Skyrider Part 18

"Easy on the controls, bo, till you get the feel of it." Bland leaned to shout in his ear. "You can over-control, if yuh don't watch out. You feel my control. Don't try to do anything yourself at first. You'll come into it gradual."

He sat back, and Johnny waited, breathing unevenly. He had meant to wave a hand nonchalantly to Mary V, but when the time came he forgot.

The motor drummed to a steady roar. The plane started, ran along the sand for a shorter distance than before, smoothed suddenly as it left the ground, climbed insidiously. The beat in Johnny's throat lessened. He forgot the suffocated feeling in his chest. He glanced to the right and looked down on the ridge that held the hangar in its rocky face. A perfect a.s.surance, a tranquil exaltation possessed him. G.o.dlike he was riding the air--and it was as though he had done it always.

He frowned. The earth, that had flattened to a gray smoothness, roughened again, neared him swiftly. Ahead was a bare, yellow patch--they were pointed toward it at a slackened speed. They were just over it--the wheels touched, ran for ten feet or so, bounced away and returned again.

They were circling slowly, just skimming the surface of the ground. They slowed and stopped, the plane quivering like a scared horse.

"Fine!" Bland shouted above the eased thrum of the motor. "You done fine, but seems like you showed a tendency to freeze onto the wheel when we were coming down; yuh don't wanta do that, bo. Keep your control easy--flexible, like. Now we'll go back where the girl is and make a landing there. And then we'll make a flight--as far as is safe on our teacup of gas!"

"I brought five gallons; that ought to run us a ways," Johnny pointed out. "I didn't want to land, that is why I froze to the wheel, as you call it. I wanted to keep a-goin'!"

"You get me the gas, and we'll keep a-goin', all right, all right! I got a hunch, bo, you're holding out on me."

"Forget it! Let's go!"

Again the short run, the smooth, upward flight, the slower descent, the bouncing along to a stop.

"You done better, bo. I guess this ain't the first time you ever flew, if you told it all. I hardly touched the controls. Now, say! On the square--where's that gas at? She's working perfect, and now's the time we oughta beat it outa here, before something goes wrong. I _know_ you've got more gas than what you claim you've got."

"You know a lot you just think. I'll send for some, right off. Let's go.

No use burning gas standing still!"

Mary V, her camera sagging in her two hands so that the lens looked at the wheels, gazed wistfully after them as they rose and went humming away toward the rising sun, that had just cleared the jagged rim of mountains and was gilding the ledge behind her. They climbed and swerved a little to the south, evidently to avoid looking straight into the sun.

Sandy stamped and snorted, tugging at the rope that tied him. Mary V looked down, away from the diminishing airplane, and gave a shrill cry of dismay.

"Jake! You come back here--_Whoa!_"

She stood with her mouth partly open, staring down along the ledge to where Jake, whom she had daringly borrowed again because of his strength and his speed that could bring her to Sinkhole in time to watch the trial flight, was clattering away with broken bridle reins snapping. Sandy wanted to follow. When she ran toward him to catch him before he broke loose, he, too, snapped a rein and went racing away after Jake.

Mary V stamped her foot, and cried a little, and blamed Bland Halliday for flying down that way where Jake could see him and get scared. She had been very careful to tie Jake back out of sight of the strip of sand where Johnny had told her they would make their start and their landing.

It wasn't her fault that she was set afoot--but Bland Halliday just _knew_ Jake would be scared stiff if he went down past where he was, and he had done it deliberately. And now Sandy was gone, too--and Johnny only had a couple of bronks in the little pasture--and she would just like to know what she was going to _do_? She should think that the least Johnny and Bland could do would be to come back and--do _something_ about the horses. They surely must have seen Jake running away, and Johnny would have sense enough to know what that meant.

But Johnny, as it happened, was wholly absorbed in other things. He was not thinking of horses, nor of Mary V, nor of anything except flying. He was crowding into a few precious minutes all the pent emotions of his dearest dreams. He was getting the "feel" of the controls, putting his theoretical learning to the test, finding just how much and how little it took to guide, to climb, to dip. Bland Halliday was a good flyer, and he was doing his best, showing off his skill before Johnny.

He shut off the motor for a minute and volplaned. "Great way to see the country!" he shouted, and climbed back in an easy spiral.

Johnny looked down. They were still within the lines of the Rolling R range, he could tell by a certain red hill that, from that height, looked small and insignificant, but red still and perfect in its contour. Beyond he could see the small thread stretched across a half-barren slope--the fence he meant to inspect that day. Between the red hill and the fence were four moving dots, following behind several other smaller dots, which his range-trained eyes recognized as horses driven by men on horseback.

The airplane circled hawklike, climbed higher, and disported itself in an S or two and a "figure eight," all of which Johnny absorbed as a sponge absorbs water. Then, pointing, flew straight.

