CHAPTER X AVIATORS UNAWARES

“Ground-school dinners! What! That means you’re hungry!... Dreadfully hungry?”

“Oh, not so bad as all that; only rather tired of feasting on air-puffs,” came the laughing answer. “Joy-sticks and air-puffs! My companion had some of the former in his pocket--meaning chocolate bars!”

“Joy--fiddlesticks! We’ll get you something more substantial right away. Supper--supper will be ready in a winged hurry!”

Wing-footed, indeed, one-half the army of girls started for a united drive upon the bungalow and its seashore resources.

“Oh, not so many! ‘Too many cooks,’ you know!” The Guardian’s voice arrested them. “Four will be plenty--those who are housekeepers for to-day, with Olive and Sara. Well! you’re on your mettle, girls; it’s something to entertain aviators unawares.”

“Lucky loopers of the clouds, who certainly have tumbled into a bed of roses!” chuckled the youthful pilot, throwing off his leather “togs,” examining his a?rial ship all over by the light of an electric torch, whose luminous ring belted his own adventurous figure in its greenish-brown trick-suit fashioned like the farming overalls which his girl-hostesses had worn that day in their battle with weeds and pests upon Squawk Hill.

“Well! aren’t you glad now, ‘Goggle Eyes,’ now that we’ve landed in clover--hit it lucky--that I decided to nose her down and make a landing here--bunk out on our wings to-night?”

Thus he challenged the observer, with his dangling binoculars.

“Well! I do admit it’s ‘low tide’ inside me, Ned; every little creek bare as a sand-pocket; I shan’t object to being filled up,” acknowledged the older air-man. “Only I feel rather”--he smiled through the flash-light’s luminous ring upon the picturesque maidens in ceremonial dress--“rather as if we had been sailing by the star-chart and landed upon some more romantic planet than old Mother Earth, which hits some of us such hard knocks at times. I--I’ll have to rub my eyes to make sure I’m awake--not having an air-dream,” blinkingly.

“Oh-h, what a pretty compliment to the Council Fire!” Sybil purred happily. “Now! won’t you--can’t you--tell us something about the a?roplane--the big, strong battle-plane--about its different parts, and what it is made of?”

“Humph! Let the pilot explain his own ship. Go ahead, ‘Tailspin Ned’!” laughed the observer, challenging the younger aviator, Lieutenant Edwin Mortimer Fenn, R. M. A.

“Well! Well, as you see, ours is the tractor type of a?roplane, having the propeller in front, drawing it through the air,” explained the latter, flashing his electric light upon that mahogany propeller which shone like a silver paddle--if not a silver piece--in a gasping fish’s mouth.

“These are the a?rofoils--wings--which support it in flight, having a spread of thirty-six feet from tip to tip, on each plane. And----”

“You have--oh! excuse my interrupting!--you have some wings on your breast, too.” Little Owl pointed shyly to those four-inch mirror-wings, the army insignia, reflecting the young air-man’s flying achievements, gleaming against their velvet setting upon his rough gabardine overalls.

“Yes! I wouldn’t swap them for a General’s stars.” His white teeth flashed boyishly. “They represent my commission as an R. M. A.--Reserve Military Aviator. When I was a humble cadet my breast-wings were stiffer,” laughingly.

“How--how do you mean?” came from a dozen enthralled girls.

“Why! they were of metal--silver--three inches across; not limply wrought upon black velvet; that was when I was in training on the flying-fields, where I went, from Aviation Ground School, where--where the dinners--were--so good,” na?vely.

“Mercy! I’m just dying to fly,” came breathlessly from one fluttering feminine throat--Little Owl’s. “According to my symbolic name, I’m a bird, anyway!”

“Well, don’t die--flying. Probably after the war is over--no doubt before very many years have flown ahead of you--your Camp Fire Group will have a Bird Corps of its own,” encouragingly.

“And win honor-beads for parading in the air--sky-blue and cloud-barred, I suppose!” burst ecstatically from one or two of the other girls whose symbolic names were also derived from the feathered tribe, with which, in a dazzling skyscape vision, they saw themselves competing.

“Now, perhaps, you’d like to know a little more about the wings that will support you.” The R. M. A., otherwise Tailspin Ned--a nickname he had acquired upon the training-fields--flashed his torch again over the a?roplane--the mammoth gaping red fish. “Well, the wing-ribs--spars--are of light wood, covered with fine linen, doped with a preparation to make it durable; so is the fuselage, body of the machine. The props connecting the two planes are the struts whose flying wires sang their jolly little earth-song--whistled, you know--as we came down. When we land for the night on a lonely spot, we have to guard the a?roplane, so we bunk out on our wings; if it rains, we bunk under them.”

