Every word, every frantic effort King Horn made to soothe her merely intensified her grief and his alarm. Finally, in response to one of those choked commands, he rushed out of the office. Unseeingly he passed Frank Cross at the corner of the hangar, pushed through the crowd and made for the road. He walked down the concrete much more dazed than he had been when the ship had cracked up.
Obviously this required thinking out, and yet he didn’t seem to be able to think, except in snatches. Was he in love with Lyle Tennant? Certainly not. He saw her nearly every day and enjoyed seeing her, and felt vaguely uneasy when she did not come to the field. But that wasn’t love—it couldn’t be.
Was she in love with him? That was absurd. She was fond of him, of course, just as he was fond of her. Theirs was a pleasant companionship in the rough and not always pleasant business of working for a flying circus. Probably it was just the shock of his crash that had brought from her that emotional outburst.
He reflected that she had called him a fool; then he remembered that she had not. She had said that she could stand fools better than she could stand men who played the fool. Played the fool! Well, in a way that was just. He hadn’t thought of it in that way, but certainly a man who could fly a ship with the best of them was a fool when he flew like a crazy kid or a drunken sot. And yet, he had been the exhibition pilot for this circus not for the applause or the notoriety or the money in it, but simply because none of the other pilots were so adept at the stick or in the least eager for the job. He understood their viewpoint and sympathized with it. They preferred the dull round of passenger carrying; he had been willing enough to sling a ship around a bit to attract a crowd and win the circus a decent notice in the newspapers.
“I guess lately I’ve been sort of reckless,” he muttered. “Since we leased this field—since Frank Cross and the other newspaper men have been doing that stuff about me being the Ace of Deuces—the ‘King of Crashers’—well, I guess I must have been trying to outdo myself.”
He nodded his head. “A man can’t compete against himself and win,” he reasoned. “That way the flying gets wilder every day. Then some time gravity steps on you or you get a puff of wind when you aren’t wanting a puff, and you lose.”
He thought some more. Most—in fact, about all—the circus stunt pilots, wing walkers and crowd catchers of every sort that he knew were avid for admiration, applause, hero worship. That was what kept them going—the sort of stuff about defying death that Frank Cross wrote about him.
“Can’t say I’m crazy about having a crowd’s eyes pop out as if they were on sticks at the sight of me,” he told himself. “And I certainly don’t get anything but sort of an ashamed feeling out of reading about myself in the newspapers. What am I doing this stuff for, anyhow? To please Walt Tennant and the rest of the bunch, I guess.”
He swung around suddenly and headed rapidly for the field again. “When little Lyle gets as upset about me as all that, then to hell with what the rest of ’em want!” he growled. A surge of tenderness swept over him. Lyle! What would the Tennant circus —the rest of the world—be without Lyle? Nothing! He had seen so much of her that he had not realized how much she meant in his life.
“I’m in love with her—in love!” he muttered. “I’ve been in love with Lyle a long, long time. And—maybe she’s in love with me! What a dumb fool I am!”