Then two things happened simultaneously. I heard a wild mixture of yells, screams and shrieks from the cars drawn up on the edges of the field at the same moment that the tail of my ship hit the ground again with a terrific crunch and the wheel under my hands suddenly became free, as easily movable as if it was attached to nothing whatever. I took a split-second to look up, and saw Fernald’s Martin, in a half-spin, drop below the edge of the trees. The next second a reversed Niagara of water rose above the foliage.
My brain, none too hardy an instrument at best, was literally as numb as a piece of sausage. But I could not think of Les then. My elevators were no more—that was why the wheel had become free in my hand and the tail back on the ground. I was within a hundred feet of the trees, traveling at more than fifty miles an hour, with no chance of taking off. In a flash my hand dropped to the throttles. By cutting one, the other motor would drag the ship around, probably wrecking a wing, but saving me.
Even as I did so, I knew I could not do it. For those —— cars had lined each edge of the field, and my ship would probably plow through them, killing every fool spectator in the bunch.
There was nothing to do but let it go straight ahead. It was slowing up, but four tons which has been going close to sixty miles an hour can’t stop as quick as a motorless Ford going up Pike’s Peak when the brakes are applied. As inevitably as fate itself, I was trundling swiftly toward those trees, with only a frail cockpit between myself and them, and two props to hem me in and keep me from jumping.
I cut the switches fifty feet from the trees. Up went my goggles, and off went my belt. I got to my feet on the seat the second before the ship plunged over the embankment. The trees were ten feet ahead. As it crashed over the lip of the field toward them I crouched, and leaped like a kangaroo. And by the seven thousand sweethearts of King Solomon I got my hands around a limb that swayed underneath me, and there I clung, like a monkey by its tail, thirty feet above the base of the tree.
Had I gone down with the ship all that would have remained of Slim Evans would have been an over-sized pancake. The four-ton ship crashed against the sturdy trees, and the observer’s cockpit crumpled like an eggshell. The trees swept half through both wings, and at the finish one great oak was the exclusive occupant of the cockpit which had once been mine. I’d have been wrapped around it in loving embrace, never to leave it until they scraped me off.
I scrambled on this swaying reed of a limb, and worked my way back toward the trunk of the tree. I had no time for the fainting, screaming, yelling and generally hysterical bunch of nitwits on the field, but safe in a crotch of the tree gazed down upon the river. There was Fernald’s Martin, half-submerged, and on the upflung tail was Mr. Fernald himself, accompanied by Mr. Bailey.
I was so relieved I let out a loud yelp. If I could talk as loud as that habitually we wouldn’t have had to wire Washington at all.
Fernald, squatting like a frog on a lily pad, waved airily to me, clinging pensively to my perch in a tree.
“Don’t mind if I leave this here for a while, do you Slim?” he inquired in his placid way. “Hurt?”