Flags in the Dust

The shabby man waved it impatiently aside. “Look.” He picked up the napkins again. “Dihedral increases in ratio to air speed, up to a certain point. Now, what I want to find out—“

“Tell it to the Marines, buddy,” the aviator interrupted. “I heard a couple of years ago they got a airyplane. Here, waiter!” Bayard was watching the shabby man bleakly.

“You aren’t drinking” the girl said. She touched the aviator beneath the table.

“No,” Bayard agreed.“Why don’t you fly his coffin for him, Monaghan?”

“Me?” The aviator set his glass down. “Like hell. My leave comes due next month.” He raised the glass again. “Here’s to wind-up,” he said. “And no heel-taps.”

“Yes,” Bayard agreed, not touching his glass. His face was pale and rigid, a metal mask again.

“I tell you there’s no danger at all, as long as you keep the speed below the point I’ll give you,” the shabby man said. “I’ve tested the wings with weights, and proved the lift and checked all my figures; all you have to do —”

“Won’t you drink with us?” the girl insisted.

“Sure he will,” the aviator said. “Say, you remember that night in Amiens when that big Irish devil, Comyn, wrecked the Cloche-Clos by blowing thatA.P.M.’s whistle at the door?” The shabby man sat smoothing the folded napkins on the table before him. Then he burst forth again, his voice hoarse and mad with the intensity of his frustrated dream:

“I’ve worked and slaved, and begged and borrowed, and now when I’ve got the machine and a government inspector, I can’t get a test because you damn yellow-livered pilots won’t take it up. A service full of you, drawing flying pay for sitting in two-story dancehalls, swilling alcohol. You overseas pilots talking about your guts! No wonder you couldn’t keep the Germans from—”

“Shut up,” Bayard told him without heat, in his bleak, careful voice.

“You’re not drinking,” the girl repeated, <4Won’t you?” She raised his glass and touched her lips to it and extended it to him. Taking it, he grasped her hand too and held her so. But again he was staring across the room. ‘

“Not brother-in-law,” he said. “Husband-in-law. No. Wife’s brother’s husband-in-law. Wife used to be wife’s brother’s girl. Married, now. Fat woman. He’s lucky.”

“What’re you talking about?” the aviator demanded. “Come on, let’s have a drink.”

The girl was taut at her arm’s length, with the other hand she raised her glass and she smiled at him with brief and terrified coquetry. But he held her wrist in his hard fingers, and while she stared at him widely he drew her steadily toward him. “Turn me loose,” she whispered. “Don’t,” and she set her glass down and with the other hand she tried to unclasp his fingers. The shabby man was brooding over his folded napkins; the aviator was carefully occupied with his drink. “Don’t,” she whispered again. Her body was wrung in her chair and she put her otherhand out quickly, lest she be dragged out of it, and for a moment they stared at one another—she with Wide and mute terror; he bleakly with the cruel cold mask of his face. Then he released her and rose and kicked his chair away.

“Come on, you,” he said to the shabby man. He drew a wad of bills from his pocket and laid one beside her on the table. ‘That’ll get you home,” he said. But she sat nursing the wrist he had held, watching him without a sound. The aviator was discreetly interested in the bottom of his glass. “Come on,” Bayard repeated, and he stalked steadily on. The shabby man rose and followed rapidly.

In a small alcove Harry Mitchell sat. On his table too were bottles and glasses, and he now sat slumped in his chair, his eyesclosed and his bald head in the glow of an electric candle was dewed with rosy perspiration. Beside him sat a woman who turned and looked full at Bayard with an expression of harried desperation; above them stood a waiter with a head like that of a priest, and as Bayard passed he saw that the diamond was missing from Harry’s tie and he heard their bitter suppressed voices as their hands struggled over something on the table between them, behind the discreet shelter of their backs, and as he and his companion reached the door the woman’s voice rose with a burst of filthy rage into a shrill hysterical scream cut sharply off, as if someone had clapped a hand over her mouth.

* * *

The next day Miss Jenny drove in to town and wired him again. But when this wire was dispatched, Bayard was sitting in an aeroplane on the tarmac of the government field at Dayton, while the shabby man hovered and darted hysterically about and a group ofarmy pilots stood nearby, politely noncommittal The machine looked like any other bi-plane, save that there were no viable cables between the planes, which were braced from within by wires on a system of tension springs; and hence, motionless on the ground, dihedral was negative. The theory was that while in level flight dihedral would be eliminated for the sake of speed, as in the Spad type, and when the machine was banked, side pressure would automatically increase dihedral for maneuverability. The cockpit was set well back toward the fin. “So you can see the wings when they buckle,” the man who loaned him a helmet and goggles said drily. “It’s an old pair,” he added. But Bayard only glanced at him, bleakly humorless. “Look here, Sartoris,” the man added, “let that crate alone. These birds show up here every week with something that will revolutionize flying, some new kind of mantrap that flies fine—on paper. If the C.O. won’t give him a pilot (and you know we try anything here that has a prop on it) you can gamble it’s a washout.”

But Bayard took the helmet and goggles and went on across the aerodrome toward the hangar. The group followed him and stood quietly about with their bleak, wind-gnawed faces while the engine was being warmed up. But when Bayard got in and settled his goggles, the man approached and thrust his hand into Bayard’s lap. “Here,” he said brusquely. “Take this.” It was a woman’s garter, and Bayard picked it up and returned it.

“I won’t need it,” he said. “Thanks just the same.”

“Well, you know your own business, of course. But if you ever let her get her nose down, you’ll lose everything but the wheels.”

“I know,” Bayard answered. “I’ll keep her up.”The shabby man rushed up again, still talking. “Yes,yes,” Bayard replied impatiently, “You told me allthat Contact,” he snapped. The mechanic spun thepropeller over, and as the machine moved out theshabby man still clung to the cockpit and shouted athim. Soon he was running to keep up and still shouting, until Bayard lifted his hand off the cowling andopened the throttle. But when he reached the end ofthe field and turned back into the wind the man wasrunning toward him and waving his arms. Bayard

opened the throttle full and the machine lurched for ward and when he passed the shabby man in midfielddie tail was high and the plane rushed on in longbounds, and he had a fleeting glimpse of the man’sopen mouth and his wild arms as the boundingceased.

There was not enough tension on the wires, he decided at once, watching them from the V strut out as they tipped and swayed, and he jockeyed the thing carefully on, gaining height. Also he realized that there was a certain point beyond which his own speed would rob him of lifting surface. He had about two thousand feet now, and he turned, and in doing so he found that aileron pressure utterly negatived the inner plane’s dihedral and doubled the outer one, and he found himself in the wildest skid he had seen since his Hun days. The machine not only skidded: it flung its tail up like a diving whale and the air speed indicator leaped thirty miles past the dead line the inventor had given him. He was headed back toward the field now, in a shallow dive,and he pulled the stick back.

But only the wingtips responded by tipping sharply upward; he flung the stick forward before they ripped completely off, and he knew that only the speed of the dive kept him from falling like an inside out umbrella. And the speed was increasing: itseemed an eternity before the wingtips recovered, and already he had overshot the field, under a thousand feet high. He pulled the stick back again; again the wingtips buckled and he slapped the stick, over and