CHAPTER XXII
MAROONED ON THE DESERT
There was nothing to be done but to accept the situation, little as either Roy or Peggy relished the eccentric "professor" for an aerial traveling companion. Only Peggy remarked with withering scorn:
"I think you might have waited till you were asked, don't you?"
The professor's reply was characteristic.
"My dear young lady, if I never sold anybody a bottle of my medicine except those that really wanted it I'd have a hard time getting along."
Roy was on the point of exclaiming "Bother your old medicine," when he suddenly recollected that had it not been for this queer personage they might not have been in the aeroplane at all. Instead—but Roy didn't care to think further along those lines.
Far below them suddenly appeared a giant halo of light. It hung above the desert, wheeling and gyrating about five feet above the glaring white of the alkali.
"A halo," remarked Professor Wandering William gazing over the edge of the chassis.
"A halo? Whose—Roy's?" inquired Peggy.
"No, it is one of those halos peculiar to the desert," was the professor's rejoinder; "it is caused by heat refraction or something of the sort. I recall I did read a lengthy explanation of it somewhere once, but I've forgotten it now."
"Does it portend anything?" asked Roy, turning round for a moment from his levers.
"No. not that I know of, at least—except that it's hot."
"Good gracious, we don't need a halo to tell us that," cried Peggy, and then regarding Professor Wandering William with that frank, straight "between the eyes" look, as Jimsy called it, Peggy remarked, "Do you know, Professor Wandering William, that you are a very odd person?"
"Odd, my dear young lady. How so?"
"Why at times you are quite different to—to what you are at others," stumbled Peggy lamely. It wasn't just what she wanted to say, but as she told herself it expressed it tolerably.
"Almost human sometimes, eh?" chuckled Professor Wandering William with a very odd winkle of his gray eyes; "well, you are not the first person who has said that."
To herself Peggy thought, "I'm sure that if he'd cut his hair and take off that dreadful goatee he'd be quite good looking. And his eyes, too, they twinkle and flash sometimes in a way very much out of keeping with his general appearance." But Professor Wandering William, seemingly quite oblivious to Peggy's frank gaze, was humming "Annie Laurie" to himself and gazing down at the flying desert as it flashed by below.
"At this rate we'll be in Blue Creek long before those other varmints," he observed at length; "that is, if all goes right. Wonderful things these aeroplanes. Great scheme for selling patent medicine. Why I could scatter my advertisements over a whole county in a day's time if I had one of these. That is unless I scattered myself first."
There was a sudden loud hissing sound from the motor. At the same instant the propeller ceased to revolve and the monoplane dashed downward with fearful force.
Roy worked at his levers desperately, while Peggy, white faced but silent, clung tightly to the sides of the chassis. Professor Wandering William did not utter a word, but his lips moved, as, from a pleasing rapid forward motion their course suddenly changed to that fearful downward plunge through space.
It seemed that in the molecule of time that intervened between the sudden stopping of the propeller and the moment that they reached the proximity of the ground that a whole lifetime flashed in front of Peggy. "Is this the end?" she caught herself thinking.
But it was not. Roy's skill averted that. He handled the disabled aeroplane so that as it struck the alkali its landing wheels sustained the shock. But even with all his skill he could not entirely ward off the shock. The monoplane struck the alkali in a shower of white dust that hurtled high above it like a breaking sea wave.
Peggy and the professor managed to hold on and resist the grinding shock, but Roy did not fare so well. Like a projectile from a catapult the shock flung him far. He came grinding down into the sand on one shoulder, ploughing a little furrow. Then he lay very still, while Peggy wondered vaguely if she was going to faint.
To scramble from the stranded machine was the work of an instant for the erratic professor, and he extended his hand to Peggy. With a supreme effort she pulled herself together and accepted his proffered help. But agitated as she: was, she did not fail to notice a surprising fact, and that was that the professor's hair was on one side! The next instant he caught the girl's startled eyes fixed upon it, but in that space of time he readjusted it, so that he appeared exactly as usual. But to Peggy the recollection of that deranged hair was unforgettable.
"It's—it's a wig!" she gasped to herself, and then, casting all other thoughts aside, sped to Roy's side.
"Roy! Roy! are you badly hurt, dear?" she breathed, going down on her knees in the rough surface of the desert.
The boy stirred uneasily and his eyes opened.
"Oh, is it you, Peggy? I guess I was knocked out for a minute.
It's my shoulder. Ouch! Don't touch it."
The boy winced as Peggy's soft hand touched the injured member.
"Allow me. I've got a little skill at surgery."'
It was Professor Wandering William's voice, and Peggy caught herself wondering that he didn't make some reference to his infallible bone set or wonder-working liniment. But he didn't. Instead, he knelt by Roy's side, and with a few deft strokes of his knife had cut away the boy's shirt and bared a shoulder that was rapidly turning a deep blue.
Tenderly as a woman might have, Wandering William felt the wound.
"Hurt?" he asked, as Roy winced, biting his lips to keep from crying out under the agony.
"Hurt?" echoed Peggy indignantly; "of course it does."
Professor Wandering William looked up with an odd air of authority in his keen eyes.
"Please fetch me some water from the aeroplane," he said, and Peggy had no choice but to obey.
Professor Wandering William, picking Roy up in his arms as if he were a baby, instead of a 165-pound boy, carried him after her and laid the injured lad out in the scant strip of shade afforded by the aeroplane. Then, with bits of canvas ripped from the cover which had served to conceal him when he entered the aerial vehicle, the strange wanderer skillfully bathed and then bandaged the wound.
"Nothing more than a bad sprain," he announced.
Roy groaned.
"And just as I was going ahead at such tiptop speed, too," he complained. "I won't be able to use this arm for a month the way it feels."
"Never mind, Roy, I can drive the aeroplane," comforted Peggy. But
Roy was fretful from pain.
"What can a girl do?" he demanded; "this is a man's work. Oh, it's too bad! It's—"
Suddenly the pain-crazed lad realized what he was saying and broke off abruptly:
"Don't mind me, sis. I'm all worked up, I guess. But if it hadn't been for this delay we'd have beaten them out. And now—"
"And now the first thing to do is to see what ails this old machine," said Professor Wandering William briskly. "Let me lift you into the what-you-may-call-um, my boy, and make you as comfortable as possible on this canvas."
The professor skillfully arranged the canvas from which he had cut the bandages, and making a pillow for Roy out of his own coat, he lifted the lad into the chassis.
"There now, you'll do," he said, as his ministrations were completed. "And now, young lady, as you know more about this thing than I do let's have a look at it and see what particular brand of illness it is suffering from."
A brief examination showed Peggy that the radiator—the intricate mesh-work of pipes in which the circulating water for cooling the cylinders is kept at a low temperature—was leaking, and that almost all their supply of water had leaked out. This had caused the cylinders of the motor to overheat and had stopped the aeroplane in midair.
"Bad—is it?"'
Professor Wandering William noted the despairing look on Peggy's face as she discovered the cause of the stoppage.
"As bad as bad can be," the girl rejoined seriously; "it means if we can't get water and something to stop that leak with that we can't go on or go back. We're stuck right here."
"Phew!" Wandering William's lips puckered in a whistle. "I should just say that is bad."
He looked about him. On every side stretched the dazzling white alkali, with here and there a little dust devil dancing as if in mockery at their plight.
On all that vast expanse they seemed the only living things, and Wandering William knew the desert well enough to realize that it is not good to linger on its treacherous sands.