Читать книгу Mark Gilmore, Scout of the Air - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 7

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His inspiration to save his brother, and all the events following it, were forgotten. He had another inspiration now. It carried him on its wings and he obeyed it with a reckless frenzy. Oh, if that airman up there in the black storm would only linger for just a few minutes—maybe only ten minutes! But an airplane, even in a storm, may go a long distance in ten minutes. How Mark wished he could call and ask that ghostly visitant to wait!

Rushing into the house he ran pell mell through to the back shed and lifted the five gallon kerosene can that stood there on a box. It was empty. Baffled, he paused. Then suddenly his big inspiration came to him. Running with all his might and main down the street he came, soaked and panting, to the back yard of the corner grocery. He had not the slightest scruple about what he intended to do, any more than he had harbored the slightest scruple about playing hookey from school for a week when it meant safety for his brother. It was this heroic theory of his that a noble end justified a dubious means, that was always getting him into trouble.

A strange figure of a very little demon he must have seemed as he climbed into the old delivery car, wiping his streaming hair and face with his soaked sleeve. His clothes were dripping from the driven rain, his shoes were saturated. But he was quite unconscious of these effects of his exposure. “If I can only get the blamed thing started,” he said.

More than once had the companionable Herman Schmitter, son of the proprietor, allowed Mark to drive this ramshackle car (despite the law) in byways unfrequented by the authorities. The boy knew that if he could only get it started he could drive it now. Fortunately, no one lived in the building behind which this antiquated Ford was housed under a protecting shed.

It started! Mark did not turn on the lights until he was well along the street, and only then because he was forced to by reason of the utter darkness. For a few moments he was apprehensive, but once on Edgetown Road he knew he was safe. No one would stop him or see him now.

The old flivver rattled along, sputtering and slowing down, then picking up again, for the rain was driving in through the radiator. Mark’s only fear was that it would stop. How strange and black the road seemed without the town lights! The lights of the car were reflected in huge puddles in the road through which the old Ford splashed.

Soon he passed the little cemetery and in a flash of lightning saw its gravestones standing white and stark and ghastly. Then, as quickly, they were lost again in the darkness. It seemed almost as if the spectral company housed there had struck a light to glimpse this drenched midnight apparition as he sped by.

Then he was at Kent’s Field. There were no sparks of light there. He drove the car lickety-split up over the hubbly border of the road and straight across to the center of the field. Here were the two flood lights atop their short posts, standing like twin ghosts.

He lost not a second. Driving the car close to one of these he threw open the hood and began to flood the carburetor. Soon his hand was wet with gasoline and he could feel it dripping off the frame. For just a few moments he continued this operation, then drove the car over to the other dead light some seventy-five or more feet distant. Then he ran back and threw a lighted match into the puddle of gasoline.

The effect was sensational. An imposing flame arose and spread which must have been quickly visible in the sky. But one blaze means nothing in a matter of this kind; two mean everything. A pair of lights separated by seventy-five or a hundred feet in surrounding darkness are eloquent to an airman. Mark ran back to the car, flooded the carburetor again, and soon had another blaze which, like its companion, defied the rain.

He had succeeded. Standing in the wind and rain, a forlorn and lonely figure in that vast, desolate, field, he contemplated the two flaming areas. What a strange sequel was all this to his secret labors of the week, his encounter with his father, his rescue of his brother from disgrace! And here he was in the tempestuous midnight, gazing anxiously into the sky—watching, listening...

And the next day (or very soon at all events) he was to go to a Military School. As he stood there this realization flashed into his mind, and he could not reason the thing out at all. That this should be the reward of a great, good turn! There was no sound in the sky—only the voice of the storm. He had spoken with his two masses of dazzling flame; he had sent his signal up into the night when all the fine equipment of the field had failed.

Still there was no response to his blazing welcome.

He could not stand there in the rain doing nothing. He kept as close as he could to one of the fires, but the rain, which helped to swell and prolong the flames of gasoline, soaked his clothing faster than the fire could dry it. He ran to the car and wrenching a floor board from the rickety affair, pushed up the soft earth into a little mound around each area of flame, for the fires were spreading as gasoline fires are sure to do. Thus confined, the flames mounted higher and brighter.

But spilled gasoline will not burn long and Mark was now well nigh frantic lest the fires die out and all his efforts go for naught. He could not drive the old Ford into the burning area, so he flooded the carburetor into a vegetable basket which he found in the car, having first pushed an old oil cloth side-curtain down into it. It dripped as he carried it and probably lost as much as he was able to add to the flames in all his frantic running back and forth.

Utterly exhausted at last, he took refuge in the old car, panting, drenched, his head swimming. From this shelter, he watched his precious beacons diminish. And now that his strenuous exertions were over he began to wonder what would happen the next morning when it became known that he had commandeered the Schmitter car. Of one thing he felt certain—his father would be in no mood to applaud his futile, if heroic, enterprise. The only thing that could save him now was success.

And there seemed no prospect of that. There was not a sound in the sky. The dying flames illuminated a considerable area above the field, but no sign was there of that lonely airman striving in darkness and storm. Had it been just a spectral airman that he had seen; something like a mirage?

One wistful thought did come to this soaked and lonely boy as he sat in the old car, a mere atom in that vast, storm-swept field. There was no doubt that he would have a cold and be ill in bed. And perhaps by this means could he checkmate his stern parent in the matter of the Military School.

He prayed fervently that he would be ill for at least one week.