 CHAPTER XII. A notice from the President's office, commanding Carl's instant presence, was in his post-office box. He slouched into the waiting room of the offices of the President and Dean. He had an incarnate desire to say exactly what he thought to the round wooly President would. Dean Albert Smith was leaving the waiting room. He seized Carl's hand with his plowman's paw and said, Goodbye, boy, he growled. There was nothing gallant about his appearance, his blue flannel shirt, dusty with white fuzz, his wrinkled, brick-red neck, the oyster-like ear at which he kept fumbling with a semi-fingernail of his left hand. But Carl's salute was a salute to the new king. What do you mean, goodbye, Al? I've just resigned from play to old Carl. How'd you happen to do that? Did they summon you here? No, it just resigned, said plain Smith. One time, when I was school-teaching, I had set to, with the school committee of farmers, about teaching the kids a little botany. They said the three hours were enough. I went out, but I swore I'd stand up for any teacher that tried to be honest the way he'd seen it. I don't agree with Frazier about those socialists and all. Fellow that's worked at the plow like I have knows a man wants to get ahead for his woman and himself. First of all, and let the walking delegates do the work too. But I think he's honest, all right, and well, I stood up, and that means losing my scholarship. They won't try to fire me. Guess I'll mosey on to the U of M. Can't probably live there as cheap as here, but cousin of mine owns a big shoe store, and maybe I can get a job with him. Boy, you were plucky to get up. Glad we've got each other finally. I feel as though you'd freed me from something. God bless you. To the dean's assistant in the waiting room, Carl grandly stated, Erickson, 1908. I'm to see the president. It's been a rain-sheeter to see the dean instead. Sit down. Dean's engaged just now. Carl was kept waiting for a half-hour. He did not like the transference to the dean, who was no anxious ol' lamb like S. Alcott Wood, but a young collegiate climber, with a clip mustache, a gold eyeglass chain over one year, a curt voice, many facts, a spurious appreciation of music and no mellowness. He was a graduate of the University of Chicago and aggressively proud of it. He had earned his way through college, which all tradition and all fiction pronounced the perfect manner of acquiring a noble independence and financial ability. Indeed, the blessing of early poverty is in general praised as the perfect training for acquiring enough wealth to save one's old children from the curse of early poverty. It would be safer to malign George Washington and the Boy Scouts, professional baseball and the YMCA, than to suggest that working one way through college is not necessarily manlier than playing and dreaming and reading one's way through. Defidently, without generalizing, the historian reports this fact about the dean. He had lost the graciousness of his rustic clergyman father and developed an itchingly bustling manner, a tremendous readiness for ticking charge of everything in sight. By acquiring during his undergraduate days a mastery of all the petty ways of earning money, such as charging meek and stupid wealthy students too much for private tutoring and bullying his classmates into patronizing the laundry whose agent he was. The dean stuck his little finger far out into the air when drinking from a cup and liked to be taken for a well-dressed man of the world. The half hour of waiting gave Carl a feeling of the power of the authorities, and he kept seeing plain smith in his cousin's shoe store trying to fit women's shoes with his large red hands. When he was ordered to step into the dean's office now, he stumbled in, pulling at his soft felt hat. With his back to Carl, the dean was riding at a roll-top desk. The burnished top of his narrow, slightly bald head seemed efficient and format roll. Not glancing up, the dean snapped, sit on, young man. Carl sat down. He crumpled his hat again. He stared at a framed photograph and moved his feet about, trying to keep them quiet. More waiting. The dean inspected Carl over his shoulder. He still held his pen. The fingers of his left hand tapped his desk tablet. He turned in his swivel chair deliberately as though he was now ready to settle everything permanently. Well, young man, are you prepared to apologize to the president and faculty? Apologize for what? President said those that wanted to protest. Now, we won't have any blustering, if you please, Erickson. I haven't the slightest doubt that you are prepared to give an exhibition of martyrdom. That is why I ask the privilege of taking care of you, instead of permitting you to distress President Wood any further. We will drop all this posing, if you don't mind. I assure you that it doesn't make the