potted palms to rugs and bric-a-brac inside the car. The lobby was furnished with a telephone, when we left.