IV
During the ensuing three days we saw plenty of it, and finally went through the procedure of inspecting and testing two more Martins. By this time the Martin factory was under heavy guard. The Martins being vitally important—in fact, indispensable—for the conduct of the bombing tests, the company was under a heavy forfeit clause in the contract for twenty thereof, and the mere idea that there was dirty work at the cross-roads struck them with panic.
Detectives were rounding up the discharged and discredited employees little by little and each by each. So far no confession had been third-degreed out of the men. The first lot all had alibis.
Believe me, though, we inspected the ships from stem to stern and from rudder to nose again the next morning before we started on our way. Our route lay over the flat Ohio fields, almost due south to McCook Field at Dayton. There we gassed up, and set sail eastward to Boundville, which is a West Virginia village right on the bank of the Ohio River in that little sliver of West Virginia which hides coyly between Ohio and Pennsylvania. At Boundville the government maintains a little way-station on the Washington-Dayton airway. It’s just a field with a few spare parts and some gas and oil available.
It was a nice trip.
In case you don’t know a Martin, let me elucidate a bit for thee. The ship weighs four tons, and has about seventy feet of wingspread. On each wing, just far enough from the cockpit to allow the propellers to whirl without hitting anything, a Liberty motor is set in a maze of huge, trunklike struts which hold it up and in and down; in fact, keep it safely anchored.
The pilot’s cockpit, with two seats side by side in it, is set a bit forward of the wings, about on a line with the two propellers in front of the motors. Ahead of the pilot’s cockpit, in the very nose of the ship, is an observer’s cockpit, equipped with bomb-sights, glass in the flooring to look down through, bomb releases, and about a thousand other things with technical names as long as your arm, or even as long as mine, which is considerably lengthy.
Directly in back of the pilot’s cockpit, in the fore part of the huge fuselage, is the hollow bomb compartment, with bomb racks which can carry two tons of bombs, ranging from a swarm of little twenty-five pounders up through three hundreds, six hundreds, two one-thousand pounders or one two-thousand baby.
In back of this compartment, about half way to the tail surfaces, there is a cockpit for the mechanic or radio operator. The tail surfaces consist of elevators, vertical fin and stabilizer, each very large, but otherwise the same as in any ship, and it has two big rudders, both worked by the same rudder bar.
Les and I, like fleas on elephants’ backs, set our course from Dayton to a bit south of the airline to make sure. When we sighted the wide, sluggish-looking Ohio we simply flew up the stream until the field at Boundville came in sight.
It’s somewhat of a trick to land a Martin, because you’ve got two motors to handle, the ship is so heavy that it settles rapidly, and the pilot’s cockpit is about ten feet above the ground. That makes leveling off a foot above the ground a bit difficult, at first. I made it the first try by bull luck in that small field, and Les did it with nonchalant ease, of course.
Marston had been riding alongside me the whole trip looking straight ahead and not vouchsafing me so much as a look, either dirty or otherwise. He and I exchanged as few words as the law allowed. The cars from town commenced to arrive immediately, of course, to look over the huge ships which were so awe-inspiring compared to the De Havilands the townspeople were accustomed to. There was one lonesome soldier in charge of the gas and oil.
We were to spend the night there, there being no wild rush. We taxied the ships up to the line in front of the gas shack, turned them around, and climbed out after running out the motors.
“Both of you stay here until the ships are gassed and oiled, and until dark, when the people quit coming,” I told them. “This trip you, Marston, will spend the night out here on guard, and next trip Bailey can take it. That suit you, Les?”
“Sure,” returned that young gentlemen. “At that, Bailey, ’d advise you to stay out here rather than in the one hotel down there. It’s name ought to be the ‘Bedbug’s Roost,’ and it has the first collection of bowls and pitchers and other sanitary brica-brac I’ve seen since the hogs ate my brother.”
Bailey, one of the clean-looking, bright youngsters who came into the army during the war and stayed, grinned and allowed that he’d try it. Les and I accepted a ride into town with our baggage after I’d made arrangements with the soldier on duty to supply Marston with blankets. George William set to work bleakly, not uttering so much as a word. He would be out there all alone, because the field guard’s duty did not include night work.
