The Argosy/Volume 99/Issue 2/The High Flier

by Gordon MacCreagh

 

byGordon MacCreagh

COMPLETE IN THIS ISSUE.

I.

The sharp trill of the telephone startled Howard Selfridge out of his vacuous lethargy. For long minutes he had gazed emptily, rather blearily. into nothingness. At intervals his face was screwed up with pain and he pressed his two hands against his head to still the hammering in his temples. Soft white hands they were, and they trembled dissipatedly. The bell broke in on one of these periods of groaning torpor, and Selfridge's eyes opened again and he looked round at each of the luxurious furnishings of his room in turn with an expression of peevish bitterness on his face.

It might have been a fine face under other circumstances. The eyes were wide apart and intelligent—in spite of their present weariness. The nose was finely chiseled. The lips were full and firm; and the whole showed the possibility of an imagination which might have accomplished things. But it was a soft face and bloodless, and the lines which seamed it were lines of dissipation and disillusionment and of weary cynicism.

Again the bell reminded him. He grumbled discontent, and without rising from his deep chair he reached out a shaky hand to a decanter on the table beside him to pour himself a bracer for the necessary energy to answer it. He turned the decanter upside down over a tumbler, and for long seconds he watched the last amber drops trickle from the thin neck with a twisted smile of satirical introspection.

Then suddenly he gripped the bottle in a spasm of passion as a convulsion of rage flushed his pale face. He leaped to his feet and crashed the costly glass into the empty fireplace.

"Damn Dickie anyhow!" he swore viciously. "I knew he was a fool! Sure tip, hell! Any stock that he boosted was bound to slump! Curse it, I'd never have invested, only Margie giggled and said I was no sport; and I was pickled to the gills."

Once again the bell jarred imperiously on his jangled nerves. This time he staggered painfully to the instrument and listened at the receiver. An appreciable time elapsed before he seemed to understand the message. The operator had to repeat. Then he groaned.

"Oh, thunder! Tell her I'm not in."

There followed an awkward pause. Then he distinguished the cautious buzzing of the wire—or was it his head:

"Standin' right heah, suh; she done heard me talkin' to you, suh."

Selfridge hung over the instrument helplessly, All he could think of was:

"Oh, Lord! Tell her that—oh, hell!"

Then the voice again:

"She comin' right up, suh."

Selfridge was standing by the mantle-shelf when the girl burst into the room with eager impulsiveness. Then she stopped rigid in her gesture of greeting, his half-formed name frozen on her lips.

She had never seen him this way before. She had heard of his prodigal gaieties, and she had seen him "sick," but not like this. Her eyes opened slowly wide and the level brows above them corrugated in an expression of incredulous surprise and sorrow rather than reproach. Fine eyes they were, wide-set and thoughtful, with a wistfulness in them which came of much grieving and wondering—and waiting; silent, suppressed emotions which inevitably mold softness; yet the lips, when they closed with a tremulous intake of the breath, were firmly curved and the rounded chin was full of decision.

She wore "something in a russet-brown," which matched her hair. Selfridge never knew what these things were made of, or how; he was conscious only that it looked well and quiet and wonderfully appropriate.

It was abundantly clear that this girl was not, never could be by the most distorted fancy mixed up with the Margie who had giggled when he was pickled to the gills. Selfridge stood leaning weakly against the mantle, looking at her in dull silence in which humiliation was evenly balanced with irritation. The girl was the first to find her voice. Instead of bursting into reproachful reference to his appearance she faltered, stammered, and managed to articulate:

"Howard, I—I heard that you had—had been unfortunate again; so I—well, I came."

Selfridge's reply was irrelevant.

"You shouldn't have come, Grace—not here."

Instantly the rounded chin was ready for battle.

"Why not?" she demanded defensively, knowing full well the answer in advance.

Selfridge subsided wearily into a chair and told her the conventional law in a dispassionate voice.

"If anybody were to see you it might be unpleasant—for you."

The girl was wilfully defiant.

"I don't care. I—I heard that you had—that you were cleaned out; and I knew that you needed m—" She was about to say, me, but she bit her lip on her impulsiveness and altered the sentence lamely to, "you needed somebody to help."

Selfridge winced, but said nothing. He sat hunched in the chair staring dully ahead. The girl came swiftly into the room and stood by his side, her feeling of awkwardness in the situation evinced by the helpless little movement of her fingers playing with her dress. It was difficult to know just what to say. So, "poor Howard!" she murmured.

There was the sheer woman of it. All his present plight, all his past criminal foolishness, all his neglect, were glossed over. The only emotion she was aware of was sympathy.

"Poor Howard! What do you propose to do now?"

Howard proposed nothing. He had been in no condition to think of anything. He just shrugged at the outlook therefore. The girl offered a hopeless suggestion.

"Couldn't you go back to your Uncle Stanley—just for a while, till you could get something to do?"

At last Selfridge spoke; he laughed, rather; a laugh of the ultimate ridicule.

"Pshaw! Uncle Stanley! You know what my uncle thinks of me, Grace: and you can just imagine what he'd say if I went to him looking for room and board"—his face turned stubborn—"not in a million years, I wouldn't! Darn him, he'd read the Bible at me."

The girl nodded. She had listened to that stout Methodist's views on his scapegrace nephew on more than one occasion when she had dropped in, while Howard was still at home, and found the old man alone—always alone.

"Well then, what about your friends?" she suggested.

Howard's sudden cackle was satanic.

"Ha-aa-a! That bunch? You know those boys—you don't, though, and that's your good luck. I could borrow just about ten dollars from one of them; and then they'd stake me to dinners—as long as my clothes lasted."