They were going back to the ledge. Johnny's heart sank at thought of once more creeping along on the surface of the earth like a worm, toiling over the humps and the hollows that looked so tiny from away up there. He wanted to implore Bland to turn and go back, but he did not know how long the gasoline would last, and he was afraid they might be compelled to land in some spot a long way from his rock hangar. He said nothing, therefore, but strove to squeeze what bliss remained for him in the next minutes, distressingly few though they were.

As it happened, Bland did not know the topography of Sinkhole as did Johnny, and in the still air the flour sack did not flutter. Bland was in a fair way to fly too far. Johnny knew they were much too high to land at the cleft unless they did an abrupt dive, and he did not quite like the prospect. He let Bland go on, then daringly banked and circled. Bland had done it, half a dozen times--so why not Johnny? Luck was with him--or perhaps his sense of balance was true. He did not side-slip, and he made the turn on a downward incline, which brought them closer to earth. He sought out the place where Mary V, a tiny wisp of a figure, stood beside the cleft, and flattened out as the ground came rushing up to meet him.

To all intents Johnny made that landing alone, for if Bland helped he did not say so. Johnny was positive that he had made it himself, and his sense of certainty propelled him whooping to where Mary V stood, her camera once more slanted uselessly in her two hands, her lips set in a line that usually meant trouble for somebody.

"How's that--hunh? Say, there's nothing like it! Did you get a picture of that landing I made? Say--"

"It seems to me that you are doing all the saying, yourself," Mary V interrupted him unenthusiastically. "It may be all very nice for you, Johnny Jewel, to go sailing around in an aeroplane. I suppose it _is_ very nice for you. I grant that without argument. But as for me--" Sympathy for herself pushed her lips into a trembling, forced a quiver into her voice.

"As for _me_, you went and stampeded Jake so he broke loose and went off like a--a bullet! And Bill Hayden will just about _murder_ me for taking him; I was going to sneak him back while the boys were out after more horses, and sneak out again with Tango so Bill wouldn't know. And now _look_ what a mess you've got me into! Of course _you_ don't care--you and your darned old flying machine! I wish it had busted itself all to pieces! And you too! And Sandy's stampeded after Jake, and I'm just glad of it!" She gulped, forced back further angry-little-girl storming, and recovered her young-lady sarcasm.

"But please don't let me interrupt your very fascinating new pastime. Of course, since you are a young man of leisure, playing with your new toy must seem far more important than the fact that I have about twenty miles to walk--through the sand and the heat, and not even a canteen of water to save me from parching with thirst. I--I must ask you to pardon me for--for thrusting my merely personal affairs upon your notice. Well, what are you grinning about? Do you think it's _funny_?"

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A RIDER OF THE SKY

"I could take her home, old top--if I had the gas." Bland turned his pale stare significantly from Mary V to Johnny. "Come through, bo. You know you've got more gas hid out on me somewhere. I got a slant at the bill of it, so I _know_. It wouldn't be polite to let the young lady walk home."

Johnny stilled him to silence with a round-eyed stare.

"Thank you, I'd much prefer to walk--if it was forty miles instead of twenty!" Mary V chilled him further. "What are we going to do, Johnny? I don't know _what_ will happen if Bill Hayden finds out that I borrowed Jake. And then letting him get away, like that--"

"Sandy's at the pasture fence, I'd be willing to bet; but at that it's going to be the devil's own job to catch him, me afoot. And he wouldn't let you on him if I did. I guess it's a case of ride the sky or walk, Mary V."

"Then we better be stepping, bo, before the wind comes up, as I've noticed it's liable to, late in the forenoon. You dig up the gas, and I'll take her home."

"Thank you, I do not wish to trouble you, Mr. Halliday. Johnny can take me, if anybody--"

"Who--him?" Bland Halliday's smile was twisted far to the left. "Say, where do you get that idea--him flyin' after one lesson? Gee, you must think flyin' is like driving a Ford!"

"You could go to the shack and 'phone home for some one to come after you," Johnny suggested uncertainly.

"And let them know where I am? You must be absolutely crazy, if you think I'd consider such a thing. I'm supposed to be getting 'Desert Glimpses'--"

"Well, you sure got your glimpse," t.i.ttered Bland.

Mary V turned her back on him, took Johnny by the arm, and walked him away for private conference.

"You better let him take you home, Mary V. He's all right--for flying.

I've got to hand it to him there."

"And give him a chance to steal your aeroplane? He'd never bring it back.

I know he wouldn't."

"He'd have to. I'd only give him gas enough to make the trip on, and--"

"And if he had enough to come back with, he'd have enough to get to the railroad with. Don't be stupid. You can take me; couldn't you, now, honest?"

"Well,--I feel as if I could, all right. But a fellow's supposed to practice a lot with an instructor before he gets gay and goes to flying alone. Bland says--"