slightest impression on me, Erickson. Let's get down to business. You know perfectly well that you have stirred up all the trouble you and I could in regard to Mr. Frazier. And I think I really think that we should either have to have your written apology and your promise to think a little more before you talk, hereafter or else we shall have to request your resignation from the college. I'm sorry that we apparently can't run this college to suit you, Erickson. But as we can't, why, I'm afraid we shall have to ask you not to increase our inefficiency by making all the trouble you can. Wait Let's not have any melodrama. You may as well pick up that hat again. It doesn't seem to impress me much when you throw it down, though doubtless it was very dramatically done. Oh yes, indeed, very dramatic. See here. I know you, and I know your type, my young friend, and I haven't. Look here. Why do I get picked out as the goat, the one to apologize because I stood up first? When Prexy said to, Oh, not at all. Say, it's because you quite shamelessly made motions at others while you stood there, and did your best to disaffect men who hadn't the least desire to join in your troublemaking. Now I'm very busy, young man, and I think this is all the time I shall waste on you. I so expect to find you written. Say, honest, Dean, Carl suddenly laughed. May I just say one thing before I get thrown out? Certainly, we have every desire to deal justly with you, and to always give, always to give you, every opportunity. Well, I just wanted to say, in case I resign and don't see you again, that I admire your nerve. I wish I could get over feeling like a sophomore talking to a dean, and then I could tell you I hadn't supposed there was anybody who could talk to me the way you have and get away with it. I'd always thought I'd punch their head off. And here you had me completely buffaloed. It's wonderful. Honestly, it never struck me till just this second, that there isn't any law that compels me to sit here and take all this. You had me completely hypnotized. You know I might retort crucially and say I am not accustomed to have students address me in quite this manner. I'm glad, however, to find that you are sensible enough not to make an amusing show of yourself by imagining that you are making a noble flight for freedom. By decision of the President and myself, I am compelled to give you this one chance only. Unless I find your apology in my letterbox here by five this evening, I shall have to suspend you or bring you up before faculty for dismissal. But, my boy, I feel that perhaps for all your mistaken notions you do have a certain amount of courage, and I want to say a word. The dean did say a word. In fact, he said a large number of admirable words regarding the effect of Carl's possible dismissal on his friends, his family, and with an almost cheerful climax on his mother. Now go and thank it over. Pray over it, unselfishly, my boy, and let me hear from you before five. Only? The reason why Carl did visualize his mother, the reason why the Erickson kitchen became so clear to him that he saw his tired-faced mother, reaching up to wind the alarm clock that stood beside the ball of odd string, on the shelf above the water pail, the reason why he felt caved in at the stomach was that he knew he was going to leave Plateau, and he did not know where in the world he was going. A time of quick action, of bursting the bonds, even of friendship, he walked quietly into Jeannie Linderbeck's neat room, with the rose-hued comforter on a narrow brass bed, passe partaud-coupley prints, and a small oak table with immaculate green desk blotter, and said good-bye. His hidden apprehension, the cold, empty feeling of his stomach, the nervous intensity of his emotions told him that he was already on the long trail that leads to fortune, then bowery lodging-houses, and death and happiness. Even while he was warning himself that he must not go, that he owed it to his folks to apologize and stay, he was stumbling into the bank and drawing out his ninety-two dollars. It seemed a great sum. While waiting for it, he did sums on the back of a deposit slip. Ninety-two dollars out of the bank, two dollars and twenty-seven cents in pocket, about ten cents in room, total, ninety-four thirty-seven. O. Taylor, dollar and forty-five cents, Turk twenty-five cents, to Minneapolis, three dollars and five cents, to Chicago, probably fifteen to eighteen dollars, to New York, twenty to thirty, to Europe's steerage, forty dollars, total about ninety-two seventy-five, would take me to Europe. Golly, I could go to Europe, to Europe. Now, if I wanted to, and have maybe two plunks over or grub on the railroad, I'd have to allow something for tips, I guess. Maybe it wouldn't be as much as forty dollars for steerage. Not to allow? O. Thunder, I've got enough to make