"Well, what are you going to do then, Howard?" She was insistent, and he felt that she was driving him into some definite blind alley: but he was too utterly soul-weary and heavy-headed to conjecture about it.

"Oh, good Lord, Grace, how should I knew what I'm going to do? I'd get some one to sell all this stuff for me, I suppose—my private cellarette ought to fetch something these days; and then—well, I suppose I'll get a job of some sort."

"What kind of a job, Howard? What can you do?" She fenced him yet closer.

Selfridge had a very clear-cut picture of just what he could do. It was an easy picture to visualize. The keen imagination betokened in his forehead and eyes showed him a long vista of grim grayness stretching ahead of him; drab days during which the crease in his coats and pants gradually dissolved into dissolute bagginess, and progressed thence to hard-worn shininess, and finally disintegrated to the ultimate frayed thread; hideous days to contemplate; and colorless nights of unbroken monotony in which the only laughter would be that of people who passed in automobiles, and the only lights would be the white arcs gleaming coldly on park benches. His laugh was the fulfilment of the twisted, bitter-tasting smile.

"What can I do? Might have got a sweet job mixing drinks—a little while ago. But now—oh! I've never thought about it, but I suppose I can do something."

The girl pressed her concerted plan yet further.

"What is something, Howard? You know you have no training."

Howard was silent. He knew his limitations better than she did. He shuddered suddenly and put his hands over his face. That was to shut out the grim prospect which his malicious imagination conjured up. He was afraid of it. The competing with other men for work, the battle for existence, appalled him. He had never had to develop self-reliance. The only assertion he had ever known had been his readiness to order—and pay the bill.

That keen imagination of his showed him in hideous pictures how he would shrink in the competition with men in an open field. The only competition he had met hitherto had been a riotous rivalry with vacuous young men to be known as the wildest, highest flier of them all. In that sort of competition he had succeeded gloriously. He had flown high—and he had crashed. And now he was afraid, deadly afraid. He sat therefore with his hands before his eyes, and there was no smile on his face.

The girl swayed over him, yearning to do something, she did not know what; but just hungering to comfort and help. It was the instinctive mother yearning over the weakness which is the weakness of a child, a phenomenon which leaves strong men in amaze and indignant fury. Her fingers touched his hair ever so lightly.

"Poor Howard!" she murmured again; and then—she had driven him now against the final wall—diffidently, yet with set determination, she made her final point. "Howard, you know that I have a little—some negotiable securities; so I"—the rest came with a rush—"won't you take them to carry yourself with till you can make some connections?"

The startling suddenness of this offer from this direction struck Howard with galvanic effect. He lurched, almost reeled, from under the girl's protective influence.

"Good Heavens, Grace, don't talk that way!" he muttered almost fearfully. "Of course I couldn't. It's—it's awfully decent of you, of course; but—good Lord, I haven't got there yet!"

He strode several times up and down the room plucking nervously at his fingers locked behind his back. Then:

"Grace, you ought to be going now. If some one were to come, you know—really, you mustn't stay."

The girl made another effort to reason with him; or rather to urge the age-old argument of, why not? But he almost ran from her with a hunted expression in his eyes. She saw that she would have to relinquish her plan, for the present, at any rate. She sighed, then; but she was only postponing matters till a more auspicious occasion, when his need might be more imminent and his nerves less shaken. He must communicate with her, of course, as soon as he had made any other arrangements for a less exorbitant scale of living. With feminine practical economy she urged that he lose no time.

"Of course," he said; and, "sure he would." And he piloted her to the door. Once more she gave him implicit directions of just how he should proceed; once more her eyes softened with yearning; and then she went, looking back and waving bravely as the elevator shot down.

Selfridge sat down weakly and dabbed with a handkerchief at his brow.

"Phe-ew!" he murmured. "Gee whizz, that was a bad one! Nearly a knockout, by golly! When they begin to assume that air of proprietorship it's time to slide from under."

He remained supine for a long time, his hands in his pockets and his long legs trailing out in front. His expression was thoughtfully serious, half frightened still; an expression of long and sober review of the past and of shuddering forecast of the future. Finally he gathered his legs stiffly under him, rose painfully to his feet and dabbed a shaky key at the lock of a mahogany sideboard.

"Gosh!" he murmured. And "Gee, whizz!" again, as he poured a stiff bracer for himself. "Grace is a bully fellow and an awfully good girl and all that; but—thunder—who wants to be tied to a good girl for life!"

One of the inexplicable enigmas of existence is why a good girl should so often want to be tied to a worthless man for life.

II.

Exactly twenty-eight days had passed, and Selfridge's keen imagination had proved itself to be a prophet of horrid accuracy. Gray days they had been from the first; for Selfridge had moved out of his luxurious home at once; not so much from a sense of economy as from a sense of pride. He was afraid that some of his friends might look in while the memory of joyous nights was yet new, and he shrank from the attendant humiliation. He was quite sure, too, that the girl would come again, and he was afraid of her—and of himself.

If his prophetic imagination had erred at all it was in defining just how black a gray day might be when it had been preceded by seven others, or by fourteen, or by twenty-one. Selfridge had never before thought of days in periods of sevens; but three times already a drab woman, as gray and monotonous as the days she counted with such dull avarice, had appeared before him and demanded money for his privilege of occupying a thin coffin of a room at the head of a dingy flight of stairs which were as dark by day as they were by night. To-day Selfridge knew that she would appear again and demand more money for a further lease of the malignant number seven—and he had been afraid to meet even her this morning. He had got up early, therefore, earlier even than the woman, whose practise it was to emulate the early bird; and he stood now in a line with other men who wore overalls and carried tin pails, or, some of them, packages, under their arms, greasy packages suggestive of food.

