During the ensuing three days we saw plenty of it, and finally went through
the procedure of inspecting and testing two more Martins. By this time the
Martin factory was under heavy guard. The Martins being vitally important—in
fact, indispensable—for the conduct of the bombing tests, the company was
under a heavy forfeit clause in the contract for twenty thereof, and the mere
idea that there was dirty work at the cross-roads struck them with panic.
Detectives were rounding up the discharged and discredited employees little
by little and each by each. So far no confession had been third-degreed out of
the men. The first lot all had alibis.
Believe me, though, we inspected the ships from stem to stern and from
rudder to nose again the next morning before we started on our way. Our route
lay over the flat Ohio fields, almost due south to McCook Field at Dayton.
There we gassed up, and set sail eastward to Boundville, which is a West
Virginia village right on the bank of the Ohio River in that little sliver of
West Virginia which hides coyly between Ohio and Pennsylvania. At Boundville
the government maintains a little way-station on the Washington-Dayton airway.
It’s just a field with a few spare parts and some gas and oil available.
It was a nice trip.
In case you don’t know a Martin, let me elucidate a bit for thee. The ship
weighs four tons, and has about seventy feet of wingspread. On each wing, just
far enough from the cockpit to allow the propellers to whirl without hitting
anything, a Liberty motor is set in a maze of huge, trunklike struts which
hold it up and in and down; in fact, keep it safely anchored.
The pilot’s cockpit, with two seats side by side in it, is set a bit
forward of the wings, about on a line with the two propellers in front of the
motors. Ahead of the pilot’s cockpit, in the very nose of the ship, is an
observer’s cockpit, equipped with bomb-sights, glass in the flooring to look
down through, bomb releases, and about a thousand other things with technical
names as long as your arm, or even as long as mine, which is considerably
lengthy.
Directly in back of the pilot’s cockpit, in the fore part of the huge
fuselage, is the hollow bomb compartment, with bomb racks which can carry two
tons of bombs, ranging from a swarm of little twenty-five pounders up through
three hundreds, six hundreds, two one-thousand pounders or one two-thousand
baby.
In back of this compartment, about half way to the tail surfaces, there is
a cockpit for the mechanic or radio operator. The tail surfaces consist of
elevators, vertical fin and stabilizer, each very large, but otherwise the
same as in any ship, and it has two big rudders, both worked by the same
rudder bar.
Les and I, like fleas on elephants’ backs, set our course from Dayton to a
bit south of the airline to make sure. When we sighted the wide,
sluggish-looking Ohio we simply flew up the stream until the field at
Boundville came in sight.
It’s somewhat of a trick to land a Martin, because you’ve got two motors to
handle, the ship is so heavy that it settles rapidly, and the pilot’s cockpit
is about ten feet above the ground. That makes leveling off a foot above the
ground a bit difficult, at first. I made it the first try by bull luck in that
small field, and Les did it with nonchalant ease, of course.
Marston had been riding alongside me the whole trip looking straight ahead
and not vouchsafing me so much as a look, either dirty or otherwise. He and I
exchanged as few words as the law allowed. The cars from town commenced to
arrive immediately, of course, to look over the huge ships which were so
awe-inspiring compared to the De Havilands the townspeople were accustomed to.
There was one lonesome soldier in charge of the gas and oil.
We were to spend the night there, there being no wild rush. We taxied the
ships up to the line in front of the gas shack, turned them around, and
climbed out after running out the motors.
“Both of you stay here until the ships are gassed and oiled, and until
dark, when the people quit coming,” I told them. “This trip you, Marston, will
spend the night out here on guard, and next trip Bailey can take it. That suit
you, Les?”
“Sure,” returned that young gentlemen. “At that, Bailey, ’d advise you to
stay out here rather than in the one hotel down there. It’s name ought to be
the ‘Bedbug’s Roost,’ and it has the first collection of bowls and pitchers
and other sanitary brica-brac I’ve seen since the hogs ate my brother.”
