Usually Hal got a chance to make at least one trip a day, hauling garden truck over the thirty-mile route from Hillton to Interborough, the nearest city. On the return trip he’d bring supplies for the little stores in his home village and other villages beyond Hillton.
Sometimes he had the luck to land a second sixty-mile round of hauling in one day—like the present occasion that was bringing him rattling homeward in the night.
Night hauling was wearisome work, and if it hadn’t been for Hal’s lively imagination he would have been tempted to doze on his job. But Hal Dane’s air-minded brain was seething with spirals and Immelmanns and three-point landings. One of the great events of his life, the State Air Meet at Interborough, had been over for a week, but every flight and entry was still fresh in the boy’s mind. He lived them over again. By twist of the imagination old man Herman’s two milk cans rhythmically banging against Grocer Kane’s crate of lard buckets seemed almost the roar of a stunt plane warming up for action. Hal could almost think himself into seeing in that empty stretch of sky above the host of planes that had formed the “flying circus” of last week. There had been Rex Raynor, famous pilot who stunted upside-down; there had been aerial rope-swingers and ladder-climbers. There had been—
“Bang—bong—scre-e-eak!”
With a snort of dismay at the clattering outspilling of his load and the scrape of his truck as it careened sideways, Hal chocked his wheel and leaped for the ground.
“Jumping catfish!” moaned the lanky, long-legged blond young trucker as he raced madly down the road he had just rattled up. “Ought to have looked back once in a while ’stead of always up at the sky—wouldn’t have happened then!” And onward he sped, chasing a runaway wheel.
This, though, was no unheard-of performance. The Western Flyer flung some piece of its anatomy to the winds on at least every other trip.
With a grunt of satisfaction young Dane fell upon his miscreant wheel as it thumped to a standstill in a ditch. Methodically he trundled it back along the road, jacked up the ancient truck on the side where its protruding axle had ploughed the ground for some forty yards, and set to work repairing damages.
An hour later the boy had his wheel cotter-pinned and hub-capped back into place. As he slid under the steering gear, he determined to keep his eyes and his mind out of the sky, and to concentrate all energies on navigating the Western Flyer safe into her garage by dawning.
But farther along the road his imagination began playing him false again. Rhythmic thump of his load of cans seemed to simulate whir and zoom of an air engine.