Back of the tumbledown dwelling was a tumbledown barn that had once housed the high-stepping Harrison horses. Now it housed some strange contraptions beneath its sagging roof.
When Rex Raynor went out to that old stable under the voluble and excited escort of Uncle Telemachus, he was amazed at the variety and perfection of things aeronautical that he found there.
“Just look at ’em,” chortled Uncle Tel, waving a gnarled hand about the barn workshop to include little models of gliders, models of planes in paper and wood, some tattered books on aviation mechanics, and a crude man-sized glider made of wood strips and cloth.
“Looks like this one’s seen real usage.” Raynor’s eyes lighted up with interest as he laid a hand on various splicings of the wood and huge patches on the fabric.
“My sakes alive,” sputtered Uncle Tel, “I’ll say it’s been used! That crazy boy’s always rigging himself up in something like this, and having the kids from the village pull him off down that bare slope of old Hogback Hill. Sometimes he’d achieve a pretty good float before he’d drift to the plain at the hill bottom. He achieved his head bumped, too, a score of times, a shoulder wrenched, arms and legs knocked up—but dang it, he keeps on trying the thing!” Uncle Tel’s voluble complaining was belied by the prideful glint in his old blue eyes.
“And what does Mother Mary Dane think of all this gliding and head bumping?” laughed the flyer, turning to Mrs. Dane who had just come in.
She stood there, a hand resting on the glider wing. The eyes she lifted held a glow of pride, but around those eyes anxiety had etched its own lines too.
“Umph, Mary, she’s got sense—if I do say it,” grunted Uncle Telemachus. “She knows it ain’t any more use to try to keep an air-minded boy out of the air than it is to try to keep a water-minded duck out of the water. Mary, she’s shed tears over his busted head and banged-up shoulders considerable times. But shedding tears didn’t keep Mary from giving her wing-sprouting offspring all ten of the linen sheets she heired off her Grandma Harrison. Real linen sheets and a silver spoon or two was all there was left to descend to Mary. Grandma Harrison would turn over in her grave if she knew just what an end her good hand-woven cloth had come to. A whole sheet ragged up on a hawthorn bush where Glider Number One went gefluey in a gulley and spilled Hal for a row of head wallops. Another burned to a crisp when some invention of wing lacquer combustulated and liked to have fired us all out of house and home. There’s four on that glider contraption, and the rest of ’em—the rest of ’em—” With a guilty look, Uncle Tel clapped a hand to mouth and went off into a hasty fit of coughing. He turned away and stamped down the length of the shop where he began to putter with some spruce sticks and a lathe.
When he rejoined the others, Raynor was saying:
“Didn’t Hal drop a few hints that he was going to do some gliding for my benefit to-morrow?”