CHAPTER V
READY TO HOP
THE christening was over, and the publicity that it brought had added interest to their flight. In the days before the christening they had scarcely ever been bothered by crowds around the hangar.
Now things were changed. Whenever the plane was inside the hangar, the doors had to be kept closed, or ropes stretched, to keep the idle curious from interfering with the work in hand. Rumors were continually being broadcast that a surprise take-off was imminent, which brought throngs to the field at all hours of the day and night.
Reporters on special assignments were always bothering the Skipper and Jack with questions about the performance of the plane, how long they expected it would take them to get to India, and about incidents in their lives that the reporters thought would be of interest to the public.
From one source or another they found out about the Skipper’s war record—how he had gone to a ground school in this country, had been sent to England to finish his flying training, and, this completed, had waited in England for weeks for an assignment to an American Squadron; how the shortage of planes on the American front had prevented this; how the British, who had spent time and money in training American pilots, found themselves with plenty of planes and a scant supply of their own men to fly them; how the British government had finally asked and received permission from the American authorities to send some of these American pilots to France to work with the British flying corps; how the Skipper had gone out under this arrangement and fought with great distinction with his British comrades.
The newspaper men had also looked up stories about the Skipper that had been printed in his home papers during the war. These they reprinted—stories of the miraculous way in which he had come through months of hard flying with scarcely a scratch; of his spending a couple of weeks at one of the base hospitals in France, recovering from a slight wound made by a machine-gun bullet as he was diving on a balloon near Armentieres, and then, without waiting for the usual sick leave, of his hurrying back to his squadron and plunging once more into the daily round of patrols, shooting down two enemy planes the very day of his return.
During one fight, when he was within a hair’s breadth of adding one more enemy machine to his score, his engine had stopped in the midst of a zoom, and the enemy, realizing he was getting the worst of it, had streaked for home, leaving the Skipper several miles behind the enemy lines with just enough altitude to glide down to No Man’s Land, where he had scrambled from his machine into a shell hole. There he crouched while the enemy artillery battered his plane to pieces with shell fire. Getting his direction, in the failing light, from the line of enemy balloons, he had made his way, as soon as darkness came, to his own lines.