Bailey, one of the clean-looking, bright youngsters who came into the army
during the war and stayed, grinned and allowed that he’d try it. Les and I
accepted a ride into town with our baggage after I’d made arrangements with
the soldier on duty to supply Marston with blankets. George William set to
work bleakly, not uttering so much as a word. He would be out there all alone,
because the field guard’s duty did not include night work.
We saw a wild western movie called “Temptations of the Flesh,” fought off
curious questioners the whole length of the one street, and retired early
because there was nothing else to do. It was the sort of a town I’d like to
come to after a month of ribaldry, to settle down for a week or two and do
nothing but drink Pluto and watch the sun go down.
Our start was planned for seven o’clock, and we were out there right on
time. We wanted to cross the towering Cumberlands of West Virginia early,
before it got hot and the cañons and rivers and woods and rocks made the air
too bumpy.
Early as we were, however, a parade of cars followed us out. The residents
of Boundville considered eleven A. M. the middle of the night, and four was
the fashionable breakfast hour. As our Ford bumped into the field, leading a
miscellaneous collection of vehicles, I spotted Marston reclining in his
blankets under a wing.
That made me pretty sore. He knew the hour we were to start, and we had
sent a man out to him with a vacuum bottle full of coffee and half a dozen
buttered rolls for his breakfast. The messenger was standing alongside his
car, smoking a cigaret.
I galloped over to George William, followed in order by Les and Bailey.
Marston should have had the canvas covers off motors and cockpits, and
everything ready for the warmup.
“Sorry to disturb your rest, Marston,” I told him as we came within a few
feet of him. “It’s a shame to get you up before noon, but you can get your
beauty sleep back at Langham.”
By that time I was right over him, and as I looked down at him I saw that
his face was a curious greenish color. His eyes glared up into mine with that
non-stop hatred in them. Then, without a word, he staggered to his feet and
over to one side of the field, where he had what looked like a paroxysm of
coughing; apparently trying to vomit, but couldn’t. Then he walked back to us,
and seemed to be all right, temporarily.
“Sick?” I asked him, while curious onlookers gathered close.
“Get back where you belong!” yelled Les, and herded them away.
“I never was sicker in my life,” stated Marston, mumbling his words.
“Any idea what made you so?”
“No, sir. Late last night a couple of fellows came out and gabbed a while,
and finally went to town and got some sandwiches and coffee and we ate ’em.
They beat it away, and I went to sleep a while and woke up sick as a dog. And
I’ve been sick ever since.”
“Haven’t been drinking any of this moonshine?”
“No,” he barked savagely, as if I was inferring that he was responsible for
the war or something.
“Well, are you up to the trip?”
“Sure.”
“The —— he is,” stated Fernald. “He’d better find a doctor and lay up
here a few days and meet us in Cleveland again for the next trip. He’s as
green as a drafted mountaineer, and——”
He was interrupted by another paroxysm on the part of George William. It
was horrible to see his body wracked and wrenched around, without relieving
the terrible nausea.
“Climb in one of those cars and get to a doctor as soon as we leave,” I
told him. “The next Martins’ll be ready in five days. Meet us in Cleveland
then.”
He made no answer, but walked weakly over to the side of the field, and sat
there numbly. Bailey primed both motors, and then Les in his ship and I in
mine pressed the self-starter buttons, and soon the four great Libertys were
roaring a diapason of power. I watched the maze of instruments—just double as
many as in a single-motored ship, of course—and then idled my left motor
while I gave the right one full gun, tried it on either switch of the
double-ignition system, and listened carefully.
Everything was sweet as a nut, and the same procedure was gone through with
the other motor. My ship was r’arin’ to go, and so was Fernald’s. The field
guard pulled the blocks and tossed them into the rear cockpit, and I turned my
ship on a dime by using only the left-hand motor, which pulled the ship around
to the right. Then followed Fernald’s huge Martin, like a house on wheels, up
the field for the take-off.
The field lay practically east and west, and the western edge went right to
the edge of the river. The wind was from the west. There was a screen of trees
and undergrowth between the edge and the Ohio, the tops of the trees some
fifteen feet above the level of the field. The growth was on the banks of the
river, which sloped down from the field to the water.