We saw a wild western movie called “Temptations of the Flesh,” fought off curious questioners the whole length of the one street, and retired early because there was nothing else to do. It was the sort of a town I’d like to come to after a month of ribaldry, to settle down for a week or two and do nothing but drink Pluto and watch the sun go down.
Our start was planned for seven o’clock, and we were out there right on time. We wanted to cross the towering Cumberlands of West Virginia early, before it got hot and the cañons and rivers and woods and rocks made the air too bumpy.
Early as we were, however, a parade of cars followed us out. The residents of Boundville considered eleven A. M. the middle of the night, and four was the fashionable breakfast hour. As our Ford bumped into the field, leading a miscellaneous collection of vehicles, I spotted Marston reclining in his blankets under a wing.
That made me pretty sore. He knew the hour we were to start, and we had sent a man out to him with a vacuum bottle full of coffee and half a dozen buttered rolls for his breakfast. The messenger was standing alongside his car, smoking a cigaret.
I galloped over to George William, followed in order by Les and Bailey. Marston should have had the canvas covers off motors and cockpits, and everything ready for the warmup.
“Sorry to disturb your rest, Marston,” I told him as we came within a few feet of him. “It’s a shame to get you up before noon, but you can get your beauty sleep back at Langham.”
By that time I was right over him, and as I looked down at him I saw that his face was a curious greenish color. His eyes glared up into mine with that non-stop hatred in them. Then, without a word, he staggered to his feet and over to one side of the field, where he had what looked like a paroxysm of coughing; apparently trying to vomit, but couldn’t. Then he walked back to us, and seemed to be all right, temporarily.
“Sick?” I asked him, while curious onlookers gathered close.
“Get back where you belong!” yelled Les, and herded them away.
“I never was sicker in my life,” stated Marston, mumbling his words.
“Any idea what made you so?”
“No, sir. Late last night a couple of fellows came out and gabbed a while, and finally went to town and got some sandwiches and coffee and we ate ’em. They beat it away, and I went to sleep a while and woke up sick as a dog. And I’ve been sick ever since.”
“Haven’t been drinking any of this moonshine?”
“No,” he barked savagely, as if I was inferring that he was responsible for the war or something.
“Well, are you up to the trip?”
“Sure.”
“The —— he is,” stated Fernald. “He’d better find a doctor and lay up here a few days and meet us in Cleveland again for the next trip. He’s as green as a drafted mountaineer, and——”
He was interrupted by another paroxysm on the part of George William. It was horrible to see his body wracked and wrenched around, without relieving the terrible nausea.
“Climb in one of those cars and get to a doctor as soon as we leave,” I told him. “The next Martins’ll be ready in five days. Meet us in Cleveland then.”
He made no answer, but walked weakly over to the side of the field, and sat there numbly. Bailey primed both motors, and then Les in his ship and I in mine pressed the self-starter buttons, and soon the four great Libertys were roaring a diapason of power. I watched the maze of instruments—just double as many as in a single-motored ship, of course—and then idled my left motor while I gave the right one full gun, tried it on either switch of the double-ignition system, and listened carefully.
Everything was sweet as a nut, and the same procedure was gone through with the other motor. My ship was r’arin’ to go, and so was Fernald’s. The field guard pulled the blocks and tossed them into the rear cockpit, and I turned my ship on a dime by using only the left-hand motor, which pulled the ship around to the right. Then followed Fernald’s huge Martin, like a house on wheels, up the field for the take-off.
The field lay practically east and west, and the western edge went right to the edge of the river. The wind was from the west. There was a screen of trees and undergrowth between the edge and the Ohio, the tops of the trees some fifteen feet above the level of the field. The growth was on the banks of the river, which sloped down from the field to the water.
As I was turning for the take-off Les, with Bailey beside him, gave his ship the guns. It roared away across the field, and in a moment his steady pressure on the wheel had the tail up. I waited, in order to give the air, which would be badly scrambled by the wash of two propellers, a chance to clear a bit. I set my goggles, jazzed each motor a bit, and shoved the two throttles all the way on just as Les left the ground.
In a Martin there is no obstruction to your view, the motors being to each side of you. It took all my strength, pushing against the wheel, to get the tail up. As my big bomber picked up speed Les was circling over the river.
