The engineer on a passing freight train had seen us go down and stopped long enough for Klink to climb on board. It was agreed that Klink would go to the nearest place where he could get the material to make repairs, while I remained with the plane. We were thirty-two miles from the nearest store and as the section boss was leaving that day for his new location, I walked a mile and a half to a ranch house, where I arranged for accommodations until we were ready to fly again.
Klink went all the way to El Paso before he could get any dope and wing fabric. Meanwhile I spent the day with the plane, and a large part of the night following the ranchers’ hounds in their search for wildcats and panthers. They had treed a large cat the night before while we were staying in the section house, but were unable to duplicate their performance for my benefit. About all I succeeded in accomplishing after following them for hours, was to pull one dog out of a wire fence which had caught his foot as he jumped over.
Klink returned with a can of pigmented dope, two lengths of crating board, some nails and screws, a can of glue, several balls of chalkline, and enough fabric to replace the torn wing covering. We borrowed a butcher knife, a needle and thread, and an axe from the rancher, and set in to make the Canuck airworthy once more. We hued the crating down roughly to size, cut it into proper lengths with an old hacksaw blade from our toolkit, and finished it off with the butcher knife. In a short time we had constructed a second box splice similar to the one at Pensacola, but a few feet farther out on the spar.
We had just enough dope to cover the splice, so the fabric in the outer bay was left undoped; and after we had sewed up the longer rents caused by the sagebrush, we were once more ready to take the air.
It was too near the fifteenth of March to continue west, so we decided to take the Canuck back to San Antonio where we would finish off the repairs and Klink would continue on to California alone.
V
TRAINING AT BROOKS FIELD
I ARRIVED at Brooks Field on March 15th, 1924, but was not enlisted as a Flying Cadet until March 19th. Ordinarily a cadet enlists at the nearest station to his home and is given free transportation to his post of service and back to the enlistment point after his discharge. By enlisting at Brooks I was entitled to no transportation allowance except possibly bus fare back from Kelly where I graduated a year later.
There were one hundred and four of us in all, representing nearly every state in the Union. We filled the cadet barracks to overflowing. There were two cots to each window and some of us were even quartered in the recreation hall. We were a carefree lot, looking forward to a year of wonderful experiences before we were graduated as second lieutenants and given our wings. Nearly all of us were confident that we would be there to graduate a year later. We had already passed the rigid physical and mental entrance examinations which so many of the other applicants had failed. We had no doubt of our ability to fly although most of us had never flown before, and we had yet to get our first taste of the life of a flying cadet.
By the time we had been in the barracks a few hours stories began circulating around which originated from conversations with the last class of cadets who were waiting to be transferred to the advanced flying school at Kelly.
Rumors of “Benzine Boards” and “washouts,” “academic work” and “eight-hour examinations,” “one eightys,” and “check pilots,” “walls with ears” and “cadet etiquette”—these and a hundred other strange terms were condescendingly passed down to us by the old cadets of six months experience. Someone remarked that less than forty per cent of us could expect to finish the primary training at Brooks and that probably half of those would be washed out at Kelly.