a mighty good start seeing the world anyway. On the street a boy was selling extras of the Plato weekly times with the heading, President Crush's Student Rebellion, Plato Demonstration for Anarchist Handled Without Gloves. Carl read that he and two other students who are alleged to have been concerned in several student pranks, had attempted to break up a chapel meeting, but had been put to shame by the famous administrator S. Alcott Wood. He had never seen his name in the press except some three times in the local items of the Jololiman Dynamite. It looks so intimidatingly public that he ain't trying to forget it was there. He chuckled when he thought of Plain Smith and Jeannie Linderbeck as concerned in student pranks. But he was growing angry. He considered staying and fighting his opponents to the end. Then he told himself that he must leave Plato after having announced to Jeannie that he was going. He had made all his decisions except the actual deciding. He omitted his noonday dinner and tramped into that country, trying to plan how and where he would go. As evening came cloudy and chill in a low wooded tract, miles north of Plato, with dead boughs kneeling in the uneasy air, threatening a rain that never quite came, the loneliness of the land seemed to be fogged, all the possibilities of the future. He wanted the lamp-lit security of his room, with the Turk and the gang in red sweaters, singing ragtime with the Frazier Fair a bad dream that was forgotten. The world outside Plato would all be like those lowering woods in dreary swamps. He turned. He could find solace only in making his mind a blank, sullen dull. He watched the sunset, watched the belaying cumulus clouds mimic the Grand Canyon. He had to see the Grand Canyon. He would. He had turned the corner. His clammy heart was warming. He was slowly coming to understand that he was actually free to take youth's freedom. He saw the vision of America through which he might follow the trail like the pioneers whose spiritual descendant he was. How noble was the panorama that thrilled this one-generation American can be understood only by those who have smelled our brown soil. Not by the condescending gods from abroad who come hither to gather money by lecturing on our evil habit of money-gathering and return to Europe to report that America is a land of Irish politicians, Jewish theatrical managers, and mining millionaires who invariably say, I swan to calculate all of them huddled in unfriendly hotels or in hobbles set on hopeless prairie, not such the Americans that lifted Carl's chin in wonder. Cities of tall towers, tawny deserts of the southwest, and the flawless sky of cornflower blue over sagebrush and painted butte, silent forests of the northwest, golden china dragons of San Francisco, old orchards of New England, the oily Gulf of Mexico, where trap steamers puff down to Rio, a snow-piled cabin among somber pines of northern mountains. Elsewhere, elsewhere, beyond the skyline, under larger stars where men ride jesting in women's smile. Names alluring to the American, he repeated, Shenandoah, Santa Ynez, The Little Bighorn, Baton Rouge, The Great Smokies, Rappahannock, Arizona, Cheyenne, Mongahalia, Anders Grogan Canyon in Bayou, Sycamore in Mesquite, Broadway in El Camino Real. He hurled along into Plato. He went into Mrs. Hankel's for supper. He smiled at the questions dumped upon him. He vaded answering. He took may thirst and aside and told her he was leaving Plato. He wanted to call on Professor Frazier, he did not dare. From a pleasant gentleman drinking tea Frazier had changed to a prophet whom he revered. Carl darted into his room. The Turk was waiting for him. Carl cut short the Turk's apologies for not having supported Frazier with the dreadful curt pleasantness of an alienated friend. And as he began packing his clothes in two old suitcases, insisted, It's all right. Where's your biz, whether you stood up in chapel or not? He hunted Dillingerly through the back of the closet for a non-existent shoe, in order to get away from the shame-faced melancholy which covered the Turk when Carl presented him with all his books, his skis, and his pet hockey stick. He prolonged a search because it had occurred to him that, as it was now eleven o'clock, the train north left at midnight, the Minneapolis train at two a.m. It might be well to decide where he was going when he went away. Well, Minneapolis and Chicago, beyond that, he'd wait and see. Anywhere. He could go anywhere in the world now. He popped out of the closet cheerfully. While the Turk mooned, Carl wrote short, honest notes to Gertie, to his banker employer, to Benny Rusk whom he addressed as friend Ben, he found himself writing a long inspired letter to Bone Stillman, who came out of the backwater of ineffectuality as a man who had dared. Frankly, he wrote to his mother. His