CONTENTS
A Viking of the Sky
CHAPTER I
NIGHT HAWK
“Oh, how I wish I was up there!” muttered Hal Dane to himself as he cocked an eye upward into the far heights of the moonlit sky.
In mind, Hal Dane was already just below the stars, riding the clouds in a winged ship; before him, on imaginary instrument board, ticked the latest thing in indicator, controller, tachometer. And all the while, like the other half of a dual personality, his hands and feet mechanically guided his rattletrap old truck along the ruts of the lonesome country road. On the downgrades Hal’s left hand with skill of long practice chocked a brakeless wheel with a wooden block, and on the upgrades his right foot judiciously kicked a wire that let on extra “juice” for the pull.
In Hillton, Hal’s home village, folks laughed considerably over the Western Flyer, which a green daub of paint on the sideboards flaunted to the world as the ancient truck’s title. But folks didn’t laugh at the boy who persistently patched up the rattletrap and drove it. Anyone knew that it took genius of sorts even to hold the contraption to the straight road.
For all its decrepitude, Hal had to hang on to the old truck. It furnished his living—and a living for his mother and his great-uncle Telemachus, who was “stove-up with rheumatism.” The weeks when hauling was brisk, the truck even earned a few strange luxuries such as queer Hal Dane would want—bottles of odd-smelling glue, old wire springs and bits of metal from Kerrigan’s junk pile, and now and then a precious book full of diagrams of aeronautical engines.