Then two things happened simultaneously. I heard a wild mixture of yells, screams and shrieks from the cars drawn up on the edges of the field at the same moment that the tail of my ship hit the ground again with a terrific crunch and the wheel under my hands suddenly became free, as easily movable as if it was attached to nothing whatever. I took a split-second to look up, and saw Fernald’s Martin, in a half-spin, drop below the edge of the trees. The next second a reversed Niagara of water rose above the foliage.
My brain, none too hardy an instrument at best, was literally as numb as a piece of sausage. But I could not think of Les then. My elevators were no more—that was why the wheel had become free in my hand and the tail back on the ground. I was within a hundred feet of the trees, traveling at more than fifty miles an hour, with no chance of taking off. In a flash my hand dropped to the throttles. By cutting one, the other motor would drag the ship around, probably wrecking a wing, but saving me.
Even as I did so, I knew I could not do it. For those —— cars had lined each edge of the field, and my ship would probably plow through them, killing every fool spectator in the bunch.
There was nothing to do but let it go straight ahead. It was slowing up, but four tons which has been going close to sixty miles an hour can’t stop as quick as a motorless Ford going up Pike’s Peak when the brakes are applied. As inevitably as fate itself, I was trundling swiftly toward those trees, with only a frail cockpit between myself and them, and two props to hem me in and keep me from jumping.
I cut the switches fifty feet from the trees. Up went my goggles, and off went my belt. I got to my feet on the seat the second before the ship plunged over the embankment. The trees were ten feet ahead. As it crashed over the lip of the field toward them I crouched, and leaped like a kangaroo. And by the seven thousand sweethearts of King Solomon I got my hands around a limb that swayed underneath me, and there I clung, like a monkey by its tail, thirty feet above the base of the tree.
Had I gone down with the ship all that would have remained of Slim Evans would have been an over-sized pancake. The four-ton ship crashed against the sturdy trees, and the observer’s cockpit crumpled like an eggshell. The trees swept half through both wings, and at the finish one great oak was the exclusive occupant of the cockpit which had once been mine. I’d have been wrapped around it in loving embrace, never to leave it until they scraped me off.
I scrambled on this swaying reed of a limb, and worked my way back toward the trunk of the tree. I had no time for the fainting, screaming, yelling and generally hysterical bunch of nitwits on the field, but safe in a crotch of the tree gazed down upon the river. There was Fernald’s Martin, half-submerged, and on the upflung tail was Mr. Fernald himself, accompanied by Mr. Bailey.
I was so relieved I let out a loud yelp. If I could talk as loud as that habitually we wouldn’t have had to wire Washington at all.
Fernald, squatting like a frog on a lily pad, waved airily to me, clinging pensively to my perch in a tree.
“Don’t mind if I leave this here for a while, do you Slim?” he inquired in his placid way. “Hurt?”
“Nope. How about you?”
“Bailey’s got a broken rib, or maybe two or three or four,” yelled Fernald. “Otherwise all present and accounted for. Looks to me as though there was dirty work along the river.”
“I’ll see about a boat for you,” I told him, and started to climb down the tree toward the surging mob beneath me.
I oiled up the mental machinery and had it whirring away at a great rate before I got down. While still ten feet up I gave orders.
“Get back on the field and stay there,” I told the crowd. “And I mean it. Beat it—fast! All but Marston! Wait a minute. Who’s got a boat or knows of one?”
“I—I got one!” stuttered one red-faced man with a gray mustache of the vintage of 1850.
“Get at it quick?”
“Y-Yes.”
“Get it and get out after the two men on the river—quick! Rest of you back on the field.”
They obeyed pronto, talking to each other continuously and with no one listening to anybody else. I had a sort of a kind of a plan of procedure staked out by the time I got down and faced the scaredest, whitest, most shaken-up sergeant in the American or any other army.
“You’re sicker now, I presume,” I told him grimly.
Marston could not speak. His tongue seemed stuck to the roof of his mouth, and he was a truly pitiful sight, I suppose, had I had room for any pity in my mind.
I was about to launch forth on something, when one of the occasional sensible ideas I get seized the opportunity to make itself known to me. So I folded up my tongue and said curtly:
“My elevator controls went bad on the take-off. Looks to me like Fernald’s went bad in the air, and it was just the grace of —— he was over the water, and only a few feet high. Help me with this fuselage.”
Marston, as I said, was like a man in a trance. His weakness seemed to have been effectually scared out of him, and he didn’t try to vomit once. Which gave me pause for thought, in itself. He hadn’t been in my ship.