It conveyed the impression that these men hoped to go to work the same day. It was a comforting impression that did much to counterbalance the repugnance with which he had forced himself to consider this new type of advertisement. Hitherto he had haunted offices which advertised: "See Mr. Smith after 9 a.m." This other which said tersely: "Bring your tools," was a grievous come-down. But Selfridge had acquired a new and very definite conception of the potence of the mystic number seven.

In due time Selfridge, having filled out—or rather, made empty dashes in—an application form in an outer office, found himself standing before a wiry little man who sat at a desk and scribbled his name on slips of paper which bore printed captions such as Sub-Assembly, Dope, Wiring. He looked Selfridge over with quick ferrety eyes. Twenty-eight days ago he would have said: "Nothing doing, brother; you're in the wrong shop." But to-day Selfridge looked quite a lot different from the wreck of three weeks ago. His face, for one thing, was a lot browner—even the sparse sunlight of city streets will have some effect if one ventures into them by day; and his hand was steadier; and to-day, oddly enough, under the spell of the impending seven, his attitude was not quite so diffidently apologetic.

The man grunted, there, and snapped: "Ever done anything in aircraft before?" It was quite evident that he had never looked at the application-blank; what he looked at was men.

"No," said Selfridge without following up with his usual, "but, et cetera, et cetera." Two days ago he would have produced his well-worn diploma—and would have immediately killed his chance. Employers have a nasty habit of insisting that "there's a reason" for broken-down college men. The alert little man surprised him.

"Good! Most of 'em claim that they're expert mechanics at least, with an army training—and I fire 'em. In this shop we work. What can you do?"

"Anyth—" Selfridge began; and then he caught the look that was starting into the other's eyes, and altered his reply to: "I have no experience in manufacture."

The man looked at him sharply and grunted: "Huh, I don't like that high-brow accent of yours for two cents; but the National will give anybody a chance. Could you"—he looked at Selfridge and grinned shrewdly—"do you know how to use dope?"

"No," said Selfridge quite innocently.

The man grinned again. "H-m, I guess you're telling the truth. If dope had been your trouble you'd have fallen for that. All right." He scribbled on a slip: "Report to Scudder, dope section. He'll show you how to use it. Twenty a week."

That was all. There was no inquiry as to whether the figure would suit. The quick-eyed psychologist at the desk sized up his applicants as he spoke to them, and he always knew to an exact nicety just how badly they needed employment.

Selfridge took his slip to Scudder feeling an elation which he had not known since his misfortune. As a matter of fact, he had never felt such a real satisfaction in his life before; he had never known the need of success.

Scudder looked him over with scant approval. He took the slip which consigned Selfridge to his care and growled:

"H-m, another of Mitchell's experiments, I suppose." And he set Selfridge to painting wings. This was not a compliment; for it meant that Selfridge, in his opinion, did not have sense enough to apply dope to fabric.

Selfridge, then, at last had what he had never hoped to have in his life—a job.

For torturing ages thereafter it seemed to him that he toiled with a breaking back and raw hands directing a fine spray of liquid color through an air pressure "paint gun" against acres and miles of wing surfaces. Yet he dared not stop or slack down; for he saw men, older than himself mostly, and even more anaemic, shirking now and then: and presently they did not come any more. The thought of not coming any more to this loathed occupation filled Selfridge with cold horror; for the insistent woman and the alternative fear of the outer dark were very present menaces.

He toiled with feverish steadiness, then, and his life was a hazy mist of gray paint and acres of gray wings and ages of gray days; though as a matter of fact he saw the grim woman who reckoned days by sevens but twice during that time. And presently his back ached less and he began to feel the airbrush nozzle as something other than a piece of red-hot metal; and he found himself doing almost as well as some of the girls who worked by his side in overalls. And just about then he was suddenly transferred to the dope-room!

Selfridge did not recognize the compliment. He worked in the forced draft of the dope-room for nearly half a day; and then he went out and deathly sick—and then he quit. Two weeks ago he would have toiled on in terror and would have died; but two weeks of "experience" at a definite profession gave him a wonderful confidence. He went to Scudder and told him flatly that the fumes of that acetate were too much for him, and that was straight goods.

Scudder looked at him searchingly for a minute. Then he said: "All right. Knock off and call it a day. I'll see Mitchell about shifting you."

This in itself was amazing. As a shrill-voiced girl remarked pithily to another between rapid mastications of gum, "Holy jiminy! 'F I'd have fallen down on me job thataway I'd 'a' bin fired that quick." But to Mitchell, Scudder said: "I don't quite make that guy. He ain't got a hell of a lot of steam to him; but then he don't waste no extra time fooling around with the Janes."

Which was true. For one thing, Selfridge had not dared to steal time for surreptitious horse-play with the by no means frail sharers of his labor; and for another—well, he had acquired during his years of affluence a certain very definitely developed taste; and these girls were neither in speech nor in manner nor in looks anything like Margie. Nor were they by any means anything at all like Grace. He thought, in passing comparison, of Grace, and he thought of his promise to write and communicate his whereabouts; but that thought, too, was no more than passing, and hastily dismissed as quite obviously not to be considered.

Mitchell smiled thinly at Scudder and agreed: "I don't quite make him myself; but he looked like a man who wanted a job bad enough to stick. You say he's not as thick as some? Well. I'll put him in sub-assembly on fabric."

