At Zenner, Hal had the thrill of buying himself a plane. It was an old J-1 Standard, the type of ship the army used to train pilots before the war. Its owner had made one flight in it and had come down to a perfect one-point landing—straight on the nose—and smashed up everything.
Max Maben knew points though when it came to planes, and advised Hal to buy. They made Zenner their headquarters for a while and radiated out from it to do carnival flying. Between times they worked on the plane. In the end they evolved a patched-up creation built with homemade spars, a second-hand engine and rusty fittings that had to be painted over. But she flew like a bird. The carnival season was closing in. Hal used the old J-l Standard to double their earnings by flying races at one fair while Max filled his schedule at other fairs.
But for all her sweet flying, the Standard wasn’t altogether a lucky plane. Some nemesis of mischance seemed to dog her flights more often than not. Once when the two flyers had her out for a pleasure spin that took them hedgehopping over mountain tops and skimming the warm air softness of the desert edge, the false darkness of a windstorm swooped around them and sent them earthward for a forced landing. In the dimness they took to ground between the cactus and Spanish dagger covering old fields. And here they stayed the better part of a week. As they landed, a villain of a Spanish dagger plant had slashed through the front spar of a wing. It took half a day to patch the ten-inch gap in the spar and to sew up a dozen rips in the wing fabric. It took half a week of cutting sagebrush and cactus to clear enough space for a take-off runway.
But whether the old J-l Standard was a lucky bird or not, possession of it began to stir in Hal Dane a slow, subtle change. Ownership of a plane of his own awoke in him vast longings and hopes. In spare moments he was always tinkering lovingly around the old bus, seeing if a wire tightened here didn’t make her wing edge better, or if a heavier wire coil above the landing gear didn’t make her taxi along sweet. Now and again when he had a spell off from carnival work, he took the “J” up on long, high solo flights.
On one of these lonely air journeys he pushed higher than ever before. The vast altitudes were always luring the boy, held a fascination for him. Zooming up into the ether till from land he might seem some mere speck in the sky had long since ceased to awake in him any nervous terrors. Instead, he reveled in the sense of space and freedom the heights gave him. Aerial intuition showed him that, within limits, the higher he was, the safer he was. An engine break a hundred feet above ground, where room for soaring tactics was limited and the parachute of no account, was a much more terrible danger than a similar accident two miles high. The heights meant safety from rough ground air; ten or fifteen thousand feet often meant safety from storms.
Up and up Hal pushed his rough-built, patched-winged old army relic, reveling wildly in the freedom of the skies, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen thousand feet up. Intense cold froze him to the marrow, chattered his teeth. Air pressure weighted his brain, reeled his head dizzily. If only he had some protecting, oxygen-piped helmet to protect him from air heights, as a diver had helmet to save him from water pressure! If—if! Then he could explore the great unknown of the air! But even at a puny sixteen-thousand-foot height, the sky had revelations for one that soared its spaces knowingly.
Once in his high flying, Hal was swept into the vast power of a great westward flowing current of air. A veritable river of the wind. It swept him on fast and faster. Exhilaration shot through the boy’s being. Speed! Power! Here was power waiting to be harnessed by man. Westward on a river of the wind!
A thousand years ago his Norse ancestors had swept westward on ocean currents, the rivers of the sea, to find a new land. Some day, he, Hal Dane must sweep westward on a river of the wind to discover—what?
He longed to fly onward forever as he was now, with a speed wind under his wings. But the cold was devouring him, the awesome pressure was roaring into his brain. Anger at his puny man’s impotence in the face of such power shook him. He could bear no more, the air weights were smothering him. Downward he began to drop in long swoops.
As altitude had plunged him into a baptism of ice, so earth, as he swooped downward, seemed to have prepared for him a baptism of fire.