As I was turning for the take-off Les, with Bailey beside him, gave his
ship the guns. It roared away across the field, and in a moment his steady
pressure on the wheel had the tail up. I waited, in order to give the air,
which would be badly scrambled by the wash of two propellers, a chance to
clear a bit. I set my goggles, jazzed each motor a bit, and shoved the two
throttles all the way on just as Les left the ground.
In a Martin there is no obstruction to your view, the motors being to each
side of you. It took all my strength, pushing against the wheel, to get the
tail up. As my big bomber picked up speed Les was circling over the river.
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?”
“Nope. How about you?”
“Bailey’s got a broken rib, or maybe two or three or four,” yelled Fernald.
“Otherwise all present and accounted for. Looks to me as though there was
dirty work along the river.”
“I’ll see about a boat for you,” I told him, and started to climb down the
tree toward the surging mob beneath me.
I oiled up the mental machinery and had it whirring away at a great rate
before I got down. While still ten feet up I gave orders.
“Get back on the field and stay there,” I told the crowd. “And I mean it.
Beat it—fast! All but Marston! Wait a minute. Who’s got a boat or knows of
one?”
“I—I got one!” stuttered one red-faced man with a gray mustache of the
vintage of 1850.
“Get at it quick?”
“Y-Yes.”
“Get it and get out after the two men on the river—quick! Rest of you back
on the field.”
They obeyed pronto, talking to each other continuously and with no one
listening to anybody else. I had a sort of a kind of a plan of procedure
staked out by the time I got down and faced the scaredest, whitest, most
shaken-up sergeant in the American or any other army.
“You’re sicker now, I presume,” I told him grimly.
Marston could not speak. His tongue seemed stuck to the roof of his mouth,
and he was a truly pitiful sight, I suppose, had I had room for any pity in my
mind.
I was about to launch forth on something, when one of the occasional
sensible ideas I get seized the opportunity to make itself known to me. So I
folded up my tongue and said curtly:
“My elevator controls went bad on the take-off. Looks to me like Fernald’s
went bad in the air, and it was just the grace of —— he was over the water,
and only a few feet high. Help me with this fuselage.”
Marston, as I said, was like a man in a trance. His weakness seemed to have
been effectually scared out of him, and he didn’t try to vomit once. Which
gave me pause for thought, in itself. He hadn’t been in my ship.
We looked at the elevators, which were absolutely undamaged. The control
wires were attached to the little cabane struts above and below the great
linen fins—but they hung loosely. Then I broke through the fuselage
carefully, so that patching would be all that was necessary to repair it, and
took a look inside. The tail-control cables go through the fuselage, and are
not visible from the outside except at either end.
In a very few minutes the evidence was all before me. The cables had been
filed inside. Not completely through, but nearly. The object was clear. The
few unfiled strands of the cables were sufficiently strong to hold and work
the elevators when the ship was on the ground. But when it picked up speed,
and one commenced to use the things with all the force of the propeller blast,
plus the speed of the ship, acting against the surfaces, the cable was not
strong enough to hold.
I had been lucky, in a way, in that mine had been filed a bit too much and
had broken before I was going at full speed. Les’ had given way over the
river. It was my guess that the perpetrator of the thing had hoped that the
cables would hold for a while, and give way during the trip some time when the
ship was going at an unusually fast pace, getting underneath a cloud or
something like that. It didn’t seem likely that he or they would want the
wrecks to happen on the field.
Marston saw it, and he was a broken man. For a moment, that is. My eyes
must have shown what was in my mind as they finally met his. He straightened
like a shot, and his sullen, strained face suddenly flushed as red as fire. He
stood there, daring me to say something, and hating me worse than ever because
of what had happened. And as I stood there I was utterly convinced that I was
looking at as low and rotten a murderer as one would meet in a tour of the
United States, where most of the murderers are.
But I held my tongue, except to say—
“Sick or no sick, you’re going in a boat with me and we’ll look over
Fernald’s ship.”
