Frank Armstrong at College

by Matthew M. Colton

"Shot for one, they can't beat old red-top McGinnis. These English chaps never learned how to put a shot anyway, and there's the high jump, certainly ours; it's like taking money from a baby."

"Sounds like seven wins, the way you have it figured out."

"It is seven places or my training as to what five and two make is all to the bad. I tell you it's a cinch. I'd put up all my spare cash on it, and walk home cheerfully if I lost out. But, pshaw! we can't lose!"

Conversation was checked by the appearance of several athletes who had emerged from the Club locker-room doorway, and who were walking across the turfed stretch to the track. They were seen to be Americans, and a ringing shout went up from their supporters which brought smiles to the faces of the young athletes. The English spectators applauded the Americans with hand-clapping. By twos and threes the athletes made their appearance on the track before the hour set for the beginning of the games, for the day was bright and warm and the sun of more advantage to them than the shade and cool of the training quarters.

It is not our purpose to narrate in detail the doings of the half hundred athletes who struggled for the honor of their colleges and country that afternoon nor how records fell and predictions of experts were set at naught, how the balance swung this way and that, how the mercurial American cheer-leader ruined the throats of his countrymen for the encouragement of the team striving desperately on field and track. We are more intimately concerned with Frank Armstrong whom we left a thousand feet more or less in the air, taking a last desperate chance to be in at the finish on the Queen's Club track.

Frank afterwards said that he experienced no fear of any kind as the flying machine glided upward from the earth. At first there was the sensation of great speed, though the machine was comparatively close to the ground, but as the height increased that sensation diminished. Instead of the machine seeming to rise, the earth seemed to drop away leaving the machine stationary. Below, the country revealed itself like a map, with the highways and lanes standing out sharply. To the south he got the glint of the English Channel, and to the north was a great black smudge which he took to be London with its smoke from tens of thousands of chimneys.

"Going higher," shouted Butler. "Bad currents down here." The words came faintly to Frank through the roaring of the wind and the sharp crackle of the engine exhaust. The plane plunged and rocked in an air billow.

"Go ahead as far as you want to," shouted Frank, "but get me there." He had lost all sensation of fear and almost of interest in the flight. His mind was on Queen's Club. Steadily the machine climbed until the green of the trees and the grass all became as one, and the red tiles of the roofs showed only as a splash of color among the vast expanse of green. At the greater height of perhaps two thousand feet, where Butler found better currents, Frank thought the country below seemed more than ever like a map in one of his old school geographies. Twenty towns and cities lay within the range of his vision and, by turning his head slightly, he could distinguish, across the whole width of the Channel, the dim outlines of the shores of France.

The motor of the big biplane, which had been running with the precision of a well-timed clock for the space of half an hour, began to give evidence of something wrong with its internals. It skipped, stuttered in its rhythm for a moment and then went on, only to repeat in a moment. The aviator, helpless in this emergency, merely jiggled his spark lever, but the stuttering of the motor continued, and then with a most disconcerting suddenness the motor stopped entirely.

"We've got to come down," shouted Butler, "but I'll make our fall as long as possible. Hold tight."