Selfridge, then, instead of being fired, was promoted. He went to a department where the thin skeletons of wings came in all their nakedness and he learned to stretch fine linen over them. Acres of linen he stretched and tacked down with infinite care; and he shuddered as he regarded the frail structures which he covered. His imagination freed—or perhaps rather jaded—from visualizing for him scenes of his own unpleasant prospects, turned with a mysterious fascination to picturing gruesome collapses of these spidery compositions of wood and cloth and paint in every conceivable sort of circumstance. In their nakedness he could see—his mechanical training helped him—just where the weaknesses lay, and he pictured them suddenly doubling up thousands of feet in the air and whirling down to spectacular destruction. His imagination dwelt with morbid fascination on the emotions of the occupants during the appreciable interval of hopeless certitude. But it was a cheerfully impersonal sort of picture show this time. It was no affair of his. He would never have to trust his life to his own skill and care and to the care of his fellows. The very thought occasioned a derisive and at the same time a fearsome smile.

Yet he worked, carefully and fast. Not that he liked the thought of work any more—or rather, hated it less; but because his imagination still found time every now and then to remind him of a cold park bench; and, though his promotion meant more pay he never saved anything; it meant only that he ate that much the more suitably to his taste. But he did not drink. For one thing, drink was difficult and not very satisfying; and for another, he did not dare. If he were to revert to his old condition of uselessness he would be fired; and the consequent picture was unthinkable.

This is no story of a man who has seen the error of his ways and has resolutely set himself to conquer the demon rum and thereafter to raise himself by sheer grit and determination—spurred by the inspiration of the pure working-girl who believes in him—to affluence and respectability. Selfridge frankly did not see the error of his ways. He worked solely because work meant better food and a room less soul-destroying.

As for the demon rum, it had never been for him more than a pleasant accessory to pleasant company. He felt no urge to drink in company with his fellow workers, any more than to talk to them. The honest—and sometimes pure—working-girl who held down her end of the fabric with a lump of chewing-gum while she skilfully tacked down the edge, afforded him no inspiration whatever. Not one of the nobler emotions fired him. He worked because he had common sense and he could visualize the inevitable result of two and two—or of two minus two; and—since man is a creature of habit—because work came not nearly so difficult now.

Since he had sense, however, which so many of his fellow slaves had not, he forged ahead. That was the plain result of two and two. In the fabric department he happened to detect an internal brace wire which was too loose. That meant that he had observation as well as sense. He was graduated to the wire section.

Wire work meant more pay—and as a natural sequence, more of the luxuries of life. Selfridge smiled to himself, that thin cynical smile. He was able to see humor in the thing. That a man entirely unworthy, as he confessed himself to be, who had no interest in his work, and who worked solely that he might not starve, should be pushed ahead through sheer force of circumstance, was a most pleasing satire on life.

And then, as he chuckled over the thing, the beginnings of a great truth began to take shape in his mind. This tremendous fact was that a man of educated intelligence, having once acquired the necessary technique of any manual craft, is bound to rise by reason of his quicker thinking aparatus.

Let some of our forlorn college graduates, whose finest prospect is a "position in business," apply this axiom to, let us say, the plumbing trade, and watch themselves become leaders of men.

Selfridge realized another and more patent truth; and that was that since the direct result of work was more pay and therefore food more suited to his taste and even cigars—not so well suited, real application might lead once more to the flesflesh-pots of Egypt. That was the beginning of ambition.

One of the first things that Selfridge did was to move away from the nightmare of the seventh day advent. So imminently respectable was his new domicil that he thought for a moment of redeeming his promise to communicate his whereabouts to Grace. Grace used to be awfully good companionship; and human companionship was what he could not find among his fellow workers. But he thought immediately of his last meeting with Grace and he put the impulse from him with a shiver.

Less than a month in the wire department found Selfridge an expert in making loops in hard wires and soldering eyes into non-flexible cables and splicing flexible controls and taking gages and even in applying the Tinius-Olsen test. He was put into "field."

Not long after, on the field, he was renewing a flying wire on a plane and listening to two mechanicians swear because the engine would not start. They had tried all the orthodox tests. They had tested spark-plugs for "juice," sweatingly turning the propeller the while. They had poked screwdrivers into the distributor terminals; they had opened up the breaker-box and examined minutely the platinum connection points; and they had found no fault. Yet there was no current. Therefore they stood and blasphemed to high heaven in their wrath.

Selfridge finished his job and gathered up his tools. He was always diffident about thrusting himself forward among those rough-spoken men; but he made a suggestion over his shoulder.

"How's the betting for a cracked bushing in your magneto, causing internal ground?"

"Huh!" snorted one of the mechanicians. "Whadda you know, lineman? S'pose you show us."

Selfridge shrank from their antagonism.

"Not I," he said. "I wouldn't know the inside of one of those things if I saw it; but theoretically that would be the next step."

The mechanicians looked after him and swore some more, including him in their objurgations this time.

Yet it was a cracked bushing. Selfridge was transferred to "motor." He had to smile quizzically to himself again. But he was beginning to realize that there was, after all, some value to his college training. And in motors his inherited aptitude at last found an interest. Here was something in which his father's spirit was evident in him. He took a real joy in toying with oily things that revolved and noting how exactly they fitted and understanding just why they worked, and even theorizing in a half-formed way how they might be improved.

In motors at last he had found something in which he did not have to force himself reluctantly to work. He did not by any means plunge into an orgy of interested activity; he did not even particularly apply himself, no more than he had done at college; but since he knew the theory already the application of it came easy. Intelligent application of the two put him once more into the field force.

Only the best motor mechanics get to field work. But Selfridge was not entirely elated over his promotion. Field men are sometimes called upon to go up. The idea was unthinkable. Selfridge had never at any time been called upon to develop personal courage: his life had been too sheltered. And now, like many factory men who have seen the apparent frailty of internal construction and who have a knowledge of aerodynamics to show them just with what force and where the strains incidental to flying are applied, the thought of trusting his life to one of those things was a chill of horror.

