His mother, eyes flashing, head held high, insisted stoutly that of course he must go—his chance—he must take it. Why, she’d manage!
Hal knew exactly how Mary Dane would manage. Sewing, and more sewing, and a pain in the side most of the time. She had put him through high school that way. Mothers were like that, always insisting that they could do the impossible—and doing it.
Well, his mother had sacrificed herself enough for him. Hal shut his lips fiercely.
The next day his answer went back to the Rand-Elwin Flying School, a letter very different from that first boyishly exuberant communication. This ran: “Sorry—circumstances make it impossible for me to accept your splendid, kindly offer—hope at some future date—”
The clumsy old sliding doors to his barn-hangar were rammed shut, and left shut. Within were the remains of his greatest wind bird. The torn cloth and tangled wires were left undisturbed in their huddled dump. Hal didn’t even bother to see what parts were good enough to be rejuvenated into some other variety of gliding apparatus. He just ceased to experiment.
He repaired the old truck instead. He went after hauling business. Several times a week he made double trips to Interborough. Once he made three trips—a haul that worked him twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. He wanted to work, so that he would be too tired even to think.
Summer passed into autumn.
One day when Hal rattled into the paved streets of Interborough with a towering combination load of cowhides, lightwood bundles and great blackened sacks of country-burned charcoal, he found himself in the midst of carnival.
Autumn was a period of street fairs. One had strung its booths of shooting galleries, side shows and outdoor aerial trapezes along a roped-off concession on one of the city’s side streets. Even this early in the morning, flags and banners flaunted themselves in a chipper gayness. Small dark-skinned people, with a gypsyish, foreign look, busied themselves with settling tent-pins, tautening ropes, setting out their tinsel wares,—calling out now and then in soft, slurring accent.
They might be a travel-grimed lot, these gaudy-costumed traders in tinseled junk and these bandy-legged acrobats. But they had been somewhere, were going somewhere. They caught Hal’s imagination, stirred it out of its long, dull dormancy. After he had halted some minutes, while his eyes caught the glint of sunlight on tent tops and fluttering little banners, he shot the juice to the old truck and, stiffening his backbone behind the wheel, rattled off down the street actually whistling. Out across town in an old field behind the warehouse, where he went to deliver the roll of cowhides, Hal’s eye glimpsed something roped down to fence posts and a couple of stakes. A something that sent his heart blood pounding suffocatingly up to his very ears,—an airplane! A battered affair, with the look of having ridden the winds full many a time! But an airplane, for all that.