“This is the hunting knife my remote ancestor, Daniel Boone, carried into the wilderness of Kentucky in his first discovery of the blue grass region that was to him new Eden.... This hunting knife means more to me than pride in fighting blood. It may go through the heart of some cocaine-crazy creature in far Asia. But it means that other thing to me, the sanctity of the log cabin, or the cottage which we must defend as Boone defended the first cabins in the blue grass. To him they were pavilions of new patriarchs, not barnyards or forts.”
May 19:—By this time all the trees are putting forth their second leaves, and smaller blossoms than before the frost. But everyone is rejoicing for it is spring of a sort. The air is filled with hovering branches in palest green, a good gift to man. The town knows it and walks abroad gaily, this morning of May nineteenth.
Then, late in the afternoon, local war breaks out suddenly and we know nothing about the trees, and care less. It is a Springfield utterly new and terrible to its citizens. The star chimes are not allowed to ring. I am with Comrade Avanel in the very top of the Truth Tower. The terrors of flight and pursuit sweep over the far sections of Springfield given over to aviation fields, orchards and the like.
When machines overtake each other there is, so far, no shooting or the like, only a veering to the right or left. It might be a game of tag, were it not for the symbolism in decoration put on by the two factions driving the machines. There is a big death’s head painted near the front of every Snob machine, and the hunting knife of Daniel Boone painted on the front of every Robin Redbreast machine.
Neither Black Hawk Boone nor Avanel has authorized any such use of this symbol. The whole threat and roaring are unauthorized by any of the leaders of factions. The “People” have escaped the leash.
Avanel is the only reporter her father will trust tonight and she has come to the top room of the Truth Tower, because it is the observation and news gathering room for things that may be untangled from a tower. All the papers have made common cause tonight. All the telescopes are in use, looking to the borders just beyond the City Wall, the borders of Morgan, Menard, Logan, Macon, Christian, Montgomery and Macoupin Counties. The news is assembled and everything observed is explained by telephones from these regions and re-telephoned into the various offices and rewritten there and then telegraphed to all the world that cares. Newsgathering remains what it has been for a century and a half. Boone is at the opposite end of the phone from Avanel and the first definite effects of the threatened air-riot are to make that gentleman quite profane.
The flying machines were at first not public property. But so much crowding out of the truly skilled flyers came about by the monopolists with buried gold, that machines are now rented to private citizens by the state or city for a nominal fee and deposit for damages. To enter the examinations in the autumn and to fly for the year is, in theory, one of the privileges of highly skilled, athletic people. Our friend, Portia, the Singing Aviator, is with us tonight and helping unravel the story of the rise of factions. And the gentle creature has written of the uppermost blue and of the dawn clouds and of the map of the earth and of sailing around the curve of the earth. This young girl is appalled to be obliged to take sides in the controversy and enlist for a possible battle of mere children. The most famous aviators on each side come from the High Schools. She does not want to paint war insignia upon her machine. But already her literary imitators have done so. Her three most sedulous apes in the High School, John Nash and Findlay Bryson and Margaret Rand, who have diluted her innocent and heroic songs, turning them into society verses, now demand that she put the death’s head upon her machine, or lose them as disciples. And Portia is appalled to find that the names she once chose in sport to classify the machines are now used to represent actual factions in the threatened war. The Robin Redbreast and Carrier-Pigeon machines are all on the side of the Robins, and the Snobs are subdivided into the Don Juan, the Raider, the Flamboyant, the Brahmin and the Bird of Paradise. It is the exceedingly high priced Brahmin and Bird of Paradise machines that make the trouble.
People go to the High Schools past their twenty-first year. And the town is first torn up by High School pupils, children of the local multimillionaires, such of them as still have brains and body enough to go through the rigid examinations for aviation. These children of men with buried gold are again and again at the top of the aviation waiting-lists. This is especially exasperating because having a private fortune is proclaimed in every political speech to be against the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Illinois.
And so youngsters of the Wicked Standings, the Cheerful Radleys, the Arrogant Rocks, the Fat Zebeskys, the Nervous Kusukos, the Slick Slack Kopenskys, the Shrewd Sims family, and all that set try successfully to monopolize the priceless Brahmin and Bird of Paradise. Their sinecure is defended in silly verse by Findlay Bryson, John Nash, sometimes called “Beau Nash,” and Margaret Rand.
May 20:—Many of those parading the streets in the Redbreast costume are skillful High School seniors, young men and women, licensed graduate aviators, whose machine rent-money has been refused through the quibbling of the corrupted authorities. The only work left open to them is drilling for the work of mail carriers for the International Government. Word comes to the news room at the top of the Truth Tower that all through the counties touching the Springfield wall, wherever Brahmin and Bird of Paradise machines reach the ground, the farmers taking Springfield affairs a little more seriously than we do, proceed to set torch to the wings.