“I fear so.” Mary Dane’s lips quirked up in a smile, but her hand was flung out nervously. “And just look at that innocent little wind cloud lazying out there on the horizon! It could roll up into anything. I tell Hal that every time he even plans a glide, his subconscious mind stirs up a wind somewhere.”
“What’s he going to take off in—this?” Raynor touched the battered glider.
“Gosh, no—er-r—” Uncle Tel joined the conversation, then sputtered off distractedly, “er-r—well, you just wait and see!”
CHAPTER III
FLYING HOPE
Interborough got wind of the near-robbery, the wild sky-ride, the subsequent crash of a great plane on the outskirts of Hillton. A horde of reporters swarmed over to interview the crashees, to get pictures of them and the wreck. For the first time in his life, Hal Dane saw himself staring, with the usual garbled, wood-cut expression of newspaper pictures, from the front page of a metropolitan paper. But if the picture was poor, Harry Nevin, the young reporter for the Interborough Star, had at least wielded a kindly pencil. In spite of the crash, he gave Hal Dane credit for “unusual wing sense.”
In reality as well as in the smeary newspaper picture the wrecked plane showed up as a dismal mess. To the uninitiated eye, this grotesque thing with its tail in the air and its nose in the mud had all the appearances of having flown its last flight. But when mechanics from Interborough, with Raynor to direct them, began to dig out the ship, it was found that the actual damage was done only to the propeller, although the fuselage and wings were covered with mud and some of the wing fabric would have to be patched and “doped.”
“It’s that ditch that did it,” consoled Raynor, going over the various aspects of the “cracked-up” landing with Hal. “In the night that grass-covered ditch couldn’t have looked much different from the rest of the field. But a ditch for a landing place can turn most any sky bus into a bronco-bucking affair. Nearly every pilot mixes in with something of the kind sooner or later. Settling in a little gully out in Texas about seven years ago gave me a wallop in the bean that I won’t be forgetting any time soon,” and Raynor ducked his head to show Hal a jagged white scar that persistently parted his black hair unevenly at the crown.
As soon as a new propeller could be shipped out and adjusted, one of the flyer’s friends from the air mail route was coming down to pilot off both Raynor and his ship.
So the next day, in spite of a few rolling, murky wind clouds in the east, Hal determined to do some gliding on his homemade apparatus. He wanted this chance to get a real aviator’s criticism and advice on the board and cloth mechanisms with which he had to satisfy his longings for air flight.
Hal Dane might have wing sense, but he had no money with which to buy engine-powered wings. All he could do was patch up contrivances out of the crude materials that lay to hand.