“Aviators have to be the ears as well as the eyes in this flood fighting,” went on Colonel Wiljohn, “I’m expecting great things of even this dog plane you’ve brought down, but we’ve got to get radio equipment installed on it before you take it out on the job. Radio is our time-saver. You can wireless a message in one-twentieth of the time it would take you to zoom back and forth delivering reports by word of mouth. There’s an extra seaplane here, already radio-equipped. You can take that out.”
“Any kind will do,” said Hal, “just let me get my hands on the stick and be off.”
“I’m changing one group of men to another section,” went on Colonel Wiljohn, “and the work I want you to do today is scout-flying in a ten-mile radius over the flood country below the forks of the Pea River and the Choctawhatchee. You’ll have to locate the forks by chart, that section’s been under water a week. And Hal, search every creek that leads in—I—I’m depending on you more than any of the others—to find—” The Colonel turned away suddenly.
Hal felt a quick sting behind his eyelids. He choked till he could hardly give his answer. Without having actually said so, the Colonel, he knew, was giving him the patrol of the district Jacky was lost in. If only he could find Jacky!
A few moments later, Hal had become one of the many aviators whose planes circled over the heaving waste of flood waters. At low altitude roared these scout planes. Keen-eyed as hawks, the flying men sought continually for groups marooned on ridges or housetops. In answer to their radio messages flung into the ether, the rescue steamers churned far and wide across the yellow tide, hauling bargeloads of silent, stupefied people snatched from their perilous retreats. As the work went on, most of the hill-top islands were cleared of their refugees, but out of creeks and bayous, shackly old buildings swept from their foundations, and burdened with pitiable human freight, continued to drift down with the flood current. Scout planes flew low over these floating derelicts. It would be haggard faces at a window, or a scream; or, sometimes it would be a quavery old voice singing a hymn that told rescuers that here was human freight drifting down to death.
At the beginning of the flood, each drifting house was, mayhap, searched a dozen times by various boat crews—no crew knowing that already others had been there before them. Time was lost that could have been put to other needs. To avoid this, it was finally agreed that when a house was once searched a red flag, made of calico salvaged from a half-submerged dry goods store, should be nailed to its gable.
Hal saw some pitiful sights during his day’s work. Up Jardin Bayou he found five negroes on the roof of a tottering barn, the building ready to collapse and float off. When Hal dropped them bread from the emergency box in his cockpit, they hardly had strength to hold it and eat it. They had been without food for days, and were so weak that when the rescue boat came they had to be lifted off into it.
Some of the refugees that Hal radioed word back about were the four-footed kind. All through the flooded district, hundreds of mules and cattle were marooned on ridges and mounds. These hungry ones soon cleaned their tiny islands of every vestige of grass, moss and twigs. After that, they looked starvation in the face. Hal saw one hungry old horse, marooned on a bare little mound, who had the courage to plunge into the roaring flood, swim a hundred yards to a leafy tree that lifted its head above the yellow torrent, eat what waving green he could from it, then go struggling back to his mound. Such a courageous one deserved to be rescued. A radio message brought a barge to gather him up with a herd of other animals stranded on a ridge farther up.
Midday came and passed. The hours wore on into the afternoon. The night of flying across half a continent, combined with the strain of the work he was at now, began to tell on Hal’s strength. His head was whirling and his aching muscles were in rebellion against the will that drove them on.
Then in an instant, a glimpse of a something lodged in the branches of a drifting tree spurred him on to fresh endeavors, cleared his brain of fatigue clouds. Hal was miles from headquarters, skimming above a section which had been cleared of refugees earlier in the day. And now into his line of vision there came drifting a tree, now and again submerging to the pull of the currents, and bearing caught in its branches a tiny figure.