After landing, there would always be a heavy barrage of questions—were the wings made of tin or catgut; what was that paddle thing in front; which was worse, to break the nose or the tail; how did it feel to fly, anyway? The answer was that the only way to know how it felt to fly was to try it.
Because a plane was an expensive machine and because it took considerable funds to buy gasoline, the charge for a short sky-ride had to be five dollars.
After one brave native son took his courage in his hands and went up for a flight, others usually crowded in, anxious for their share of the thrills. Once a whole village, out on the gala event of an annual picnic, “took to the air.” That night Maben and Hal found they had taken in a hundred and seventy-five dollars. The nickels and dimes and small bills, emptied out of a bulging canvas sack into the dip of a hammock, looked like a young mountain of money. Hal and Maben both had fat checks to send home that week.
Hal had enjoyed visualizing how his mother and Uncle Tel looked when they received his check, liked to picture the comforts in which they could now indulge.
But out here on the edge of Texas business had flopped. They seemed to have struck a belt where planes had become common as dirt, no rarity at all. Other barnstormers must have combed this section well ahead of them. When Hal and Maben zoomed over villages, nobody even bothered to look up.
“We’ve got to make ’em look,” said Maben fiercely, as he mopped the last crumb out of his tin plate, “got to make ’em look—or we don’t eat. I’ve got sort of a plan.”
When he and Hal walked into town to see about having a tank of gasoline sent out to the plane, Maben dropped hints everywhere about a thriller of a high dive they were going to stage, a high dive into the whirlpool below the falls of Faben River, just out of town. Folks that wanted their hair to stand on end better not miss that! Plenty of excitement!
Back at their camp, Maben, chuckling like the big boy he was at heart, worked all the rest of the morning on a contraption made of empty cloth sacks on which he sewed valiantly with a huge needle threaded with stout string. He made four bolster-shaped rolls, a square pillow, a rounded knob, all of them stuffed with dead grass and some mixed sand and clay thrown in for good weight. Then he assembled his six parts, sewed them strongly together into the form of a stiff, stubby dummy man.
That afternoon when Hal and Maben went up in the plane, the dummy man went with them, scrouged down out of sight in the cockpit. Low over the houses and trees flew Maben, with Hal out on a wing tip doing all the stunts he knew. With that air balance that seemed born in him, Hal bowed and whirled on the lower wing, did acrobatics between struts, climbed to the top wing, stood outlined against the sky in daring silhouette. From his swift-moving aerial stage, the boy shouted down for the crowd to gather at the river bank—last stunt to be pulled there—a thriller!
Higher and higher over the foaming, rocky rapids of the river and its whirlpool below the falls rode the airplane. Flat on his stomach on the lower plane wing, Hal lay stretched out, holding to a wing strut with one hand and reaching into the cockpit with the other. It took every ounce of muscle in him to draw the weighted dummy up, to flatten it on top of him.