Skyrider by B. M. Bower (best novels in english txt) 📕

side of the depot at Agua Dulce, Johnny sat himself down on a truck whose iron parts were still hot from the sun that had lately shone full upon it. With lips puckered into a soundless whistle, and fingers that trembled a little with eagerness, he proceeded to unwrap one of the parcels he had just taken from the express office. On another truck that had stood longer in the shade, a young tramp in greasy overalls and cap inhaled the last precious wisps of smoke from a cigarette burned down to an inch of stub, and watched Johnny with a glum kind of speculation. Johnny sensed his presence and the speculative interest, and read the latter as the preparation for a "touch." And Johnny was not feeling particularly charitable after having to pay a seven-dollar C.O.D. besides the express charges. He showed all the interest he felt in his packages and refused to encourage the hobo by so much as a glance.

He examined the slender ribs, bending them and slipping them through his fingers with the pleasurable feeling that he was inspecting and testing as an expert would have done. He read the label on a tin of "dope," unwrapped a coil of wire cable and felt it, went at a parcel of unbleached linen, found the end and held a corner up to the light and squinted at it with his head perked sidewise.

Whereupon the hobo gave a limber twist of his lank body that inclined him closer to Johnny. "Say, if it's any of my business, how much did Abe Smith tax yuh for that linen?" His tone was languid, tinged with a chronic resentment against circumstance.

Johnny turned a startled stare upon him, seemed on the point of telling him that it was not any of his business, and with the next breath yielded to his hunger for speech with a human being, however lowly, whose intelligence was able to grasp so exalted a subject as aircraft.

"Dunno yet—I'll have to look it up on the bill," he said with a cheerful indifference that implied long familiarity with such matters.

"Looks to me like some of the same lot he stung me with last fall, is why I asked. Abe will sting you every time the clock ticks. Why don't yuh send to the Pacific Supply Company? They're real people. Got better stuff, and they'll treat you right whether you send or go yourself. Take it from me, bo, when you trade with Abe Smith you want a cop along."

Johnny fingered the linen, his face gone sober. "I told him to send the best he had in stock," he said.

"Well, maybe he done it, at that," the hobo conceded. "His stock's rotten, that's all."

"I was looking the bunch over so I could shoot it back to him if it wasn't all right," Johnny explained with dignity. "They sure can't work off any punk stuff on me, not if I know it."

The hobo flipped his cigarette stub into the sand and stared out across the depressing huddle of adobe huts and raw, double-roofed shacks that comprised Agua Dulce. His pale eyes blinked at the glare, his mouth drooped sourly at the corners.

"Believe me, bo, if you're stranded in this hole with a busted plane, yuh better not take on any contract of arguing with Abe Smith. He'll stall yuh off till you forget how to fly." He turned his pale stare to Johnny with a new interest. "You aren't making a transcontinental, are you?"

"Well—n-no. Not yet, anyway. I—live here." You may not believe it, but Johnny was beginning to feel apologetic—and before a hobo, of all men.

"The deuce you do!" The tramp hitched himself up on another vertebra of his limp spine. "Why, I thought you were probably just making a cross-country flight, and had a wreck. I was going to bone yuh for a lift, in case you were alone. You live here! Why, for cat's sake?"

"Gawd knows," said Johnny. Then added impulsively, "I don't expect to go on living here always. I'm going to beat it, soon as I get my airplane repaired, and—" He was on the point of saying, "when I learn to fly it." But pride and his experience with the Rolling R boys checked him in time.

The hobo looked hungrily at the "makin's" Johnny was pulling from the pocket of his shirt. "At that you're lucky," he said. "Having a plane to repair. Mine's junk, and I'm just outa the hospital myself. I was a fool to ever go east, anyway. They are sure a cold proposition, believe me. Long as you're lousy with money, and making pretty flights, you're all right. But let bad luck hit yuh once—say, they don't know you any more a-tall. I was doing fine on the Coast, too, but a fellow's never satisfied with what he's got. The game looked bigger back East, and I went. Now look at me! Bumming my way back when I planned to make a record flight! Kicked off the train in this flyspeck on the desert; nothing to eat since yesterday, not even a smoke left on me, nor the price of one!" He accepted with a nod the tobacco and papers Johnny held out to him, and proceeded languidly to roll a cigarette.

"Down to straight bumming—when I ought to be making my little old thousand dollars a flight. Maybe you've kept in touch with things on the Coast. I'm known there, well enough. Bland Halliday's my name. Here's my pilot's license—about all them sharks didn't pry off me in the hospital! I sure do wish I had of let well enough alone! But no, I had to go get gay with myself and try and beat a sure thing."

Johnny was gazing reverently upon the pilot's license which he held in his hand, and he did not hear the last two or three sentences of the hobo's lament. He was busy breaking one of the ten commandments; the one which says, "Thou shalt not covet." That he had never heard of Bland Halliday did not disturb him, for in Arizona's wide spaces one does not hear of all that goes on in the world. He was sufficiently impressed by the license and what it implied, and he was thinking very fast. Here was a man, down on his luck it is true, but a man who actually knew how to fly; a fellow who spoke of Smith Brothers Supply Factory with the contempt of familiarity; a fellow who had used some of the very same linen.