We looked at the elevators, which were absolutely undamaged. The control wires were attached to the little cabane struts above and below the great linen fins—but they hung loosely. Then I broke through the fuselage carefully, so that patching would be all that was necessary to repair it, and took a look inside. The tail-control cables go through the fuselage, and are not visible from the outside except at either end.
In a very few minutes the evidence was all before me. The cables had been filed inside. Not completely through, but nearly. The object was clear. The few unfiled strands of the cables were sufficiently strong to hold and work the elevators when the ship was on the ground. But when it picked up speed, and one commenced to use the things with all the force of the propeller blast, plus the speed of the ship, acting against the surfaces, the cable was not strong enough to hold.
I had been lucky, in a way, in that mine had been filed a bit too much and had broken before I was going at full speed. Les’ had given way over the river. It was my guess that the perpetrator of the thing had hoped that the cables would hold for a while, and give way during the trip some time when the ship was going at an unusually fast pace, getting underneath a cloud or something like that. It didn’t seem likely that he or they would want the wrecks to happen on the field.
Marston saw it, and he was a broken man. For a moment, that is. My eyes must have shown what was in my mind as they finally met his. He straightened like a shot, and his sullen, strained face suddenly flushed as red as fire. He stood there, daring me to say something, and hating me worse than ever because of what had happened. And as I stood there I was utterly convinced that I was looking at as low and rotten a murderer as one would meet in a tour of the United States, where most of the murderers are.
But I held my tongue, except to say—
“Sick or no sick, you’re going in a boat with me and we’ll look over Fernald’s ship.”
He didn’t say ah, yes, or no; didn’t expostulate, explain or try to clear himself. With a baleful glare in his eyes and a shadow on his heavy face he went with me in a Ford, driven by a kid who tried to break all speed records, and we got a boat a half mile away.
We met Fernald’s party on the way. Fernald transfered to my flat-bottomed dreadnaught, while Bailey went on toward shore. The boy was white and sick, the freckles standing out on his face as if one was looking at them through a stereoscope. I just asked one question—
“Did you inspect these ships from tail to nose last night?”
“Yes, sir!” yelled Bailey, his eyes like those of a madman.
Then they sought Marston’s and so did Fernald’s, only Les was calmly curious and appraising, where the overwrought youngster was half insane.
“Beat it on, Bailey, and don’t talk a word,” I told him.
I told Les what I’d found. Marston brooded in one end of the boat while the Boundville veteran, rowing us, bent to his work and asked one question after another which never got answered.
Well, exactly the same things had been done to Fernald’s ship as to mine.
“We’ll talk when we get back,” I told him, jerking my head toward Marston.
George William caught the gesture. A wild, leaping fire flamed in his eyes, and a shaking paw was extended toward me.
“I know what you’ll do!” he snarled. “You’ve got me now, and you’ll railroad me to Leavenworth, —— you!”
“Shut up, Marston!” I snapped. “Remember who you’re talking to!”
There was a second of tension in that boat which was enough to make one’s flesh crawl. Marston, his full face like a dark demon’s, sat like a statue, arm still out-thrust toward me.
“Listen, Marston,” I said quietly. “No one holds you responsible for this. My opinion is that the men who brought you coffee put dope of some kind in it; that you slept like the dead, while they did the work, and that what they put in the java is reponsible for you being sick. I don’t like you, and I never did and never will, as a man, but you’re a soldier with a good record, and as far as I’m concerned you’re above suspicion.”
His big body relaxed suddenly, as if he had gone suddenly limp. A queer look leaped into his eyes, a sort of calculating gleam, as it were.
“Don’t get excited, Marston,” Fernald advised him in his equable way. “You weren’t supposed to stay up all night, anyway, with the ship after the usual sightseers had left. Nobody’s hurt much. Don’t lose your shirt or go wild.”
“Yes, sir,” mumbled the sergeant, and relapsed into his brooding.
When we reached shore I gave the orders.
“Go to town with Bailey, Marston, and get a doctor for him. Both of you go to bed at the hotel. You’re still feeling bad. My orders are that you spend the day in bed.”
“Yes, sir.”
They trundled off in the same Ford which I had used, and then Fernald turned to me.
“What about it, Slim?”