mammy, he wistfully called her. To his father, he could not write. With quick thumps of his fist he stamped the letters, then glanced at the Turk. He was gay, mature, business-like. Ready for anything. I'll pull out in half an hour now, he chuckled. Gosh, sighed the Turk. I'd feel as if I were responsible for everything. Say, here's the letter I forgot to give you. Came this afternoon. The letter was from Gertie. Dear Carl, I hear that you were standing for that Frazier just as much as ever, and really, Carl, I think you might consider other people's feelings a little and not be so selfish. Without finishing it, Carl tore up the letter in a fury. Then, poor kid. Yes, she means well, he thought, and made an imaginary bow to her in farewell. There was a certain amount of the milk of humankindness in the frozen husk he had for a time become. But he must be blamed for wisely rejecting the Turk's blundering attempts to make peace. He courtesely, courtesely, between those two, declined the Turk's offer to help him carry a suitcase to the estation. That was like a slap. Goodbye. Hang on tight, he said, as he stooped to the heavy suitcases and marched out the door without looking back. By some providence he was safe from the crime of chilly self-righteousness. On the darkness of the stairs he felt all at once how responsive a chum the Turk had been. He dropped the suitcases, not caring how they fell, rushed back into the room and found the Turk still staring at the door. He cried. Oh, man! I was—say, you yahoo! Are you going to make me carry both my releases to the depot? They rushed off together, laughing, promising to write to each other. The Minneapolis train pulled out, with Carl trying to appear commonplace. None of the sleepy passengers saw that the golden fleece was draped about him or that under his arm he bore the harp of Ulysses. He was merely a young man, taking a train at a way-station. CHAPTER XIII There are today in the mind of Carl Erickson many confused recollections of the purposeless wanderings which followed his leaving Plato College. For more than a year he went down, down in the social scale, down to dirt and poverty and association with the utterly tough and reckless. But day by day his young joy of wandering matured into an ease in dealing with whatever man or situation he might meet. He missed the opportunity of becoming a respectable citizen which Plato offered. Now he did all the grubby things which Plato obligated, that her sons might rise to a place in society to eighteen hundred dollars a year, and the possession of evening clothes, and a knowledge of Greek. But the light danced more perversely in his eyes every day of his robing. The following are the several jobs from which Carl first applied in Chicago, all of the while frightened by the roar and creeping shadows of the city. Tudoring the children of a millionaire brewer, keeping time on the Italian and Pollock washers of a window-washing company, reporting on an Investon newspaper, driving a taxi cab, a motor-truck, keeping books for a suburban real estate firm, he had it ground into him as grit is ground into your face when you fall from a bicycle that everyone in the city of millions is too busy to talk to a stranger unless he sees a sound reason for talking. He changed the Girolemon Dynamite's phrase, accept a position to get a job, and he got a job as packer in the department store, big as the whole of Girolemon, since the street throngs had already come to seem no more personal and separable than the bricks in the buildings he was not so much impressed by the crowds in the store as by the number of things for women to hang upon themselves. He would ramble at lunch time to stare at them and marvel. He can't beat it. From eight till twelve-thirty and from one till six or seven, during nearly two months Carl stood in a long brick-walled stuffy room inundated by floods of things to pack, wondering why he had ever left Plato to become the slave of a sweet foreman. The great world as he saw it through a tiny hole in one of the opaque wire-glass window consisted of three bars of a rusty fire-scape landing against a yellow brick wall with a smudge of black on the wall below the landing. Within two days he was calling the packing-room a prison, the ceaseless rattle of speckled gray wrapping paper, the stamp of feet on the gray cement floor, the greasy gray hair of the packer next to him, the yellow-stained, cracked gray wash-bowl that served for thirty men. Such was his food for dreams. Because his muscles were made of country earth and air, he distanced the packers from the slums. However, he became incredibly swift at nailing boxes and crates and smashing the heavy wrapping paper into shape about odd bundles. The foreman promised to make Carl his assistant. But on the cold December Saturday, when his elevation was due, he