“Um-m, yes,” hammock shaking to violent stretchings of its human burden. “Gosh, seems like just a minute since I crawled in. Didn’t night pass in a hurry?” Hal stuck a tousled blond head out of his sleeping bag and gazed reproachfully down at Maben, who was already up and, in spite of the crisp autumn chill, was taking a shower bath by the simple expedient of standing in the shallow creek and flinging water all over himself.
It was a strange camping outfit that Maben and Hal had evolved. Instead of a tent, they utilized the upper wing of Maben’s old biplane as a roof over their heads. They had constructed hammocks of heavy canvas which could be suspended, one on each side of the fuselage, up under the top wing. The corners of a hammock were tied to the upper strut fittings, and when a fellow crawled into the three blankets inside, which were sewn up to form a bag, he was prepared for a comfortable night.
Sliding out carefully, so as not to wreck the wing fabric above and below him in any way, Hal stood up, stretched again, then made a speedy dash for a dip in the creek and a leap into clothes.
“My time to cook! I’ll get breakfast to pay for oversleeping,” shouted Hal, back at the plane and grabbling into the little provision sack tucked under canvas in the cockpit.
The sack contained little enough in the way of foodstuff—some potatoes, a little bacon, nubbin of bread.
As Hal flopped over the sizzle of meat and spuds in the frying-pan and set out the meal in two tin plates, he attended to the job by mere mechanical touch,—his mind was running round in circles. What in the dickens were they going to do? If they spent what little they had buying food, there’d be no money to buy gas. If they bought gas,—no food! Um, better draw their belts tighter and put the cash in gas. No gas meant no stunt flying—no stunt flying, no crowd to take for rides. And carrying passengers was how they earned their living.
Three states lay between Hal and home.
Maben’s proposition had been a wild one—that he and Hal join forces and stunt together over the backwoods country towns. It would be a precarious livelihood. Some days they might cop nothing. Some days they might make a pile. Maben needed a “pile” for his folks back home, his wife, a baby boy, a little daughter just old enough to start school. Maben carried their pictures in a rubbed old case stuck away in an inside pocket. Hal had his home folks on his heart too. He needed to earn money somehow. Even though the mere touch of a plane and the call of the air were a delightful lure, he knew aero-stunting was a risky business. In the end he had decided to tackle it, for a while anyway. So he had rattled the old truck home from Interborough, turned over to his mother the first twenty-five dollars he had ever earned all in a lump, and had joined Maben.
For a while they had made good money. In sections where airplanes had never come or at most had been merely glimpsed—a swift moving speck in the sky that came out of nowhere and disappeared into nowhere—a plane that really came down to earth was a novelty. As they flew over villages, folks rushed out into the open, heads thrown back, eyes on the sky, arms waving and beckoning excitedly.
After circling to find a good pasture or stubble field from which to operate (a piece of open ground close up to the village being of course most desirable from a showman’s point of view), Maben would fly low, and Hal would begin to do wing-walking. If the sight of a young fellow walking and cavorting and skinning-the-cat between wire struts on the wing of a flying plane didn’t catch the eye of the crowd, the parachute drop could always be counted on to “get ’em going.” After the stunts, Maben would fly low and ease to a perfect landing to show folks how safe it was to come down in an airplane.