That diabolical imagination of his treated him all over again to a vivid picture show of collapses from vast heights, and added this time the grim "close-up" of himself as one of the occupants. Selfridge determined to apply some real energy and work out of the field force to motor-tester in the shop. Yet in that very application his fate overtook him.

A military model Spad had been converted to the more useful pursuit of mail-carrying. The Liberty motor had been replaced with a powerful, and appallingly noisy, Hispano-Suiza. The observer's seat in front had been ripped out and replaced with an aluminum grille for holding mail-bags. Flying wires and landing wires had been sounded like banjo-strings to test their tautness. Innumerable crown nuts and cotter-pins and safety wires had been examined; and now the great machine stood ready for its test.

The flight-tester, Stevens, a youth of sublime recklessness, as is befitting in one who takes machines into the air to determine whether they are fit to fly, sat in the pilot's seat and jerked his controls sharply to try out their tension. Selfridge hopped down from the foot-board of the lower plane and reported:

"All O. K. with the engine."

Stevens looked toward the field superintendent, who nodded.

"All right!" the boy called. "Spin the stick over! She's on!"

An assistant of Selfridge's took the great propeller in both hands and jerked it downward and to the left. It was a compliment to the engine force that the ignition caught on at once and the propeller roared its readiness. The pilot immediately shut down on the gas-control and let the motor "idle" while he settled himself and tested his "joystick" again. Once or twice for a few seconds at a time he "gave her the gun" and let the engine race while he watched his instruments. Suddenly he threw up his hand.

"Hey, the tachometer don't register!"

The tachometer is an instrument which is connected with the cam-shaft of the engine and registers the revolutions per minute of the propeller. Selfridge jumped up, abashed, to the dash-board and examined the instrument. In a moment he found that it had been rattled loose by the vibration of the motor. Adjustment was easy.

"All right, I can fix this while she idles," he called; and his nimble fingers set to work with quick skill. In a few moments he muttered: "That's all right, I guess," and he climbed into the forward well; it seemed to him that perhaps the leader-hose might be stretched a little too taut. The pilot tested out the new connection by gradually opening out the throttle to its limit. Then he choked down again and hung over the edge of his seat.

"Seems all right now," he shouted to the field boss.

"Well, give her a jump," that individual shouted back. "You've got just about a decent balance with that man forward."

Selfridge, doubled up in the well, half over and half under the grating, with the motor drumming in his ears, heard nothing of all this. Stevens opened up wide again, but Selfridge was blissfully content. Suddenly Stevens waved his hand. The men who leaned against the wings in front let go and dived under. The great machine slowly gathered way and raced off across the field.

It was then that Selfridge knew! In a frenzy of terror he extricated himself from his position and sprang to his feet—and was instantly hurled against the rear of the well by the blast that roared past him. His cap disappeared from his head like a conjuring trick and he gagged for breath. The machine was skimming the grass tops now and must have been making about sixty miles an hour. In another moment the pilot drew gently back on the control-stick and climbed into the sky at a steep angle.

Sheer choking for breath forced Selfridge to duck his head under the well-coaming; and then the wilting of his knees let him down in a huddled heap. For several minutes he was too paralyzed to think.

Blessed minutes of respite! For when his reasoning faculties returned to him he was beset with the most hideous picture display of his life. Each separate one of his previously imagined accidents flashed before him in vivid detail; and with the climax of each his breath ceased and his heart rose to his choking throat with the immediate expectancy of feeling the machine suddenly lurch and wabble and then—his heart ceased—plunged to the long, shrieking dive.

But no lurch came yet, no sickening plunge. His long reel of preïmagined pictures came to an end at last, and his paralyzed mind was quite incapable of making up any new ones. In the ensuing blankness he found himself vaguely conscious of all the conglomerate voices of his engine. There was a despairing sort of pride in the droning hum which the trained ear picks up as an undertone below the pervading racket; almost a sense of security in the strong, steady rear of the exhaust.

The motor was running beautifully, and on the ground Selfridge would have thrilled to its music. But here he cowered and clutched with despairing strength at the grating as though to hold the machine off from the expected crash by the sheer pull of his arms.

There is a definite limit to every human emotion. Having arrived at the extremity of terror, the mental reflexes presently tire and are unable to hold their high pitch. They subside with slow palpitations and leave a dull numbness behind through which other emotions are able to register again. Selfridge began to be aware of another such emotion. It was a queer tingling of the nerves, a racing, shouting circulation of the blood. It was the exhilaration of extreme speed. He found for himself what this unusual sensation might be—and then the dive came!

The machine nosed over. Selfridge gasped and clutched at the rear rods of the grille. Over it went till it was almost perpendicular, and then, with engine going full blast, it roared down to earth. Selfridge shrieked, shut his eyes, and choked on his pent-up breath. Every nerve fringed before the expectant crash. Then suddenly the engine stopped dead, and a few moments later the landing-gear bumped gently. Another few seconds and it came to a stop within a few feet of its take-off.

"Good landing, boy!" a voice congratulated.

"Yep, she's a bird," responded Stevens easily, pushing his goggles from his face.

Selfridge climbed down from the forward well and vomited his soul out before the group. Somebody supported him with an arm around his shoulders. Somebody else patted his back. The voice came again with matter-of-fact confidence.

"I've seen them that way before the first time. He'll be all right in a minute."

III.

Of course he was all right; but it was many minutes before he could control the trembling of his limbs. It was anger at the rough chaffing of the others that gave him the impetus to climb up to the engine and fumble among its cylinders as though feeling for possible overheating. The action called for all the will power he had. It surprised him, as a matter of fact, that he was able to do it at all; for he had conceived an almost physical fear of the brute machine, as though it might suddenly turn and snap at him.

