Hike and the aeroplane

With the patched Gnome engine, with Hike and Lieutenant Adeler and Martin Priest and nearly two thousand pounds of Priest’s baggage, the tetrahedral Hustle I stood ready to start.

There is no use denying it—Hike felt a little nervous. He had flown with the Lieutenant several times, in well-tested Jolls ’planes, but with this new machine, that looked like a castle made of playing cards by some child, he was waiting to find out whether or not he was going to be scared! He didn’t think he would be, but Poodle was grinning at him and declaring that he sure would be.

Martin Priest, the driver, snapped on the control. The tetrahedral’s engine began racing. Down the slope in front of the aerodrome she ran, bumping and hopping, then plunged out into the air, easily as a bird. Suddenly they were two hundred feet up, crossing a foothill, rising up—up—with the elevating planes sharply tilted upward. Hike yelled with joy, for never had he felt more comfortable, more like some big eagle, than then.

The earth sank below them, and left them free of it. There was none of the jar of the smaller ordinary Jolls ’planes. The tetrahedral, though it was gaining in speed, rode as smoothly and easily as a huge steamer.

They curved over the Big Peak, and a gust of wind—a real flaw—swooped up at them from the cold valley beyond. Then they struck a “hole in the air,” and the Hustle dropped two hundred feet. But she did not go down like a shot—she took the drop easily.

Again Hike shouted, and settled back in his seat, looking out to the blue sunny stretch of the Pacific Ocean, longing to soar over it in the Hustle. He laughed down at the arroyos and hills beneath them, over which they were passing so easily. They looked like small folds in a heap of green velvet.

In twenty minutes, they were in sight of Monterey. As they passed the Carmel valley, there was a crackling from the engine; it missed a stroke, and then suddenly stopped.

Hike was much interested to find that he wasn’t scared, after all. Here they were, two thousand feet up, balanced on nothing but air, with the ground very far below, and with the engine stopped.

But Martin Priest merely turned back to him, with a grin that made his prophet face look very good-natured. Then—Martin Priest took his hands entirely off the levers, stood up, and began to sing a hymn!

Gone crazy, Hike first thought—just now, when all his skill was needed, to keep them safe on the long glide to earth! Hike’s backbone seemed frozen. Then he looked at Martin Priest’s face again, and down to earth. The Hustle was sinking as easily as a feather, with a little creaking of her many planes. Only a tetrahedral could flutter down like that.

Lieutenant Adeler stood up, made ready to grapple with Martin Priest. “Let ’im alone,” shrieked Hike. “We’re going all right. Part of the test.”

“Good boy,” Martin Priest stopped singing to say. “It is. The tetrahedral can’t be wrecked.” Then he stepped back to the engine, and tried her spark.

When they had softly, easily, settled down to about a hundred feet from the earth, so that the branches of trees below seemed rushing up at them, Priest yelled to the Lieutenant, “Push that right lever forward.”

As the lever slid forward, Martin Priest started the engine. After the silence, it was deafening; like the crackling of a hundred machine-guns at once. Hike could scarcely hear himself, but he shouted again and again, while they darted up, then soared aloft to five thousand feet.

As they flew over Monterey, the people rushed from the streets and gardens up to the tops of their Spanish adobe houses. They were used to ordinary Jolls biplanes, but this great bird was different. On the fashionable drives and tennis-courts of the Del Monte hotel, rich Eastern tourists gazed up till their necks ached.

Hike yelled in Martin Priest’s ear, “Let me try her!”

“Sure,” roared back Priest, though Lieutenant Adeler, guessing what was up, shook his head. “See this lever. It raises and deflects elevating planes, for’ard there. Makes her go up and down. This one, on the left, controls her rudder—back there, like a ship’s rudder. Say, I can’t yell against this. Even fifty horse-power’s too much.”

Calmly, Priest stopped the engine. The silence sounded louder than the motor had, for a minute, and Hike yelled “Ouch!” clapping his hands to his ears.

Laughing at him, Martin Priest went on, “This bar at my feet controls the engine-feed—if you take your feet off, the feed’s shut off. There aren’t any ailerons, and there aren’t any wings to warp, for lateral stability. (Aren’t we sinking down pretty though?) Don’t need them to keep from tipping, with all these little planes. The rest of the engine-control—spark and so on—is like the engine you learned on a Jolls biplane. That’s enough for a first lesson. Now try her.”

He started the engine, stepped back to a passenger-seat, and apparently went to sleep. Hike pushed the right lever cautiously forward, and up shot the machine—up, up, easily, swiftly, the trees and houses, spread out beneath him, fading into a mist. Then he turned in a long awkward circle, and planed easily down. He quivered as he felt the aeroplane obey him. He wanted to go on forever. He wanted to try to make a landing. But he wouldn’t take any chances on wrecking the tetrahedral on her first trial trip.

So he motioned to Martin Priest to take control again, and settled back into a passenger-seat, whistling his happiness.

They landed in a field outside of Monterey. The ranchero who owned it came rushing up—and in less than ten minutes Lieutenant Adeler had bought that field from him, for an aviation-course.

Before nightfall, the Lieutenant had telegraphed to San Diego for the two hundred and thirty horse-power Kulnoch engine which, he told Martin Priest, a crank aviator down there had for sale. The lieutenant sent Hike to buy the lumber for an aerodrome, and led Martin Priest to a barber, to get his hair cut. (But Priest refused to get any better clothes. “Let all the rest of the money you want to spare go in on the tetrahedral,” he said.)

Within a week, the new engine had arrived and been put into the aeroplane, while a rough shed had been built.

Then Hike heard that Captain Willoughby Welch was going to leave in a couple of days, though it was nearly a month before he was due to report to the Army Board of Aviation—which would spend a million on purchasing some sort of aeroplane. Hike and Jack Adeler had told the Captain nothing about the arrival of the Priest tetrahedral yet, wishing to surprise him after the new engine was installed.

But now Hike rushed over to the Captain’s quarters, and begged him to take a look at the Hustle. The Captain refused, laughing in his face. The most that he would promise was to come back and take a look at her before going on to Washington. He would have to be back for a day or so, anyway, he said.

Hike was much discouraged. But he went on working with Priest and the Lieutenant. It was Hike who suggested a spring for the throttle-foot-bar, so that the aviator could take his feet off the bar, if he wished.

The Lieutenant had to go up to Benicia Arsenal, to inspect some wireless material for Army transports. This, decided Martin Priest, would be a good time for him to drive down to his valley in the San Francisquito mountains, and get some belongings. So Hike and Poodle were left alone. They slept at the aerodrome, to protect the tetrahedral from sight-seers. All the while, Hike was looking for a good excuse to fly her.