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In: Adventure·Novels·American Literature
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #73579.
The opening · free to read
Author of “Groody Among the Gushers,” “The Lone Raider,” etc.
Life on the border had hit a dry spell for some unknown reason. Not a ---- thing had happened, was happening or seemed about to happen. For approximately four months the border patrolmen, of which, at times, I had the honor to be one, were slowly dying of dry-rot. We galloped up and down the frisky Rio Grande from Brownsville to San Diego, including waystations, with our customary eagerness to spot something of interest in connection with smuggling, rustling and other diversions of the Spigs and American renegades, but we were like a bunch of mosquitoes sucking on a piece of marble.
The McMullen flight, which I decorated with my lanky presence, was composed of youths like “Sleepy” Spears, “Tex” MacDowell and other flyers whose ideas of life do not include monotony as an ingredient of Paradise, and we were beginning to discuss the fact that the border was becoming really disgustingly effete. As Sleepy Spears put it in his slow drawl:
“The ---- of it is that there’s getting to be so ---- much law down here they’ll be sending delegations from Connecticut, Michigan and the Oneida Community to study Sheriff Bill Trowbridge’s methods, and we might lose our jobs!”
All of which just goes to show that it is darkest just before you switch on the electric lights, and that it’s a long worm which has no turning.
When the big news struck us we needed it, and I needed it most of all. It was the day after St. Patrick’s day, and when I awakened to greet the morning after in Laredo I was sleeping in an alley, and alongside me was Lieutenant George Groody, at that time one of the leading lights of the American Air Service.
Groody had invited me, two days before, to participate in his annual celebration of St. Patrick’s birthday.
“As an enemy of snakes,” stated Groody, “Old Pat deserves the consideration of every true Irishman.”
After the day was done I agreed, because I was on the verge of seeing a private collection of nice pink and blue ones myself. How was I to know that Groody invariably started St. Patrick’s day in Mexico by ordering six gin fizzes set up in a row, and, starting with this little eye-opener, proceeding on to drinks adjacent? At midnight of the holiday we were drinking to Clemenceau, Lafayette and Garibaldi, having long before run out of dead flyers, movie stars and famous Irishmen.
Anyway, as I sent my De Haviland staggering on its way back to McMullen I was, temporarily, a prohibitionist, with particular reference to tequila and mescal and aguadiente, which are Mexican beverages guaranteed to grow hair on the top of Mt. Everest. Any one of the three will make a rabbit spit in a bulldog’s face.
The airdome at McMullen is small, flat and hard to land on without over-running. I made it by a miracle, and as I stalked into headquarters I was greeted by a very perspicacious and inquiring look from the good eye of Cap Kennard, our genial flight commander.
“And did you enjoy yourself, ‘Slim’?” he inquired, while “Pop” Cravath, our superannuated adjutant, laughed raucously.
“Temporarily,” I admitted.
“Think you’re going to bed now, put icebags on your head and tomatoes in your stomach, and convalesce?” pursued Kennard, his scarred face holding a peculiar expression.
He’s been in twenty-three airplane wrecks, and what he did to the ships was as nothing to what he had done to his face.
Judging from photos of our stocky, chipper little C. O., he had joined the Air Service as a handsome young man with a face which could pass in a crowd on a dark night without sending any damsel into hysterics. After a couple of years in France and more time on the border, however, he looked as if he were breaking in a new pan for somebody else.
“What’s up, Cap?” I demanded, being able to see through a ladder if some one lends me his glasses.
“The chief’s got his bill through Congress, the bombing tests on those German battleships are going to take place this summer, and you, Slim, are ordered immediately to Langham Field, Virginia. You’re going in advance of the picked flyers who’ll drop the said bombs upon the bodies and persons of the Ostfriesland and other boats, and you’ve got to be out of here on the four o’clock train to San Antonio. Get under a cold shower, take some salts, drink a lot of icewater, pack the extra sock of yours, and may ---- have mercy on your soul!”
All of which more or less accounts for the fact that I, Slim Evans in person, was ensconced on the edge of Chesapeake Bay three days later. Langham Field is in the commonwealth of Virginia with the bay bounding one edge of it. All around it on the other sides there are marshes and estuaries and swamps and puddles and so forth.
The mosquitoes have a formal review each night, and march and countermarch up and down any face within reach. Every once in a while there comes an order for them to take careful aim and fire. The first night I spent in the officers’ barracks I had no screens on my windows, and the mosquitoes were so thick that when I started to throw my shirt in a corner it just hung right in the air.
Seriously speaking, I was in a very pleasant frame of mind at that, and I wouldn’t be far wrong if I said that just about every other flyer in the service was in a similar mental condition. Granting, of course, that any man who flies for a living has any mind at all to be in any condition whatever.
