“I’m counting on you.” Colonel Wiljohn’s strong, friendly hand grasped his shoulder.
“I—yes, sir—I’ll be on hand,” Hal finally got out.
Leaving the Rand-Elwin Flying School seemed to Hal like turning over one of the busiest, happiest pages of his life. He parted from his splendid, true friends here with real regret. Yet, like all youth, he was eager to turn the next page of life.
Before he entered upon his new work, there was time for a brief visit with his home folks. He found the old house still uprearing its makeshift patchwork roof among the tree tops. Within, though, the money that he’d managed to save and send home in carnival days had wrought some comfortable changes. There were rugs, dainty curtains, a piece or two of new furniture. He found his mother and Uncle Tel not so ground down with toil these days. In his mind, Hal was already looking forward. to other changes—a roof, and a coat of creamy white paint for the house, a little car so the folks could get around—just wait till he began making some real money!
For Hal Dane, life at the Wiljohn Works promised to be the greatest thrill he had ever known. Up till now he had not realized the vast extent, both in space and operations, of a modern aviation factory. It was not one factory, but many. There was a bewildering variety to the output.
Hal had thought the Works concentrated on some special type of plane. Instead, he found them manufacturing about everything from a small, neat sky boat for private use up to giant craft for freight and passenger airliners. There were air boats with wings that folded up so one could trundle them into the family garage instead of into a hangar.
Over in the invention department tests of all kinds were being continually conducted. With his keen gray eyes looking well to the future, Colonel Wiljohn was willing to try out in his laboratories things which to more conservative men seemed mere schemes and addle-pated ideas. If a scheme failed in the testing, it was just another visionary mechanism to be set aside. If one idea out of ten, out of a hundred even, proved to have worth, aviation had made a forward step!
In the parachute department strange weaves of silk were being tested for qualities and purposes that silk makers of fifty years ago never dreamed would ever be demanded of their products. According to laboratory decision, the habutai silk in present use for parachutes would soon be displaced by a new weave, the basket-mesh type. And why? Because the basket-weave oscillated less than the old habutai type, it absorbed shock better, it lowered more slowly and allowed for better landings. Silk that once fulfilled its purpose if it had a sheen and gloss to catch milady’s eye! And now it was demanded that it have a strength to lower man ten thousand feet through the air without a jostle and land him on earth without a bruise!
In the engine room, motors were being tried out for streamlines and cooling systems, for weight reduction and elimination of fire hazards, for burning new high-powered fuel oils.