glanced out of a window. And farewell, all ambition as a packer. The window belonged to the floor of bakery and lunch-room, where Carl was chastely lunching. There was dirty sawdust on the floor, six pine tables painted red, and adorned with ketchup bottles whose mouths were clotted with dried ketchup, and a long counter scattered with bread and white cakes and petrified rolls. Behind the counter, a snuffling ill-natured fat woman's slippers, handed bags of cruelers to shrill-voiced children who came with pennies. The tables were packed, with overworked and underpaid men, to whom lunch was merely a means of keeping themselves from feeling inconveniently empty, a state to which the lead-like vines of the floor-to-lunch-room were a certain prevention. Carl was gulping down salty beef stew and bitter coffee served in handle-less cups half an inch thick, beside him elbow-jugging elbow was a surly-faced man in overhauls. The old German waiter shoveled about and bawled, "'Hey, beef, this din in quicheescake!' Dishes clattered incessantly. The sicky sweet scent of old pastry of coffee, rings, with stony serrations and buns smeared with dried coconut fibers, seemed to permeate even the bitter coffee. Carl got down most of his beef stew, attacked and gave up a chunk of hard-boiled potato, and lighted a cheap Virginia cigarette. He glanced out of a dirty window. Before it, making inquiries of a big, leisurely policeman was a slim, exquisite girl of twenty, rosy-cheeked, smart-of-hat, impeccable of gloves with fluffy white furs beneath her chin, which cuddled into the furs with a hint of life, bright and spacious. She laughed as she talked to the policeman. She shrugged her shoulders with the exhilaration of winter and skipped away. Bet she'd be a peach to know, fat chance I'd have to meet her wrapping up baby carriages for the North Shore commuters all day. All day. Well, yes, I'm going to honorably discharge myself. He left the job that afternoon. His satiny Norse cheeks shone as he raced home through a rising blizzard, after dinner at the Florida Lairnt Room, where he had allowed himself a ten-cent dessert for celebration. But when he lulled in his hall bedroom, with his eyes attracted, as usual, to the three cracks in the blue-painted ceiling, which made a rough map of Africa, when he visioned lands where there were lions and desert instead of department store packages, his happiness wilted in face of the fact that he had only ten dollars and forty-two cents, with eight dollars due him from the store the following Tuesday. Several times he subtracted the three dollars he owed the landlady, from the eighteen forty-two, but the result persisted in being only fifteen dollars and forty-two cents. He could not make fifteen dollars and forty-two cents appear reasonable sum, with which to start life anew. He had to search for a new job that evening. Only he was so tired, it was so pleasant to lie there with his sore feet cooling against the wall picturing a hunt in Africa, with native servants bringing him things to eat, juicy steaks and french-fried potatoes, and gallons of ale, or a past which he may have been ignorant in assigning to the African jungles, but which seemed particularly well chosen, after a lunchroom dinner of watery corn-beef-hash, burnt German fried potatoes, and indigestible hot mis pie. His thoughts drifted off to Plato. But Carl had a certain resoluteness even in those loose days. He considered the manoeuvres for a new job. He desired one which would permit him to go to theatres with a girl in white furs whom he had seen that noon, the unknown fairy of his discontent. It may be noted that he took this life quite seriously, though he did not suppose that he was going to continue dwelling in a hall-bedroom, yet never did he regard himself as a collegian, Warren Al-Rishard, on an amusing masquerade pretending to be no better than the men with whom he worked. Carl was no romantic hero incognito. He was a workman, and he knew it. Was not his father a carpenter, his father best friend a tailor? Had he not been a waiter in Plato? But not always a workman. Carl had no conception of world-wide class consciousness. He had no pride in being a proletarian. Though, from Bones Musings and Frazier's lectures, he had drawn a vague optimism about a world syndicate of nations. He took it for granted that he was going to be rich as soon as he could. Job. He had to have a job. He got stiffly up from the iron bed, painfully drew on his shoes after inspecting the hole in the sole of the left shoe and the rip seam at the back of the right. He pulled tight the paper-thin overcoat, which he had bought at a secondhand dealer's shop, and dared a Chicago blizzard, with needles of snow thundering by on a sixty-mile gale. Through a street of inutterably drab stores and saloons, he plowed to the underlined taxicab company's