Читать книгу Mark Gilmore, Scout of the Air - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 6

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As Mark passed to his room he looked down the stairs and saw through the front door that the porch light, which had been turned on before his arrival, was stil burning, and he descended the stairs very quietly to turn it out. But before his finger touched the switch in the lower hall, the light was extinguished, and he was aware of a sudden darkness outside where the street lights had also gone out. The storm must be worse than before, he thought.

He opened the front door and looked out into the pitch darkness. How strangely black the street seemed without those lights. Mutterings of thunder could be heard, and now and then a sudden flash of lightning illuminated the tall, gaunt electric poles standing at intervals along the deserted block. The rain was overflowing the roof gutters and pouring down with incessant splashing.

Mark stepped to the end of the porch where he could look up and see his own window; the light there was also extinguished. This abysmal darkness, relieved by not so much as one familiar light, intensified his feeling of loneliness. He had been somewhat buoyed up by his defiance of his father, and by the difficult scene with his brother. But these matters were past now and his fate was sealed—he was going to some Military School, some institution noted for its discipline, and he pictured it in its very worst light.

The more he thought of it the more he realized how unjust to be sent away from home, from everything. This was to be his reward for his week of labor performed to save his brother from certain exposure! But how could his father know that? His mother?

A streak of lightning flashed across the lawn and the flower beds. The thought came to him that he would defy this unjust sequel to his efforts and run away. But in this storm and without any funds? It was absurd, he told himself. How could he manage it; where would he go?

There was something about the storm and utter darkness that favored his mood, and he lingered in a recess of the porch, assailed by the driving rain. Suddenly amid the tumult of the elements he heard, or thought he heard, a sound which was not one of the voices of the storm. A whirring sound intermingled with the roaring of the wind and thunder.

Sometimes Mark could not hear it at all and when he did it sounded strangely inharmonious with the voices of the storm. Suddenly a dazzling streak of lightning lighted the sky, and there above him, thrown into a kind of ghastly relief, was an airplane. He saw it for only a few seconds, then the night closed about it, and a peal of thunder drowned its steady whirring. Soon he heard it again, but he saw it no more.

Mark was an extremely sensitive boy, and the momentary glimpse he got of that lone plane, struggling in the darkness, chilled him and set his nerves on edge. Such utter loneliness! Such an unequal struggle, it seemed to him! Just that momentary picture, revealed to him in the wild night, aroused in him somewhat the same feeling that he had had for Edgar when he saw him taking the twenty dollars out of their sister’s drawer. It was that very human instinct of the strong character desirous of carrying the weaker one’s burden upon his own shoulders.

He was too young, of course, to analyze his feelings in the matter of the plane. He was too young to realize that the airplane was a weak thing at best when buffeted about by the tremendous force of the elements, and that human nature can often outwit even those handicaps when there is strength of character behind the task. He only knew that he had an overpowering impulse to be of some service to that lonely airman up there in the black, tempestuous night and help him outwit the storm and wind so that he might make a safe landing.

Did that aviator know that Kent’s Falls boasted of a fair-sized landing field? Mark hoped that he did for the community had constituted itself a hospitable refuge for those who braved the perils of the air. It held its welcoming arms open, and those arms were two floodlights flanking the runway in a vast and level meadow.

HE SAW IT FOR ONLY A FEW SECONDS.

Seldom it was that any aviator made use of Kent’s Falls’ generous hospitality and yet the field was always kept mowed and ready, its two beacon lights shining ever aloft to tell the baffled wanderer who chanced in that region, that here between these glowing spots he might set his wheels down in safety.

And now Mark realized with a shudder of foreboding that these lights must also have gone out when the current failed throughout the little town. His own feeling of strangeness in the unfamiliar dark enabled him to form a picture of that baffled airman in a vain quest which meant safety or disaster for him. If it seemed strange and ghostly in the pitch dark of the porch, how must it seem up there in the pitch darkness of the angry night?

Mark had only to open the screen door and grope his way up to his room. But what of the struggling, bewildered airman? Now, in a lull of the storm he heard the whirring again. His nerves were on edge. In a minute, any second, those spreading wings might crash in a crumpled mass before him. What should he do?

Another zigzag streak of lightning brightened the sky, and there was the lonely, forlorn thing, thrown in bold relief for just a second. Then darkness. One of the blinds of a porch window blew loose and began to flap violently. He fastened it open, pushing it into place with difficulty. It relieved him a trifle to feel that he was doing something.

Well, at all events, he could not go upstairs to bed with impending tragedy above him. He forgot all about his own troubles now.