The facts were that for weary months General Mallory, the chief, had been lifting his melodious voice to high heaven, Congress and the world at large, insisting that a bunch of airplanes flying out to sea with bombs aboard could considerably embarrass any navy approaching our shores. The fact that I was at Langham Field was simply due to the fact that Congress had finally taken a few dollars out of the appropriation for a new post office with a solid gold cupola for the town of Four Forks, Arkansas, and added it to the money which had been set aside to dredge the Yahee River in Mississippi and turned it over to the Air Service. The latter money was made available when the Yahee turned out to be a brook which had temporarily dried up.
The Air Service, I already knew, had developed a four thousand pound bomb, but the dope was that for the tests mere peas, as it were, weighing only two thousand pounds, would be used. It was the general’s contention, which seemed to the naked eye to be well-founded, that a few of these eggs, each with a yolk consisting of a thousand pounds of T. N. T., when laid alongside a battleship might embarrass it a trifle.
In fact, he had an idea that said monarch of the seas might become extinct almost immediately. It meant plenty for the Air Service if they could prove that they could fly a hundred miles or so out to sea and bother a navy. And when one gets down to hardpan, every flyer I ever knew has a certain pride in his corps which is seldom equaled and never surpassed in any organization I know, from the Independent Order of Odd Fellows to the Queen’s Own Royal Mounted Sussex Fusileers, which organization acts as bodyguard to the Prince of Wales, I understand, and have heavy casulaties daily as men die of heart failure, trying to follow him around.
I had but vague ideas of just what the plans were, and least of all as to why I had been ordered on ahead, until I reported to Major Lamb Johnson next morning. Major Lamb Johnson is a fox-faced little fellow with a spike mustache consisting of five hairs on one side and four on the other. He has a habit of blowing frequently with a loud report, and when he comes down to earth again the second lieutenants can be found fainting on the ground all around him.
He was striding up and down his office when I entered. From the windows of it I could see the long line of huge, corrugated iron hangars which bounded the southern edge of the field, and the one huge dirigible hangar on the northern side. Eastward was Chesapeake Bay, and on the western boundary were a few more hangars and some frame administration buildings.
“Come in, Evans,” stated the Major. “You are here a month and a half before the hundred-odd picked veterans of the service arrive to commence practising for the bombing tests. The reason for your orders is that we want you as a ferry pilot. Your job will be to commute between here and Cleveland, Ohio, where the Martin factory is located, flying a new twin-motored Martin bomber to Langham each trip. Have you ever flown one?”
I shook my head.
“We have two on the field now, and Captain Lawton will teach you. You had a lot of big ship experience in France, I believe, and you also were officer-in-charge of ferrying three tankwings from Long Island to Texas a year or so ago, were you not?”
I agreed to this without reservation.
“The big ship squadron will be the 114th to which you’ll be assigned immediately. Captain Lawton in command. It’s just a skeleton squadron until the other flyers arrive, of course. Report to him immediately. Just one thing more, Evans.”
I knew something was coming. Major Lamb was always full of good advice and uplifting thoughts.
“I have never served in the same outfit with you. However, your reputation is that of a flyer who gets where he’s going by hook or crook, but that as an officer you are somewhat lax and careless. We are face to face with the biggest opportunity the service has ever had. Every man must put his shoulder to the wheel and live, think and breathe nothing but these tests, working twenty-four hours a day if necessary and----”
He went on with his discourse for some five minutes for the good of my soul and the glory of ----. At the end I expected that he’d lead in prayer for my unregenerate soul or something. Finally I got out after agreeing piously with everything he’d said and resolving to lead a better life.
Then I hied me up to the ten big hangars which were to house the 114th, and found old Cap Lawton, who’s three inches over six feet and hence only a couple of inches shorter than I. In lankiness we are about alike, but whereas his feet are bigger than mine, my nose makes his seem like merely a microscopic growth in the middle of his thin face.
I knew him well, and he greeted me with a broad smile as he shook hands. After fanning a while I found out that my teammate in trips from Cleveland to Langham would be Les Fernald. We’d ferry two ships at a time.
“You’ll be in command of Flight Three of the squadron, Slim, after the ships get here and the boys come in. At present that flight’s got one sergeant first class in charge, and two mechanics. Later it’ll have four sergeants, meaning one crew chief apiece for the ships, and eight mechanics. Your flight sergeant is Marston, a good man, although peculiar. Better stroll down and get acquainted with him, eh? You’ll probably use him as mechanic on these trips of yours.”
I strolled down to hangar fourteen which, it seemed, was to house the ships of Flight Three for the summer, and heard voices from the little tool room partitioned off in one corner of said iron structure. There wasn’t a ship in the flight, of course, so the mechanics were about as busy as so many Congressmen.
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