Life, as it was and as he lived it, was a good invention of the Lord’s to his mind. The two rooms he occupied, with walls of beaverboard and a leak in the ceiling, were comfortable enough to live in and far more appealing than the shadowed confines of the Hemingwood residence on Beacon Hill, and, although his father’s bank was a fine big bank and his father’s son could lead an enviable commercial existence therein, the cockpit of a De Haviland airplane was infinitely more desirable.
This despite the fact that George Arlington Hemingwood had led a wild, not to say sensational existence during his five years of flying. From Long Island to the Philippines, and from Selfridge Field on the Canadian border to France Field in Panama he was known as the unluckiest flyer still above the ground instead of under it. He could handle a ship along with the best; that was conceded. However, there appeared to be a conspiracy of motors and the elements against him. He had had more forced landings by half than any other flyer on the list. And almost invariably they occurred over such choice bits of country as the Everglades, the wilder sections of the Mexican border, Chesapeake Bay, the Rockies, and similar traps for unwary airplanes.
He had been rescued thirty miles out at sea during the bombing maneuvers at Langham Field, Virginia; he had laid amid the wreckage of his ship in the Big Bend for two days, without food or water, and been found by a miracle; he had landed in a canyon in Arizona and wandered for a week in the mountains; he had been shot down three times in France, and a list of the injuries he had encountered would include mention of a considerable percentage of the bones of the human body. Always, however, George Arlington Hemingwood bobbed up serenely, cursing his luck with fluency and grinning.
His whole-souled enjoyment of life extended to flying, and was not dampened by the crack-ups thereof.
Having found his big Stetson, he adjusted it on his head at the precise angle which appealed to his liking in these matters. Even with the aid of that impressive twenty dollar chapeau he did not look like a man whose hand had frequently been outstretched to greet St. Peter; who was on speaking terms, as it were, with the life hereafter. He was slightly under medium height, and looked a bit shorter than his five feet seven and a half because of a pair of powerful shoulders. He was impeccably arrayed, as always; he was careful about those things. It was characteristic that the insignia of rank and branch of service on his collar were placed with exactitude.
He strolled out through his sitting room—the shabbily comfortable and muchly cluttered domicile of a carefree bachelor—and down the long hall, emerging into the warm sunlight of a spring afternoon in Kentucky. Springtime in Kentucky is a savory season, and four of the flyers of Goddard Field were taking advantage of it by laying at full length on the grass in front of the barracks.
Directly across the road four corrugated iron hangars squatted in a row, paralleling the line of buildings of which the officers’ quarters was one. On the other side of the hangars was Goddard Field, a small, rough airdrome which sloped down to the great artillery camp which spread out for two square miles at its foot. Like the buildings of the flying detachment, Camp Henry’s barracks and stables had never been painted, and the big cantonment looked aged and infirm, which it was.
“What is the subject of discussion?” enquired Hemingwood as he ignited a cheroot.