“Open and shut,” I told him. “It’s as plain as the nose on my face, and that’s no secret. In the first place, Marston, as you may know, got as high as major in the war. I was under him when I was a cadet, and he was a harsh martinet who made life miserable for every cadet. He hated me, and I returned it with interest.
“Just a couple of days ago, when I found him a sergeant, I took off the old blouse and bars and licked him to a frazzle just for old time’s sake. He doesn’t figure there’s room enough in the whole world for the two of us. That cock-and-bull story about a couple of mountaineers driving in, and then bringing him coffee is transparent. He filed the wires.”
“Maybe he’d file yours, and get out of riding because of pretended sickness, but he’s got nothing against me,” Les protested, his eyes resting thoughtfully on me.
“Wait a minute. I don’t figure that getting rid of me was all there was to it. Marston was a major, shot back to a sergeant. That made him hate the whole Army, and the Air Service in particular. I’ve heard him call the Flying Corps a bunch of Boy Scouts, because we’re all amateur soldiers even if we are veteran flyers.
“I can see the change in him. Notice how sullen and discouraged and brooding-like he is? And his life has probably been more or less —— since he got to be a sergeant, because a lot of men who were under him at Donovan Field probably have ridden him pretty hard.”
“What the —— are you getting at?”
“Suppose he hates the Service. He knows that these bombing tests are going to make or break not only the American Air Service, but every other Air Service as well, doesn’t he? If we sink battleships, we’re pretty near the first line of defense, aren’t we, and even Congress can see that we’ve got to grow into a big boy, can’t they? And in order to carry bombs big enough to even have a chance to sink ships we’ve got to have plenty of Martin Bombers, haven’t we? And if the Martin factory put out four bombers a week, which is all they can do, right up to the time of the tests we won’t have more than enough, will we?
“And if we don’t get Martins the tests will be off, won’t they. And before the world we’ll be labeled an unreliable branch of the Service, ships uncertain, can’t even get them a few hundred miles to Langham, to say nothing of being sure they’d ever get a hundred miles out to sea to drop bombs.
“Suppose Marston has become so bitter that he’s off his nut a little, and wants to crab the Air Service every way. If he could burn down the Martin factory the tests would be off, wouldn’t they? And he lied about being in bed at the time the fire happened, didn’t he? He did get rid of the first two ships, holding us up several days, and now he’s got rid of two more.
“He didn’t figure the wrecks would happen so quickly. He figured we’d come down in the mountains somewhere, dead as doornails, with the ships so smashed up that no one could tell anything. And if he wasn’t under suspicion at all, back at Langham, some fine night he could see to it that whatever ships finally got there, after you and I were grease spots on the side of a West Virginia mountain somewhere, could be destroyed some way—fire—anything.”
Les took a long drag of his cigaret, and his steady eyes narrowed. Along the road, a hundred yards from the riverbank where we were standing, continuous lines of cars were passing. Several rowboats were out on the river, swarming around the gradually sinking Martin like waterbugs.
Finally he said slowly:
“By ——, it sounds right, Slim. He might be getting even with you and the Air Service at one swoop. But you’re claiming, of course, that he’s a nut. No sane man could cold-bloodedly do what he did to Bailey and me, anyway. Maybe to you.”
“If he destroyed the ships at the field here, he’d be almost convicted before he started,” I pointed out. “By his method, he figured on getting away free and clear.”
“He’s convicted now,” Les returned.
“Sure, because the cables broke too quickly. But not, Les my boy, beyond the peradventure of a doubt, at that. In fact, we might be wrong. There may be some one or company or even country who wouldn’t like to see these tests come off. Listen to my idea of how to proceed to nail Marston right to the cross.”
Les listened, demurred a bit, argued, and finally we came to a decision. He finally agreed whole-heartedly with me on all points. The combination of circumstances was such as to make merely a cluster of coincidences seem very unlikely. Marston’s past, and his present attitude; the fires at the Martin factory; the filed wires; and above all, the convenient sickness which made it impossible for him to go up in the crippled ships, all pointed one way.
Les stayed at Boundville to summon a wrecking crew from Dayton, salvage my ship, and likewise to watch Marston. I wired Washington and immediately hopped a train for that thriving village. I was met at the depot by a pop-eyed trio of high-ranking Air Service officials, was rushed to headquarters without an opportunity to scrub off the cinders, and in less than two minutes I was telling my wild and wooly yarn to the chief himself and six puzzled, scared and completely flabbergasted aides, assistants and adjutants. Having finished the story, I talked about Marston, not even deleting the fight. Following on, I submitted my scheme to them.