garage. Felt lonely, cold, but he observed with ceaseless interest the new people, different people, who sloped by him in the done web of the blizzard. The American marveled at the recently emigrated slobs, Astration Cap. He had hung about the unalloyed garage on evenings when he was too poor to go to Vaudeville. He had become decidedly friendly, with the night washer, a youngster from Minneapolis, trotting up to the washer, who was digging cake snow from the shoes of a car. He blurted, Say, Cougan, I beat my job at, uh, how's chances of getting a taxi to drive? You know, I know the game. You? Driving a taxi? Stammered the washer? Might say there was a guy that was a road-tester for the blucks company, and he got a cousin that knows Bathhouse John, and that guy, with all his pull, has been trying to get on driving here for the last six months, and ain't landed it. So you see about how much chance you got? Gosh, it don't look much like I had much chance, for fact. Tell you what I'll do, though. Why don't you get on at some automobile factory, and then you could ring in as a chauffeur as soon as you got some recommends? You could take it to the YMCA Employment Bureau. The washer gouged at a clot of ice with his heel, swore profusely and went on. Here, you go over to the Lone Star Motor Company's office over on the Sal, Monday, and ask for Bill Cougan on the sales end. He's my cousin, and you tell him to give you a card to the former now that the works, and I guess maybe you'll get a job, all right. Tuesday morning, after a severe questioning by the foreman, Carl was giving a week's tryout without pay at the Lone Star factory. He proved to be one of those much sought freaks in the world of mechanics, a natural filer. The uninspired filer, unaware of the niceties of the art, saws up and down, whereas the instinctive filer, like Carl, draws his file evenly across the metal, and the result fits its socket truly. So he was given welcome, paid 25 cents an hour, and made full member of exactly such a gang as he had known at Plato, after he had laughed away the straw boss who tried to make him go and ask for a left-handed monkey ranch. He roamed at Machina's boarding house, and enjoyed the furious discussions over religion and the question of air versus water cooling far more than he'd ever enjoyed, the polite jesting at Mrs. Hinkels. He became friendly with the foreman of the repair shop and was promised a chance. While the driver who made the road tests of the cars was ill, Carl was called on as a substitute. The older workman warned him that no one could begin road testing so early and hold the job. But Carl happened to drive the vice president of the firm. He discussed bass fishing in Minnesota with the vice president, and he was retained as a road tester, getting a chauffeur's license. Two months later, when he was helping in the overhauling of a car on the repair shop, he heard a full-bodied man with a smart English silver coat and a supercilious red face as curtly of the shop foreman, where he could get a crack chauffeur right away, one that can give the traffic cop something to do for their money. The foreman always stopped to scratch his chin when he had to think. This process gave Carl time to look up from his repairs and blind the remark, that's me, wanna try me? Half an hour later, Carl was engaged at $25 a week as the Ruddy Ones driver. Before Monday noon, he had convinced the Ruddy One that he was no servant but a mechanical expert. He drove Ruddy One to his investments and securities office in the morning and back at five to restaurants in the evening, not infrequently with the wind whipping about the corners. He slept peacefully in the car until two in the morning outside a cafe and he was perfectly happy. He was at last seeing the great world. As he maneuvered along State Street, he rejoiced in the complications of the traffic and tutored his horn unnecessarily. As he waited before tall buildings at noon, he gazed up at them with a superior air of boredom because he was so boisely proud of being a part of all this titanic life that he was afraid he might show it. He gloried in every new road in driving along the lakeshore where the horizon was bounded, not by unimaginative land but by restless water. Then the Ruddy One's favorite roads began to be familiar to Carl, too familiar, and he so hated his thought of an employer that he caught himself muttering while driving. I thank the Lord I sit in front and don't have to see that chunk of raw beef steak he calls a neck. While he waited for the fifth time before a certain expensive but not exclusive roadhouse, with the bouncing giggles of girls inside spoiling the spring night, he studied the background as once he had studied his father's woodshed. He was not, unfortunately, shocked by wine and women, but he was bored by box trees. There was