During the rest of that week Selfridge was undergoing a peculiar sort of transition. Machines, of course, were tested every day; and as field expert his was the responsibility for the condition of the engine. It was with an almost ludicrous alacrity that he stepped clear of every possible entanglement before he gave the word announcing his O. K. Then he would stand and watch the powerful mechanisms scud away and roar up into the air with a strange feeling of mingled nausea and interest.

They seemed amazingly steady up there. They dipped and turned with such perfect grace that they carried an impression of being calmly sure of themselves. As he watched he imagined himself seated again behind a humming engine whose giant power he knew to the last revolution; and his imagination played tricks with him. It projected pictures of himself sitting calmly confident, toying with gas and ignition levers—he always contended that Stevens was too rough with those little polished knobs which needed a delicate touch—and he felt a faint echo of that tingling and racing of the blood. Then when Stevens would nose the machine down for its long dive to earth he would feel the same old sinking in the stomach and would clutch spasmodically at whatever tools he happened to have in his hand. And yet, it never looked anything like the fearsome fall he had experienced.

He felt impelled to talk about the planes and their habits to Stevens; and since his was the last word on the engines on which Stevens had to rely, the superman would unbend a little of his aloofness. Selfridge was amazed to find that he couldn't tell him much. The boy had a certain technical jargon of pancakes and whip-stalls and flip-flops and wing slips; but as for explaining just what stress was set up by a pancake, and where, why, he was scarcely able to decide.

He tried to bluff through on his flying patter; but Selfridge, as a wire man and a rigger, knew much more than he did. About engines Stevens was discreetly silent. Till one afternoon in a burst of ingenuous frankness, cornered by the insatiable questions of Selfridge, he quoted the jealous taunt of the ground force.

"Any fool can be a flier."

Selfridge had been supplementing his questions with a little private exploration in a book entitled, "Theory of Flight and Aerodynamics." He grinned understandingly at Stevens. Then he made an extraordinary statement.

"I'd like to go up again—only I'm scared."

Stevens laughed like a delighted schoolboy. He had found the one touch of nature.

"So was I," he admitted cheerfully. "Scared green. But I just had to. Something"—he shifted his gaze diffidently—"something called me."

"Yes," said Selfridge. "I know. Something up there."

And right on the heels of his tremulous decision the fruit of his previous efforts became apparent. He was promoted to motor tester! Immediately he saw a splendid pageant of the bright lights of his own Broadway stretching before him. For a motor tester is a man who makes money. He is a man who must know all the idiosyncracies and moods of an airplane motor, which is the most temperamental piece of mechanism in the world. A cloudy day crabs its disposition as surely as a sunny day brightens it. A few thousand feet of altitude above what it likes gives it a cough. A humid day in summer will as likely as not cause it to sulk and refuse to work.

A motor tester, then, is a man who is worthy of the money he makes; and he makes quite enough to take a whirl now and then among the bright lights.

Selfridge patted himself and smiled widely. The flesh-pots of Egypt which had been his goal were at last at hand. Yet he refused the offer of promotion and said that he preferred to remain chief field mechanician for a while yet. He explained it to himself:

"I guess I can hang that up for a little while. I've waited so long, a little longer won't hurt. I'll get this flying thing through first, and then—oh, boy!"

Yet in making that decision Selfridge, though he did not know it, was admitting that something had come into his life which was more important than the flesh-pots. Nor did he know that his method of expressing his decision was decidedly different to what it would have been some months ago. Yet less did he know that his own Broadway would have looked at him with a hazy sort of recollection as though trying to recall a vaguely familiar face.

For the face was a healthy brown—with a smear of grease across one cheek just now—and the lines that seamed it were lines of thought and of worried guessing at the next mood of an engine, and wrinkles of long staring at a circling dot against the sun. And the hands, those white, blue-veined hands of old, were brown paws, criss-crossed with small cuts and scars, and steady enough to time the tappet clearance of a valve to the prescribed decimal .020 of an inch.

So Selfridge remained on the field force, and Stevens took him joy-riding. It was a fearful sort of joy at first; yet in spite of his tremors and the leaping of his bowels into his throat with each dip of the machine, the novice experienced again that racing of the blood which caused him to whoop aloud as they swung round in a spiral on a bank which brought Selfridge looking in astonishment over his shoulder at the ground beneath.

Sitting strapped into a regular seat crouched behind the celluloid wind-shield and feeling the air whizzing in solid particles past one's ear was a very different sensation from being banged about on the bottom of an aluminum mail grille.

Stevens was merciful. He brought the machine down to earth again on a long easy glide. Selfridge was spared the sinking sensation of a steep dive.

"Well, how come?" grinned Stevens as he pushed home the gas control and cut off the spark, and the engine came to an abrupt stop with a queer blip blip.

Selfridge was removing his helmet. He was breathing hard. He didn't know just how to reply. Then he said irrelevantly:

"How high were we?"

"Oh, about three thousand feet," said Stevens.

Selfridge was suddenly disappointed.

"Was that all? Gosh, I thought we were miles up." Then, grinning; "We didn't reach it. It's still up there, way up."

Stevens looked at him quizzically for a moment; then he understood and grinned too. "Oh, the thing that calls? Yes, I've never reached it either; I used to feel that way too." Suddenly an idea struck him. "Say," he exclaimed. "If it gets you that way, maybe—well, you hold the stick next time in your front seat and see how it feels."

Stevens's inspiration was correct. In six months Selfridge was for the second time in his life something which he would never have believed—a flier; and what was more, knowing how to nurse his engine as he did, he was a good flier. Extraordinary development for Selfridge of the gay boulevard!