To make a long story short, at the end of three hours Chief Mallory got up from his chair, and paced up and down the floor silently for about a minute. He knows more about the Air Service, I sometimes think, than all the rest of the men in it put together. The bombing maneuvers were his brainchild, and he would be made, or broken, before the world by them.
He’d fought everything and everybody for three years, trying to get a chance for his young hellions to show what they could do, and he was pretty close to a temporary madman as he took in the full possibilities of what I had told him. Finally he whirled on me and said quickly—
“If we accept your procedure, Evans, you know what danger you’ll be in?”
“Forwarned is forearmed, General,” I told him. “I hate to run any chance of doing an injustice to Marston, and I’m leaning over backward so far that if I stubbed my toe I’d fall on my neck, simply because I don’t want my personal prejudice against him to result in any possible injustice.”
“I see,” commented Mallory. “Gentlemen, we will proceed as Lieutenant Evans has suggested.”
So I went back to Boundville, and with me came Colonel Feldmore, a spare, thin-faced, hard-boiled, genial and square old colonel who was in the Army before the Spanish-American war. Likewise, there sifted into town and out to Cleveland, various Secret Service men whose identity was known to nobody. Feldmore conducted an open investigation, and the Secret Service men started checking up on the two strange mountaineers, of whom Marston could give but a very vague description.
Feldmore took a half hour to give a tongue-lashing to Marston because he hadn’t awakened, at least, when the vandals were about. But the careful impression built up by every one was that Marston was not suspected in the least of having had anything to do with filing the wires. He was exonerated. Of course, strictly speaking, he could have been punished for laxity while on guard.
But in guarding a ship, except in very particular and extraordinary cases, it is a custom of the Service merely to sleep out there for the purpose of keeping sightseers from climbing all over it. In many cases it isn’t even guarded at all over night. Who’d want to tamper with an airplane? In moonshine country, or among people who have any possible reason for wanting to harm a ship or a flyer, careful guard is kept, of course. But ordinarily not any more than enough to guard a car.
Well, while the Secret Service men were snooping around Boundville and Cleveland, Marston, Fernald, a new mechanic named Gray, shipped on from Langham, and went back to Cleveland to bring the next shipment through. At the depot—Marston not knowing it, of course—was an operative to shadow him every minute.
Marston, as a matter of fact, was in rather a bad way. Despite the fact that he had been, as he thought, absolutely whitewashed, he looked more like a sick pup than ever. His physical sickness had disappeared within a few hours almost magically. But mentally he was an invalid still.
The Martin factory was heavily guarded, of course. The newspaper stories had been carefully taken care of; just a small item explaining my wreck as due to motor failure, and Fernald’s as the result of a sharp downward current of air over the cool water, which is scientifically possible. No word of the filed wires had got about, nor any connection between the fires and the wrecks. Every laborer under suspicion, by the way, had proved an alibi; which, in a manner of speaking, strengthened the case against Marston. The operatives were tracing his movements the night of the fire, among other things.
One ship was ready to ramble when we got there, and it had machine-guns installed in the front observer’s cockpit and also in the radio compartment in the rear of the bomb space. They had been shipped from Dayton, at my suggestion, to help guard the ships if necessary. I wired Washington, and was ordered to proceed with one ship and let Les follow when the second one was completed. Time was getting very precious, there were only two Martins at Langham, and practise must start very soon. Already the brigade would be four ships short—four fewer two-thousand pounders to help sink our battleship.
Marston and I took off bright and early one Wednesday morning. Just before we started I got word that Marston had made no suspicious moves while in Cleveland, had not even conversed with a stranger. Nevertheless I said to him just before we started—
“Ride in the front cockpit, will you Marston?”
It is less comfortable there than beside the pilot, for the folding observer’s stool has no back to it. He looked at me with haggard eyes and seemed about to protest, but he said nothing.
The reason I put him there was to keep an eye on him. Marston, while he did not wear wings, could fly a bit. He had taken some instruction back at Donovan in the old days, just for the fun of it, I suppose. And if the man had it in for me the way I thought he did, I wanted to have him right before my optics at all times.