“Tuck your little head under your wing, like a real bird-man,” laughed Sybil.

“While the Witch watches over your slumbers,” supplemented Sul-sul-sul-i--Victoria Glenn, the Victory girl. “Mercy! What a bloodthirsty red-eyed old witch!... Girls, do look! She’s stenciled on cloth, broomstick and all, just as we have our Camp Fire emblem stenciled upon our dresses.” Victoria, a Fire Maker, glanced down at the dusky crossed logs and tongue of flame upon the skirt of her own ceremonial gown.

“She’s the emblem of our flying squadron; we chose her as soldiers choose a mascot,” answered the R. M. A. “The cloth on which she rides rampant is glued to the side of the fuselage, just beneath my cock-pit. This is the stabilizer which preserves our equilibrium in the air; all this rear part is the tail mechanism.”

“What--what are the dials--radio-dials? Oh, see how they light up when the flash-light moves off!” cried one or two voices.

“Those that face me in my little cock-pit! Why, clock, compass, altimeter, inclinator--and a few more to guide us on the sky-trail.”

“If--if you just stroll down to the water’s edge, you’ll see a radio freak!” laughed Sybil. “A shining figurehead on a dory! She’s camouflaged too, that wooden bead-eye! I had the prettiest little Milky Way on my own arm last night,”--holding up that round member--“six tiny stars; I washed them off this morning.”

“So you’re no longer a Camp Fire galaxy!” Now, it was the aviator’s turn to chuckle, as compliantly he strode towards the murmuring tide, extinguishing his torch.

“But--but why the camouflage?” he demanded. “Rather a rub-in joke, eh, on a humble little rowboat that’s as innocent as a lamb; she’ll never chase anything--dodge anything....”

“Hold on--hold on there, you Cavalry Man of the Skies, as my soldier-brother would say! How do you know?” suddenly challenged the piquant voice of the dory’s owner, bristling with “pep” behind him.

“When--when aviators drop from a height of ten thousand feet.... Oh! don’t say you weren’t as high as that----” Sara bit her lip comically.

“Higher, part of the time,” was the amused reply. “I saw a double sunset this evening. Just after witnessing the first we ‘zoomed’ up, soared for the fun of the thing, outside the earth’s shadow, saw Old Sol rise again, blood-red, in the West--like a tricked rooster with a flaming comb--and set for the second time. Jove! Some sight that!”

“There! I told you anything--anything is possible these times. Well! What I’d like to know is, where the cavalry of the sky would like to sup--indoors or out?” questioned Sara, waving her fringed arms towards that violet night-sky, no longer locked to man.

“Outdoors, by all means, I should say, by that corking bonfire!” The aviator glanced backward over his shoulder at the blazing pile of driftwood whose shading smoke-reek, floating high over the dunes, had guided him to earth.

“And what would the air-scouts choose to drink?”

“Oh-h, I know!” flashed forth Sybil. “They’re just crazy about milk--mild milk. Don’t they--don’t they always drop down on a farmer if they get a chance? My cousin, Atwood, who’s working in the shipbuilding yards, not a dozen miles from here--leading a blind horse hitched to a great yellow ship’s timber and not enjoying it--he told me that when he visited a friend in training at the flying-fields, the chum said that after a long fly he was just like a baby, crying for milk.”

“Zooms! We’ve got gallons of that--nearly one gallon, anyway. We brought it home from the nearest farmhouse this evening--a mile away, across the dunes.”

Sara, much concerned over this novel entertainment of angels--winged beings--unprepared, swung round on her moccasined sole for an inspired rush back to camp.

“Hurrah for the home fires!” The aviator gleefully shrugged his shoulders. “Oh! I felt it in my bones, all afternoon, that before night we’d land--somewhere--in clover:
“‘Oh, a wonderful thing is a flying cadet,
He lives on a promise--and--hope!’”

he chanted boyishly.

Then, from the darkling tide’s edge, his “zooming” glance soared upward to his parade-ground, the night sky; to Atawessu, the evening star, the Creature Far Above, as softly--half-wistfully--he finished the quotation, reminiscent of his training days above the flying-fields:
“But--but the twinkling stars are as far as his bars,
And he never--quite--figures the dope!”