The company made him a flight tester; and gave him more money even than a motor tester; enough to make quite frequent whirls through the region of the bright lights. Selfridge determined to make his long postponed début—some time. The thought gave him keen satisfaction; yet he said to himself that there was just something else which he wanted to attain to first. He didn't know exactly what, but he was not satisfied. That urge to go up and up was not stilled as it had been in the case of Stevens. Selfridge's ambition always had been to be a high flier. As in the old days, so now it seemed to be his sole ambition.

His imagination was working overtime these days. Fed by the need of analyzing the tantrums of motors, nurtured by his vivid emotions in learning the mastery of the air, it spread its wings and soared. It reeled long rosy pictures—they were all prisma process now—of himself circling high above fleecy clouds in an ultramarine sky and chasing eagles. It showed him leaving the eagles behind and swinging up to a limitless blue. It dressed upon old memories of fairy tales and thrilled him with—well, he could shut his eyes and be almost sure that he saw the pearly gates. And on one especially inspired occasion—that was after he had attended a banquet in honor of certain foreign aviators and had worn evening dress—he flew right through them and was lost in billowing waves of aurora colors.

He felt that he must go up and see for himself. That Something up there impelled him irresistibly. He adjusted an engine for altitude and went. There were no eagles; but he soared through the stillnesses of upper space, drunk with the exhilaration of height and speed. Only when his gasoline gage showed a scant inch in the tank did he shut down on his engine and swing down in long spirals.

He stepped out of the machine in silence. He was exalted, thrilled. Vague theorizings about human souls and sublime heights flitted through his mind. Then, as the exhilaration wore off he slowly woke up. He shook himself angrily, and muttered something about copy-book platitudes.

But there remained a disappointment. The Something that called was still there. He felt that if only he might rise high enough he might attain it and be satisfied. He found himself wishing that Grace might be conveniently getatable. She was always so ready to understand and explain things which he did not understand. However, Grace was—wherever she was. Selfridge analyzed his emotions for himself in an inexpert manner and decided that the urge was ambition calling him to make a record. Whatever it was it was quite necessary to go and find out.

Selfridge sought out Mitchell and sounded him about the possibility of getting the company to develop an altitude engine. Mitchell smiled shrewdly through half-closed eyes. He was thinking of the wreck of a year ago.

"We-ell," he said judicially. "A record is always top hole advertising. If you think you can do the stunt—and I wouldn't be surprised if your trick with engines wouldn't make it—why hop to it. But you've got to go some to beat thirty-two thousand feet."

"I know," admitted Selfridge. "But give me the right engine and I'll make it or bust"

"Hm-mm," said Mitchell dryly. "Machines cost around the ten thousand mark; aviators cost—seventy-five a week. But I'll tell you what we'll do with you. Go up and show us that you've got the stuff, and we'll build you a special machine. And if you make thirty-five the advertising is ours and you can keep the ten thousand dollar prize."

Selfridge spent a month studying the effect of altitude on gas engines and experimenting with oxygen supply systems. Then he chose a favorable day and went out to show the company that he had the makings of an altitude champion. That was easy. The company put the promised special machine in hand: but Selfridge insisted that success would lie in the engine.

He was not satisfied with any of the oxygen supply systems. For that matter he was not satisfied with anything these days. He was obsessed with a vague unrest. He wanted something; but he didn't know what it was he wanted. He felt that the call to climb to the greater heights was the basis of his unrest; and then the thought of heights set him angrily to thinking what sort of a craziness this was that overtook him at high altitudes. His researches into the reactions of gas engines had not included anything about the psychological reactions of extreme exhilaration, or about the purely pathological reactions on some temperaments of oxygen from a breather mask.

So he fretted and worried and felt the longing for whatever it was that haunted him; and in the interim he developed an idea of his own for supplying the necessary oxygen for normal ignition at high altitudes by a pressure pump. If it worked, it would involve a patent and comparative affluence. And affluence meant lights, laughter, life!

But Selfridge had almost decided by this time that he was not nearly so anxious for life as he used to think he was. There was that something else.

Meanwhile the new machine was nearly completed; a masterpiece of clever design and perfect material. The designer told him that the company relied on his skill and that he had therefore cut down the factor of safety from the standard five to three, sacrificing the rest to lightness. Selfridge didn't worry. All he wanted was to make the big climb.

At last the day of the great attempt arrived. Weather conditions were perfect. But Selfridge climbed into his seat without much enthusiasm. He felt an intuition of disappointment. However he showed a cheerful face as he circled once over the heads of the group on the field and waved his arm at them. Then he set his controls and roared away on a steady climb.

Up he soared, and up. The engine—tuned up with his own hand—hummed in perfect rhythm and the beautiful machine leaped to every turn of the control surfaces.

Ten thousand feet! Everything ran with the smoothness of a jeweled watch. Twenty thousand! Selfridge knew that far below, in another world, tiny specks were straining their eyes to follow him with telescopes. His old sense of exhilaration began to come over him. His imagination took possession again and projected rosy pictures of success. Another five thousand!

Selfridge sat with tense muscles, his face thrust forward, a beatific smile on his open lips beneath the hideous oxygen mask. He was wrapped in wool and leather, swathed to a shapeless bull; yet he felt as free and unhampered as the thin air that hurtled past him. He was drunk with the exhilaration of it, as surely intoxicated, so far as his control over his reasoning faculties went, as he had ever been with sparkling champagne.

His eyes ceased to watch his instruments and gazed wide open into blue space. He flew by feel alone, with the unconscious effort of the born bird-man. He forgot that he ever had a recording barograph. He knew only subconsciously that his controls were set to climb at a certain angle, and he sat tense in just that position.