Lots of things can happen in a ship which those on the ground could never know. For instance, the left hand propeller tip whirled around right close to my head. Marston could grab me suddenly as I was flying and shove my head just a few inches over the side of the cockpit, and said six-foot prop, traveling fifteen hundred times a minute, would have gone through that bony knot on the top of my spine like a buzzsaw would through a cream puff.
Then he could land the ship, maybe safely, and pretend to have cracked it up, thus again killing two birds with one stone. No one would know that my own carelessness had not killed me. I simply mention this as one of the many possibilities. So I put him in front of me, where he couldn’t make a move without my seeing it, and I had a Colt handy to my hand—very handy.
With both twelve-cylinder Libertys well tuned up I taxied over the smooth field at the factory, and took off. Around and around that little slab of green we circled, getting altitude while Fernald, down below, alternately waved and then shook his head. Funny how the Air Service likes to kid by pretending to be sure a man’s going to be killed every time he goes up.
Cleveland is a funny town from the air. It’s very long, along the lakefront, and very thin the other way. It sprawls like a fat worm on the ground. A veritable network of railroads run out of it toward the south, so I set a compass course, synchronized my two motors, read the dizzying array of instruments, and settled back to watch Marston. I figured that, if we had allayed any ideas he might have that he was under suspicion, something might happen. Probably in Boundville again, but just a possibility of something else.
Well, it hit quick. I’ll say it did.
We were roaring along over the large, smooth, many-colored Ohio fields, about twenty or thirty miles south of Cleveland, when I spied a ship coming toward us. It was far in the distance, coming from the south. I figured it was a Dayton ship, of course. As it came closer I identified it as a Jenny, one of the ninety horse-power, two-seated training ships which every cadet broke in on. I thought then that it was a civilian passenger-carrying crate, because no Dayton flyer would make a cross-country trip in a Jenny. It seems like walking compared to a D. H. or a scout.
Marston was sitting there in the nose of the ship, his hands on the machine-gun scarf-mount and his head resting on his hands. His broad, powerful back did not move at all, and he had never looked around. He had his goggles up, I noticed.
In a short time, approaching each other at around eighty miles an hour, the other ship was close to us. It was not an Army ship, for it was painted a bright yellow, and it flashed golden in the sun. It was coming toward us at an angle. That was natural. A Martin Bomber is quite a sight in the air, trundling along like an aerial lumber wagon. It’s so heavy that it’s fairly stable, and after one gets off the ground the wheel handles so easily a baby could work it, so I watched the other ship and flew my huge craft automatically.
The ship was possibly a hundred and fifty yards from us, coming at a slight angle, as I’ve said. It was perhaps fifty feet above us. Suddenly it banked a bit, and its new course brought it on a line parallel to ours, but it was pointed, of course, in the opposite direction. In a flash I caught sight of a double Lewis machine-gun, swung on a scarf-mount in the back cockpit.
As it sprayed its hail of lead I had nosed my big, loggy Martin over as far as it would go. At the same second Marston, I realized, had stiffened, spun half around, recovered, and was at his guns. They had got him— I saw the blood soaking one arm of his flying suit.
I threw my ship around as the equally slow, but much smaller, Jenny banked and flew back at right angles to us for another shot, from above and behind. I spun the wheel desperately, to get the Bomber’s nose pointed toward the other ship. Subconsciously I realized that all my suspicions of Marston had been wrong. There was some gang trying to crab getting the Martins to Langham.
I was straightened around for them as the Jenny crossed above us, those wicked guns being sighted by the gunner in the rear. We were looking right up into their muzzles, a hundred feet away. Marston was on his knees, sighting too. If we were to get them, I must hold the ship in position for a moment more. It was shot for shot.
It was. I saw Marston’s hand, a mass of blood, pull the trigger of his Lewis as a terrific impact made me cry out and seemed to pin me to the seat. Something crashed through my chest, and I felt as if I had been torn apart. As if in a dream I saw the Jenny spinning downward. Then, through blurred eyes that could not transfer to my brain what they saw, I saw a huge bulk looming above me. It looked as big as all the world. I knew the Martin was diving like mad for the ground, but my nerveless, groping fingers could not find the wheel. And I didn’t care. In short, I went out like a light, my last remembrance being a torrent of blood flowing down over my body.