CHAPTER II
WINGS
When Hal Dane came to himself, lanterns and electric torches on all sides bobbed crisscross lights above him. A dozen hands seemed pulling and tugging to extricate him from the one-sided crash of plane wreckage.
He was laid out on the ground. A wet handkerchief mopped blood out of his eyes. He felt broken all over. Through a mist of pain he heard voices frantically calling, “Send for Doc! Get Doctor Joe!”
But something more than the pain and the voices beat in his brain—a throbbing “chug-chug-chug” that stirred him out of his apathy. The train, the eastbound that he’d raced!
“G-get me up,” he croaked hoarsely. “Hold that train—mail packet—im-m-mportant—no, no, no!” He fought away hands that strove to hold him quiet. His struggles seemed to clear his brain, give him strength to rise. “Don’t doctor me, doctor him,” pointing to Raynor, “he’s injured, bad off! Me—I—I’m not dead yet, not by a l-long shot!” and Hal even managed a white-lipped grin.
It was pain to walk. But the urge to complete what he had undertaken drove him on. From Raynor’s coat, thrown aside by Doc Joe who was probing the bullet wound, Hal extracted the thick envelope. After an eternity of putting one foot before the other foot, he got it delivered at the mail car of the long train that Mr. Tilton, the rotund little station agent, was importantly holding.
After the train pulled out, there was still one more job to attend to. “That airplane, Mr. Tilton,” he begged of the fat little agent. “Don’t let cows get at it—or people poke around too much. And maybe you’d better rope what’s left of it to the fence. Big wind—might—come up.”
The urge had spent its force. Hal Dane felt a thousand years old all at once. He sank wearily into the spidery, yellow-painted little car of Fuzzy McGinnis, his chum, whom all this excitement had summoned to the scene. Fuz understood. Fuz had been in smash-ups himself. In silent sympathy, and keeping the Yellow Spider throttled to a gentle gait, he carted Hal the half mile from Morris Gap to Hillton.
Doc Joe, in his own car, was bringing Rex Raynor also to the Danes’ hospitable, ramshackle old house.
After his mother, Mary Dane, wild-eyed with fear, but holding to her calm, had gone over him for broken bones, that she didn’t find, and had bound up his head better and had poured hot milk down him,—and after Uncle Telemachus had excitedly heard the story of the air crash three times—Hal crawled into bed and slept a round of the clock.