He didn’t say ah, yes, or no; didn’t expostulate, explain or try to clear
himself. With a baleful glare in his eyes and a shadow on his heavy face he
went with me in a Ford, driven by a kid who tried to break all speed records,
and we got a boat a half mile away.
We met Fernald’s party on the way. Fernald transfered to my flat-bottomed
dreadnaught, while Bailey went on toward shore. The boy was white and sick,
the freckles standing out on his face as if one was looking at them through a
stereoscope. I just asked one question—
“Did you inspect these ships from tail to nose last night?”
“Yes, sir!” yelled Bailey, his eyes like those of a madman.
Then they sought Marston’s and so did Fernald’s, only Les was calmly
curious and appraising, where the overwrought youngster was half insane.
“Beat it on, Bailey, and don’t talk a word,” I told him.
I told Les what I’d found. Marston brooded in one end of the boat while the
Boundville veteran, rowing us, bent to his work and asked one question after
another which never got answered.
Well, exactly the same things had been done to Fernald’s ship as to
mine.
“We’ll talk when we get back,” I told him, jerking my head toward
Marston.
George William caught the gesture. A wild, leaping fire flamed in his eyes,
and a shaking paw was extended toward me.
“I know what you’ll do!” he snarled. “You’ve got me now, and you’ll
railroad me to Leavenworth, —— you!”
“Shut up, Marston!” I snapped. “Remember who you’re talking to!”
There was a second of tension in that boat which was enough to make one’s
flesh crawl. Marston, his full face like a dark demon’s, sat like a statue,
arm still out-thrust toward me.
“Listen, Marston,” I said quietly. “No one holds you responsible for this.
My opinion is that the men who brought you coffee put dope of some kind in it;
that you slept like the dead, while they did the work, and that what they put
in the java is reponsible for you being sick. I don’t like you, and I never
did and never will, as a man, but you’re a soldier with a good record, and as
far as I’m concerned you’re above suspicion.”
His big body relaxed suddenly, as if he had gone suddenly limp. A queer
look leaped into his eyes, a sort of calculating gleam, as it were.
“Don’t get excited, Marston,” Fernald advised him in his equable way. “You
weren’t supposed to stay up all night, anyway, with the ship after the usual
sightseers had left. Nobody’s hurt much. Don’t lose your shirt or go
wild.”
“Yes, sir,” mumbled the sergeant, and relapsed into his brooding.
When we reached shore I gave the orders.
“Go to town with Bailey, Marston, and get a doctor for him. Both of you go
to bed at the hotel. You’re still feeling bad. My orders are that you
spend the day in bed.”
“Yes, sir.”
They trundled off in the same Ford which I had used, and then Fernald
turned to me.
“What about it, Slim?”
“Open and shut,” I told him. “It’s as plain as the nose on my face, and
that’s no secret. In the first place, Marston, as you may know, got as high as
major in the war. I was under him when I was a cadet, and he was a harsh
martinet who made life miserable for every cadet. He hated me, and I returned
it with interest.
“Just a couple of days ago, when I found him a sergeant, I took off the old
blouse and bars and licked him to a frazzle just for old time’s sake. He
doesn’t figure there’s room enough in the whole world for the two of us. That
cock-and-bull story about a couple of mountaineers driving in, and then
bringing him coffee is transparent. He filed the wires.”
“Maybe he’d file yours, and get out of riding because of pretended
sickness, but he’s got nothing against me,” Les protested, his eyes resting
thoughtfully on me.
“Wait a minute. I don’t figure that getting rid of me was all there was to
it. Marston was a major, shot back to a sergeant. That made him hate the whole
Army, and the Air Service in particular. I’ve heard him call the Flying Corps
a bunch of Boy Scouts, because we’re all amateur soldiers even if we are
veteran flyers.
“I can see the change in him. Notice how sullen and discouraged and
brooding-like he is? And his life has probably been more or less —— since he
got to be a sergeant, because a lot of men who were under him at Donovan Field
probably have ridden him pretty hard.”
“What the —— are you getting at?”