Yet another five thousand feet! But Selfridge did not know it. Engine and atmospheric condition and machine coordinated perfectly. There was no need of conscious effort. Selfridge was permeated with a supreme confidence, a pure emotion which exalted him out of himself. He knew. That was all. He never questioned. He just knew that he would find the elusive Something which his soul hungered for.

And then, quite naturally and beautifully, he did! He saw it, floating diaphanously before him. A face!

First the eyes were apparent; fine eyes, wide-set under level brows, with a wistful yearning in them. Then the lips, curved and tremulous, and the firm rounded chin. And lastly the hair, a halo of russet brown.

Selfridge started into sudden consciousness. His eyes stared behind his goggles. He leaned forward with an eager exclamation. The movement depressed his elevator control. The machine dipped downwards. And the vision was gone.

Selfridge drew a sharp hissing breath. He was trembling. He tried to think; but he found thought impossible. He was too unnerved to continue his flight. He let the machine hold its downward slant while he pinched himself to ascertain whether he was awake.

Fifteen minutes later he landed almost as lightly as a feather on his own field. Immediately an excited group rushed to the machine. Selfridge sat motionless in his seat, looking straight in front of him. Mechanicians and managers almost fought with one another to get a look at the recording barograph, sealed over the dial with the official seal of the representatives of the Aero Club.

"Whe-ee!" yelled a voice that cracked in its excitement. "Thirty-four thousand and some! Whai-ee-ee! Our man! The highest flier on earth!"

Enthusiastic hands dragged Selfridge from his seat and hoisted him shoulder high. But his face remained set and grave. He knew now, of course. He had seen the thing that called, the thing that he wanted. His record meant nothing to him. He knew now that it was never the record that had lured him. There was no room for mistake about his unrest of the last few months. He knew definitely what his soul's desire was.

And he began to understand in a vague sort of way that it had been necessary for him to rise to a plane far above where he used to be before he could appreciate what his desire really was. He begged to be let down. "I'm dead tired, fellers," he said. "I'd be obliged if you'd let me go home, and celebrate without me."

He was tired too. The strain of his emotions had worn him out. But not too tired to sit down and write a letter, a long-promised letter that ought to have been written more than a year ago. He mailed it at once; and then he went home and sat and wondered whether he had seen what he had seen.

He had plenty of time for speculation. Days came and went, and brought no reply to the letter. Selfridge waited in gnawing suspense. He tried to reconstruct the scene of his vision, but his imagination raced away into the wildest suppositions. Every time he tried to think—and that was all the time—the most grotesque explanations visualized themselves in vivid series. Selfridge was forced to realize that he had been in no condition, under the spell of his exhilaration up there to be sure of anything or to remember anything.

It was a nerve-racking period for him. As the days went on, and no reply came, the grotesque pictures took on a suggestion of morbid gruesomeness. Selfridge began to wonder, cold fear in his heart, whether his realization had not come too late; whether the girl—the only possible girl ever, he knew now—was perhaps—he dared not think it—perhaps beyond call, and whether he might possibly have seen a spirit.

He had heard of such things. Many scientific men were now beginning to believe that certain people, when in a condition of a peculiar exhilaration which they called trance, were able to see, or at least had obtained vivid and recognizable impressions of loved ones who had passed over.

The thing obsessed him. It was absolutely necessary, of course, for him to know. He speculated gloomily, then, whether, if he could reproduce the same condition of exhilaration in the same circumstances, he might be able once more to see—what he thought he had seen.

Speculation did not hold him for long. Certainty was what he needed. He stalked to the hangars and ordered out the machine.

There was no eager little crowd this time, no cheery wave of farewell and good luck. Selfridge sat in his seat with a fixed expression and with a fixed purpose. He took off with as little delay as possible and climbed as steeply as he dared; he wanted to get there and find out as quickly as possible.

Once again he reached the thirty thoussand level without any difficulty, thanks to his patent; and he cruised the attenuated blueness with a set determination to find out whether these thin, chilly levels were the abode of some unusual kind of spirit, and whether the urge that had drawn him was still there.

His face set more bitterly than ever as he pushed the control lever from him. Careless of the reduced factor of safety—sacrificed to lightness—he swooped down at an angle which caused strangly ominous strains and creaks to mingle with the shriek of the wind rushing through the wires.

Only the grace of Providence and the best material in the world averted a tragedy. As he landed Selfridge felt that his leaden heart alone would be sufficient to wreck the machine. It was a bad landing. It would have been bad even for a beginner. It was bumpy and it was far from his usual precision which brought the machine right up to the hangar doors.

He sat in dull misery for a while and then he climbed wearily out and removed his mask to call to the figure which darted out of the hangar and came running across the field to him. He felt dully annoyed. Why did not the other mechanicians hurry up to take the machine over? Star fliers were not people who should be kept waiting. He pushed his staring goggles up to his forehead and pressed his fingers to his tired eyes and blinked to readjust them to normal vision.

Then he started suddenly, and trembled as he had done when he had seen the face up above. Was he seeing it again? The figure that ran across the field so eagerly, was it a deft handed mechanician, or was it just one of the fool girls who so ineffectually washed off the machines after flight? And if so, why in thunder wasn't his regular crew coming out?

It was a girl! An ardent impatient girl, strong and graceful, with wistful wet eyes! She threw herself against the wool and leather monstrosity of a man with an inarticulate little squeal of anxious contentment and pressed close.

"I—I just got your letter," she sobbed for no reason whatever. "I've been away, and—and I've been looking for you for so long, Howard."

"I've just been looking for you too, Gracie girl—up there. And I guess I've been looking for a long time before that too, only I didn't know what I was looking for. Why didn't you tell me?"

The girl lifted a shy, wet face.

"I was going to," said the girl simply. "But you ran away."

(The End.)