The constant rains had filled the rivers to overflowing, and after leaving Maben I flew over flooded territory nearly all the way to Lake Village, Arkansas. Often the water was up to the second story windows of the farmhouses, and a forced landing at any time would have at least meant nosing over.
I had installed the compass while waiting for the new propeller at Maben, and experienced no further difficulty in holding my course.
After circling Lake Village I landed in a field several miles north of town. The nearest building was a clubhouse and soon the keeper and his family had arrived beside the plane. They invited me to stay with them as long as I wished, but the keeper persistently refused to accept a flight in return for his hospitality. I carried only a handful of passengers that afternoon. The flying territory around that part of the country was fairly good and there were a number of fields available for planes to land in. Consequently an airplane was no longer the drawing attraction that it was farther in the interior.
I staked the plane down much earlier than usual and went over to the clubhouse.
Evening came on with the clearness of a full moon and open sky. The landscape was illuminated with a soft yellow light; an ideal night for flying. I decided to see what the country looked like from the air at night and jokingly asked my host to accompany me. To my surprise he willingly agreed. For some reason he had no fear of a night flight although I had been unable to persuade him to go up with me in the daytime. What his reaction would have been, had he known that I had never flown after dark before, is a matter of speculation.
We untied the plane, removed the canvases from engine and cockpit, and after a few minutes spent in warming up the motor, taxied down the field and took off for a moonlight flight down the Mississippi and over Lake Village.
Later in the evening after the ship was again securely staked to the ground and we were sitting quietly in the clubhouse, my host stated that he had never spent a more enjoyable quarter of an hour in his life.
The next morning I was again heading towards Texas against a strong westerly wind which retarded the speed of the Jenny so greatly that even with my double fuel capacity it was necessary to land at Farmerville, Louisiana, to replenish my supply. From there I flew to Texarkana and landed between the stumps of the 1923 airport.
On the following morning I left Texarkana with a strong tail wind and after crossing the western end of the Ozark mountains, landed near a small town in north eastern Oklahoma where I took on a fresh supply of fuel and again headed north towards Lincoln, Nebraska.
My tanks began to run low about halfway through Kansas and I picked out a hillside near Alma. After flying low and dragging the field several times I came in for a landing, but just as the wheels were about to touch the ground I discovered that it was covered with fairly large rocks half hidden in the tall grass. I opened the throttle to take off but the plane had lost too much speed for the motor to take effect and as it struck the ground the left wing hooked in the rocks and groundlooped the ship to the left but without doing serious damage. The landing gear wires were strained and about two feet of the rear spar on the lower left wing tip was snapped off. Nothing was broken however which would require immediate repairing.
The field was quite a distance from Alma and in order to get an early start in the morning I stayed with the ship that night. During the heavy rains at Maben, Mississippi, I had constructed a hammock of heavy canvas which could be suspended under the top wing.
I tied the corners of this hammock to the upper strut fittings and crawled into the three blankets inside which were sewn up to form a bag. Thus I spent a comfortable night.
When I arrived over Lincoln the next day I circled over the Lincoln Standard factory, and after landing on the old flying field south of town, waited for the car which was sent out to bring in visiting airmen.
The remainder of the day was spent in “ground flying” with my friends in the factory. We had not been together for seven months and the usual exchange of experiences was necessary.
I soon learned that Bud Gurney had made a parachute for himself and was intending to test it by the simple method of going up to an altitude of fifteen hundred or two thousand feet and cutting loose from the plane. If the chute opened it was successful.
After a great deal of persuasion I prevailed upon him to let me take him up in my ship while we made the first test with a sand bag.
The tanks had just been filled with fuel but I had unlimited confidence in my Jenny and we lashed the parachute and a sandbag on the right wing. Bud, who weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds himself, climbed into the front cockpit and we started to take off with a total load of about six hundred pounds, to say nothing of the resistance of the parachute and sandbag which were directly in the slipstream from the propeller.
Even with this load we cleared the nearest obstacle by a safe margin and finally attained an altitude of about two hundred feet. Then we were caught by a descending current of air which