“Suppose he hates the Service. He knows that these bombing tests are going
to make or break not only the American Air Service, but every other Air
Service as well, doesn’t he? If we sink battleships, we’re pretty near the
first line of defense, aren’t we, and even Congress can see that we’ve got to
grow into a big boy, can’t they? And in order to carry bombs big enough to
even have a chance to sink ships we’ve got to have plenty of Martin Bombers,
haven’t we? And if the Martin factory put out four bombers a week, which is
all they can do, right up to the time of the tests we won’t have more than
enough, will we?
“And if we don’t get Martins the tests will be off, won’t they. And before
the world we’ll be labeled an unreliable branch of the Service, ships
uncertain, can’t even get them a few hundred miles to Langham, to say nothing
of being sure they’d ever get a hundred miles out to sea to drop bombs.
“Suppose Marston has become so bitter that he’s off his nut a little, and
wants to crab the Air Service every way. If he could burn down the Martin
factory the tests would be off, wouldn’t they? And he lied about being in bed
at the time the fire happened, didn’t he? He did get rid of the first two
ships, holding us up several days, and now he’s got rid of two more.
“He didn’t figure the wrecks would happen so quickly. He figured we’d come
down in the mountains somewhere, dead as doornails, with the ships so smashed
up that no one could tell anything. And if he wasn’t under suspicion at all,
back at Langham, some fine night he could see to it that whatever ships
finally got there, after you and I were grease spots on the side of a West
Virginia mountain somewhere, could be destroyed some way—fire—anything.”
Les took a long drag of his cigaret, and his steady eyes narrowed. Along
the road, a hundred yards from the riverbank where we were standing,
continuous lines of cars were passing. Several rowboats were out on the river,
swarming around the gradually sinking Martin like waterbugs.
Finally he said slowly:
“By ——, it sounds right, Slim. He might be getting even with you and the
Air Service at one swoop. But you’re claiming, of course, that he’s a nut. No
sane man could cold-bloodedly do what he did to Bailey and me, anyway. Maybe
to you.”
“If he destroyed the ships at the field here, he’d be almost convicted
before he started,” I pointed out. “By his method, he figured on getting away
free and clear.”
“He’s convicted now,” Les returned.
“Sure, because the cables broke too quickly. But not, Les my boy, beyond
the peradventure of a doubt, at that. In fact, we might be wrong. There may be
some one or company or even country who wouldn’t like to see these tests come
off. Listen to my idea of how to proceed to nail Marston right to the
cross.”
Les listened, demurred a bit, argued, and finally we came to a decision. He
finally agreed whole-heartedly with me on all points. The combination of
circumstances was such as to make merely a cluster of coincidences seem very
unlikely. Marston’s past, and his present attitude; the fires at the Martin
factory; the filed wires; and above all, the convenient sickness which made it
impossible for him to go up in the crippled ships, all pointed one way.
Les stayed at Boundville to summon a wrecking crew from Dayton, salvage my
ship, and likewise to watch Marston. I wired Washington and immediately hopped
a train for that thriving village. I was met at the depot by a pop-eyed trio
of high-ranking Air Service officials, was rushed to headquarters without an
opportunity to scrub off the cinders, and in less than two minutes I was
telling my wild and wooly yarn to the chief himself and six puzzled, scared
and completely flabbergasted aides, assistants and adjutants. Having finished
the story, I talked about Marston, not even deleting the fight. Following on,
I submitted my scheme to them.
To make a long story short, at the end of three hours Chief Mallory got up
from his chair, and paced up and down the floor silently for about a minute.
He knows more about the Air Service, I sometimes think, than all the rest of
the men in it put together. The bombing maneuvers were his brainchild, and he
would be made, or broken, before the world by them.
He’d fought everything and everybody for three years, trying to get a
chance for his young hellions to show what they could do, and he was pretty
close to a temporary madman as he took in the full possibilities of what I had
told him. Finally he whirled on me and said quickly—
“If we accept your procedure, Evans, you know what danger you’ll be
in?”
