Because he had looked down on most of the cities of the world, because, young as he was, he had seen thrilling shy views of towers and spires and mosques and temples lifting under many skies, the boy stood looking at the beautiful Capitol of his native land with a swelling heart.
Suddenly from somewhere, everywhere, nowhere came a faint, peculiar humming. Louder and louder it grew. The boy flung open the window and, leaning far out, scanned the cloudless sky with practiced gaze. Far away in the west appeared a thing of wings and sound flying far above those other birds, the troubled buzzards, that dipped and swayed and hung so easily in the invisible tides of the air.
As the boy watched, another and still another airplane appeared, close in the wake of the first, until eleven of them, all light biplanes, dashed headlong across the sky. Then, their pace slackening somewhat, they formed in twos and again strung out to compose the wide V of migrating geese.
The eleventh plane detached itself from the others which now swung wide and swept around in a graceful circle, while the single one, an instruction plane, commanded the manoeuvers by means of wireless telegraphy. Twice the ten planes circled. Then the leader, turning sharply, led the others in the direction of Mount Vernon until they vanished. The single plane, lazy as the buzzards below, hung almost motionless, waiting, effortless and serene, until once more with a faint hum the planes returned, lined up and hung at attention for a moment, when the instruction plane turned and in a wild rush of speed led its charges away in the direction whence they had come.
Not until distance had stilled the final hum of the last motor did the boy realize that he was clinging precariously to the hard granite facing outside the window, while leaning far out, too far out for safety even for a young aviator who felt no dread of falling.
“A great bunch of students,” he reflected, withdrawing and turning to look at the room in which he stood. It was the usual “beautifully furnished bachelor apartment” of commerce. Wall paper dark, in order not to show soil, odds and ends of well-worn, not to say shabby mission furniture, a table, chairs, a desk with a soiled blotter firmly skewered down on its flat top, a crex rug. Beyond was a small bedroom, and out of that any sleuth of a de-tec-a-tive would have guessed there was a bathroom if he had taken time to listen to the mournful drip, drip of a leaky faucet.
Lawrence Petit looked the bare, unpretentious, unhomelike room over with a smile. He had never been so “well fixed,” as he said, but he did not approve. Like everything else, the apartment was an incident, a stepping-stone to something better.
He went to his suitcase and took out a pocket portfolio and with a look of distaste at the soiled blotter, sat down at the table, tried his fountain pen and commenced to write. And while he is busy, we will glance at the past of the young aviator.
His own beginning he did not know. His first remembrance was of a sordid, poverty-stricken cabin where, with a group of other children, he played and quarrelled and starved, and where a slatternly woman gloomed or passed from one screaming rage into another until quieted by a black bottle brought her by an evil looking, leering man at whose approach all the children scattered and hid themselves. The children, when they spoke to the woman at all, called her Moll. Lawrence could not remember a time when the question of his parentage had occurred to him. At this period of his life he was little more than a healthy little animal, content to sleep and play and fight for the scanty food he was given, and, that failing, to steal from the more fortunate neighbors.
In the woodshed, back of the shanty, a lean-to scarcely worse than the house itself, stood a broken-down bureau crammed with odds and ends of rags and clothing too unspeakable for use. In this one day, while Moll was digging through its confusion, she chanced on a worn, black shopping bag. She tossed it to Lawrence, known wholly at that time as Snooks.