The air splasher

“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.