“Forwarned is forearmed, General,” I told him. “I hate to run any chance of
doing an injustice to Marston, and I’m leaning over backward so far that if I
stubbed my toe I’d fall on my neck, simply because I don’t want my personal
prejudice against him to result in any possible injustice.”
“I see,” commented Mallory. “Gentlemen, we will proceed as Lieutenant Evans
has suggested.”
So I went back to Boundville, and with me came Colonel Feldmore, a spare,
thin-faced, hard-boiled, genial and square old colonel who was in the Army
before the Spanish-American war. Likewise, there sifted into town and out to
Cleveland, various Secret Service men whose identity was known to nobody.
Feldmore conducted an open investigation, and the Secret Service men started
checking up on the two strange mountaineers, of whom Marston could give but a
very vague description.
Feldmore took a half hour to give a tongue-lashing to Marston because he
hadn’t awakened, at least, when the vandals were about. But the careful
impression built up by every one was that Marston was not suspected in the
least of having had anything to do with filing the wires. He was exonerated.
Of course, strictly speaking, he could have been punished for laxity while on
guard.
But in guarding a ship, except in very particular and extraordinary cases,
it is a custom of the Service merely to sleep out there for the purpose of
keeping sightseers from climbing all over it. In many cases it isn’t even
guarded at all over night. Who’d want to tamper with an airplane? In moonshine
country, or among people who have any possible reason for wanting to harm a
ship or a flyer, careful guard is kept, of course. But ordinarily not any more
than enough to guard a car.
Well, while the Secret Service men were snooping around Boundville and
Cleveland, Marston, Fernald, a new mechanic named Gray, shipped on from
Langham, and went back to Cleveland to bring the next shipment through. At the
depot—Marston not knowing it, of course—was an operative to shadow him every
minute.
Marston, as a matter of fact, was in rather a bad way. Despite the fact
that he had been, as he thought, absolutely whitewashed, he looked more like a
sick pup than ever. His physical sickness had disappeared within a few hours
almost magically. But mentally he was an invalid still.
The Martin factory was heavily guarded, of course. The newspaper stories
had been carefully taken care of; just a small item explaining my wreck as due
to motor failure, and Fernald’s as the result of a sharp downward current of
air over the cool water, which is scientifically possible. No word of the
filed wires had got about, nor any connection between the fires and the
wrecks. Every laborer under suspicion, by the way, had proved an alibi; which,
in a manner of speaking, strengthened the case against Marston. The operatives
were tracing his movements the night of the fire, among other things.
One ship was ready to ramble when we got there, and it had machine-guns
installed in the front observer’s cockpit and also in the radio compartment in
the rear of the bomb space. They had been shipped from Dayton, at my
suggestion, to help guard the ships if necessary. I wired Washington, and was
ordered to proceed with one ship and let Les follow when the second one was
completed. Time was getting very precious, there were only two Martins at
Langham, and practise must start very soon. Already the brigade would be four
ships short—four fewer two-thousand pounders to help sink our battleship.
Marston and I took off bright and early one Wednesday morning. Just before
we started I got word that Marston had made no suspicious moves while in
Cleveland, had not even conversed with a stranger. Nevertheless I said to him
just before we started—
“Ride in the front cockpit, will you Marston?”
It is less comfortable there than beside the pilot, for the folding
observer’s stool has no back to it. He looked at me with haggard eyes and
seemed about to protest, but he said nothing.
The reason I put him there was to keep an eye on him. Marston, while he did
not wear wings, could fly a bit. He had taken some instruction back at Donovan
in the old days, just for the fun of it, I suppose. And if the man had it in
for me the way I thought he did, I wanted to have him right before my optics
at all times.
Lots of things can happen in a ship which those on the ground could never
know. For instance, the left hand propeller tip whirled around right close to
my head. Marston could grab me suddenly as I was flying and shove my head just
a few inches over the side of the cockpit, and said six-foot prop, traveling
fifteen hundred times a minute, would have gone through that bony knot on the
top of my spine like a buzzsaw would through a cream puff.
