Long ago Hillton had ceased to throw up its hands and fall in a faint over that “crazy Dane boy” scudding along gully edges propelled by a pair of sheets stretched on some sticks. In fact, Hillton had grown so used to Hal’s experimenting that by now the village just accepted him and his stunts as a matter of course.
But with the famous Rex Raynor present and evincing interest in such things, the whole of Hillton turned out to watch this new gliding attempt of Hal’s.
Instead of rolling out the battered little glider that reposed in the main workshop, Hal, with considerable help from all the small boys of Hillton, pushed back a section of the opposite wall, revealing that the barn had a second long room—the harness or storage room of the old days. From out of this, scraping and screaking along the ground on its keel skid, was hauled a white monstrosity—a huge thing of wood and cloth, of wires and bars and levers.
Hilltonians who hadn’t seen the latest of Hal’s handicraft couldn’t resist a laugh at the ungainly monster with long, warped-looking stretch of wing.
“Gangway, gangway!” shouted a youngster. “Here comes the Willopus-Wallopus!”
“Willopus, your foot!” snorted Uncle Telemachus. He himself might laugh a bit at Hal, but he wasn’t going to stand for anybody else doing it. He silenced the mouthy boy with a glare from his fiery old eyes. “Hi, don’t you know a wind bird when you see one?”
Wind bird, indeed! To the uninitiated, this cloth contraption stretched on hay-bale wire and sprucewood sticks, hauled out of its lair on its screakily protesting keel skid, looked more like some waddling antediluvian from the prehistoric past.
But Rex Raynor seemed to find nothing comical in the wind bird. Her slow progress while being dragged to the brow of Hogback Hill gave him a chance to study her every line. To an aviator used to the exquisite finish and polish of a modern factory-built sky boat, Hal’s contraption offered a contrast of a rather sketchy aircraft fuselage. A little board, an upright post, some slim sprucewood longerons,—that was the fuselage, if one could call it a fuselage! But for all its homemade roughness, there was an interesting compactness in the way the boy had braced his few wires and uprights down to a “V,” converging at the board seat. The one wing was a long cloth-covered affair of wood strips and wires—streamlined after a fashion, for it was narrower at the tips than in the center, and thinner at the back edge than at the front edge. The longerons ended in rudimentary elevators and rudder, connected by wires to a pair of pedals set before the board seat that was fastened at the nose of the fuselage. A broomstick control stuck up before the seat too, and wires hitched it to the wings.
“The boy’s worked out something, eh?” grunted Uncle Tel, shuffling rheumatically alongside of Raynor, who seemed bent on studying every inch of the curious, lumbering craft. “Got some technique all his own, eh?”
“Cat’s back!” snorted the flyer, “but I’ll say the kid’s got technique!” He laid a hand on one of the hinged sections that formed the back of each wing tip. “Look at those ailerons he worked out on the wings! He’s combined the idea of the German Taube and the French Nomet in that wing lift. Where did he get it?”