Johnny Jewel forgot his pose of expert aviator. He forgot that Bland Halliday was absolutely unknown to him and that his personality was not altogether prepossessing. As a rule Johnny did not like pale eyes that seemed always to wear a veiled, opaque look. Heretofore he had not liked those new-fangled little mustaches which the Rolling R boys had dubbed slipped eyebrows. And ordinarily he would have objected to a mouth drawn at the corners in a permanent whine. To offset these objectionable features there were the greasy, brown overalls and the cap which certainly looked bird-mannish enough for any one, and there was the pilot's license—no fake about that—and the fact that the fellow had known all about Abe Smith and the linen.

Johnny threw away his cigarette and his caution together. "Say, I might be able to take you to Los Angeles, all right—provided you will take a hand on the little old boat and help me put her in shape again. It oughtn't to take long, if we go right after it. I—er—to tell the truth, it's hard to get hold of any one around here that knows anything about it. Why, I had one fellow working for me, Mr. Halliday, and just for a josh I asked him where the fuselage was. And he went hunting all over the place and finally brought me a monkey wrench! He—"

"No brains—that's the main trouble with the game," commented Bland Halliday, after he had exhaled a long, thin wreath of smoke which he watched dreamily. "What you got?"

"Hunh? What kind of a plane? Why, it's a tractor. A military—"

"Unh-huh. Dual dep control, or have you monkeyed with it and—?"

"It's a regular military type tractor. It—well, it has been in government service before—"

"You an army flier? Then what 'n hell you doing here? Say, put over something I can take, bo. You don't look the part. Only for that stuff you unwrapped, I'd tag you for a wild and woolly cowboy."

His tone was not flattering, and his very frank skepticism ill became a tramp. But Johnny had plunged, and he swallowed his indignation and explained with sufficient truth to be convincing. He even confessed that he could not fly—yet. There was something pathetic in his eagerness and his trustfulness, though Bland Halliday seemed to miss altogether the pathos, in his greed for technical details of the damage to the plane, and a crafty inquisitiveness as to distance and location.

He smoked another of Johnny's cigarettes, stared opaquely at the sweltering little village and meditated, while Johnny wrapped his parcels and tied them securely, and waited nervously for the decision.

"I wish I'd happened along before you sent for that stuff," Halliday remarked at last, flicking Johnny's face with a glance. "I've got a dope of my own that beats that, any way you take it—and don't cost a quarter as much. And that linen—I sure would love to cram it down old Abe Smith's gullet. Say! You got tacks and hammer, and varnish and brushes? If you're away off from the railroad, as you say you are, all these things must be laid in before we start work. And what about your oil and gas? And how's the propeller? Does she show any crack anywhere? How far is it, anyway? I'd like to look 'er over before I do anything about it. From all I can see, you don't know what condition the motor's in. How far is it, anyway? I might go and take a look."

"When you take a look," said Johnny, with a flash of his old spirit, "it will be with your sleeves rolled up. If you think I'm running a sight-seeing bus, you'd better tie a can to the thought. My time ain't my own—yet. I can get by, this trip, because the bronk I'm riding needed the exercise; or I can say he did, and it will get over. But I don't expect to be riding in to the railroad every day or so. If I get another chance in a month, I'll say I'm lucky."

"Well, I'd like to help you out all right. I can see where you're going to need it, and need it bad. Tell you what I will do, providing it suits you. I'll go over with you, and take a look at the plane. If it can be repaired without shipping it into a shop, all right! I'll help you repair it. You'll learn to fly, all right, on the way to the Coast. That is, if you've got it in you.

"And the other side of it is, if the plane can't be repaired at your camp, and you don't want to trust me to get it to a shop where I can repair it, all right. You stake me to a ticket to Los Angeles and money to eat on. It's going to be worth that to you, to know just what shape your plane's in, and what it will cost to fix it. And without handing myself any flowers, I'll say I'm as well qualified as anybody. I've built fifteen of 'em, myself. I can tell you down to the last two-bit piece what it's going to stand you to put her in shipshape condition, ready to take the air. And believe me, old top, you can throw good money away faster on an airplane than you can on a jamboree. I've tried both ways; I know." He leaned back on the truck and clasped his hands around one bent knee, as though, having stated his terms and his opinion, there remained nothing further for him to say or to do about it.

Johnny looked at him dubiously, did some further rapid thinking, and went to inquire of the station agent the price of a ticket to Los Angeles.

"All right, that goes," he said when he returned. "Come on and eat. We've got to do some hustling to get back before sundown. You make out a list of what we've got to have besides this—you said hammer and tacks—and I'll see if the hardware store has got it. Lucky I brought an extra horse along to pack this stuff on. You can ride him out."

"Ride a horse? Me?" the spine of the expert stiffened with horror, so that he sat up straight.

"Sure,