Then he could land the ship, maybe safely, and pretend to have cracked it
up, thus again killing two birds with one stone. No one would know that my own
carelessness had not killed me. I simply mention this as one of the many
possibilities. So I put him in front of me, where he couldn’t make a move
without my seeing it, and I had a Colt handy to my hand—very handy.
With both twelve-cylinder Libertys well tuned up I taxied over the smooth
field at the factory, and took off. Around and around that little slab of
green we circled, getting altitude while Fernald, down below, alternately
waved and then shook his head. Funny how the Air Service likes to kid by
pretending to be sure a man’s going to be killed every time he goes up.
Cleveland is a funny town from the air. It’s very long, along the
lakefront, and very thin the other way. It sprawls like a fat worm on the
ground. A veritable network of railroads run out of it toward the south, so I
set a compass course, synchronized my two motors, read the dizzying array of
instruments, and settled back to watch Marston. I figured that, if we had
allayed any ideas he might have that he was under suspicion, something might
happen. Probably in Boundville again, but just a possibility of something
else.
Well, it hit quick. I’ll say it did.
We were roaring along over the large, smooth, many-colored Ohio fields,
about twenty or thirty miles south of Cleveland, when I spied a ship coming
toward us. It was far in the distance, coming from the south. I figured it was
a Dayton ship, of course. As it came closer I identified it as a Jenny, one of
the ninety horse-power, two-seated training ships which every cadet broke in
on. I thought then that it was a civilian passenger-carrying crate, because no
Dayton flyer would make a cross-country trip in a Jenny. It seems like walking
compared to a D. H. or a scout.
Marston was sitting there in the nose of the ship, his hands on the
machine-gun scarf-mount and his head resting on his hands. His broad, powerful
back did not move at all, and he had never looked around. He had his goggles
up, I noticed.
In a short time, approaching each other at around eighty miles an hour, the
other ship was close to us. It was not an Army ship, for it was painted a
bright yellow, and it flashed golden in the sun. It was coming toward us at an
angle. That was natural. A Martin Bomber is quite a sight in the air,
trundling along like an aerial lumber wagon. It’s so heavy that it’s fairly
stable, and after one gets off the ground the wheel handles so easily a baby
could work it, so I watched the other ship and flew my huge craft
automatically.
The ship was possibly a hundred and fifty yards from us, coming at a slight
angle, as I’ve said. It was perhaps fifty feet above us. Suddenly it banked a
bit, and its new course brought it on a line parallel to ours, but it was
pointed, of course, in the opposite direction. In a flash I caught sight of a
double Lewis machine-gun, swung on a scarf-mount in the back cockpit.
As it sprayed its hail of lead I had nosed my big, loggy Martin over as far
as it would go. At the same second Marston, I realized, had stiffened, spun
half around, recovered, and was at his guns. They had got him— I saw the
blood soaking one arm of his flying suit.
I threw my ship around as the equally slow, but much smaller, Jenny banked
and flew back at right angles to us for another shot, from above and behind. I
spun the wheel desperately, to get the Bomber’s nose pointed toward the other
ship. Subconsciously I realized that all my suspicions of Marston had been
wrong. There was some gang trying to crab getting the Martins to Langham.
I was straightened around for them as the Jenny crossed above us, those
wicked guns being sighted by the gunner in the rear. We were looking right up
into their muzzles, a hundred feet away. Marston was on his knees, sighting
too. If we were to get them, I must hold the ship in position for a moment
more. It was shot for shot.
It was. I saw Marston’s hand, a mass of blood, pull the trigger of his
Lewis as a terrific impact made me cry out and seemed to pin me to the seat.
Something crashed through my chest, and I felt as if I had been torn apart. As
if in a dream I saw the Jenny spinning downward. Then, through blurred eyes
that could not transfer to my brain what they saw, I saw a huge bulk looming
above me. It looked as big as all the world. I knew the Martin was diving like
mad for the ground, but my nerveless, groping fingers could not find the
wheel. And I didn’t care. In short, I went out like a light, my last
remembrance being a torrent of blood flowing down over my body.