a smugly clipped box tree on either side of the carriage entrance, the leaves like cheap green lacquer in the glare of the arc light, which brought out all the artificiality of the gray and black cinder drive. He felt that five pilgrimages to even the best of box trees were enough. It would be perfectly unreasonable for a free man to come here to stare at box trees a sixth time. All right, he growled. I guess my wandering boy tonight is going to beat it again. While he drove to the garage he pondered, is it worth 25 plunks to me to be able to beat it tonight instead of waiting four days till payday? Nope, I'm a poor man. But at five a.m. he was hanging about the railroad yards at Hammond, recalling the lessons of youth in flipping trains, and at seven he was standing on the bumpers between two freight cars, clinging to the brake rod, looking out to the open meadows of Indiana, laughing to see farmhouses ringed with apple blossoms and sweet with April morning. The cinders stormed by him. As he swung with the cars on curves he saw the treacherous wheels grinding beneath him. But the clunk-a-chick, clunk-a-chick, clunk-a-chick of the tracks he hummed. Never turn back, never turn back, never turn back. End of chapter 13. Chapter 14 of the Trail of the Hawk. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Mike Vendetti, MikeVendetti.com. The Trail of the Hawk by Sinclair Lewis. Chapter 14. A young hobo named Carl Erickson crawled from the rods of an N and W freight car at Roanoke, Virginia, on a May day with spring at full tide and the Judas trees, a singing pink on the slopes of the Blue Ridge. Hmm, grunted the young hobo. I like these mountains, guess I'll stay here awhile, Virginia. Plantations in Civil War history in Richmond and everything in me here. A frousy old hobo poked a somnolent head up from a pile of lumber near the tracks and yawned welcome to the recruit. Hello, Slim, how's Tricks? Pretty good. What's the best section to batter for a poke-out, Cley? Do it right over that way and straight out. Much blind, said Slim. First Wild Erickson, say, do you know of any jobs in this? Any what's? Jobs. Jobs? You lookin' for... Say, you be the guan. Chase yourself, guan now. Don't stand there. You ain't no decent bow. You're none of those young fortune of workmen that's spoiling the profish. The veteran stared at Carl reprovingly, yet with a little sadness too, at the thought of how bitterly he had been deceived in this young comrade and his uncombed head slowly vanished amid the lumber. Carl Grandin started uptown. He walked into four restaurants, at noon in White Jacket. He was bustling about his waiter in the dining room of the Oaxaca-Homani Hotel, which had white service as a feature. Within two days, he was boon companion of a guest of the Oaxaca-Homani, Parker High, an actor famous from Cape Charles to Schoxerville, now playing heavies at Roanoke in The Great Riley Tent Show, presenting a popular repertory of famous melodramas under Canvas, Rain or Shine. Admittance, 25 cents. Section reserved for color people. The best show under Canvas, this week only. When Parker High returned from the theater, Carl sat with him in a room which had calico-like moral paper, a sunken bed with a comforter, out of which oozed a bit of its soiled cotton entrails, a cracked water pitcher on a staggering wash stand, and a beautiful new cuspador of white china, and painted with pink moss roses, tied with neural-brew ribbon. Carl listened credulously to High's confidences, as to how jealous was Riley, the actor-manager, of High's art, now High had knocked them all down in a stock company at Newport News, and that E. H. Southern had said to him when they met in Richmond as guests of the Seven Pines Club. Say, Raspai, you're a smart and young fellow, good-looking, educated. Why don't you try to get an engagement? I'll knock you down to Riley. The second juvenile's going to leave on Saturday, and there ain't hardly time to get anybody from Norfolk. Golly, that'd be great, cried Carl, who like every human being since Eden, with the possible exceptions of Calvin and Richard Mansfield, had a secret belief that he could be a powerful actor. Well, I'll see what I can do for you, said High at parting, alternately snapping his suspenders and scratching his head. Though he was in his stocking feet and coatless, though the back of his neck was a scraggle of hair, Parker High was prefable to the three Swiss waiters, snoring in the hot room under the eaves, with its door half open, opposite the half-open door of the room where Negro Chambermaids tumbled and snorted in uncouth slumber. Carl's nose wrinkled with bitter fastidiousness as he pulled off his clothes, sticky with heat, and glared at the swanth forms of the waiters. He was the aristocrat among proletarians, going back to his own people of the great Riley Tent Show. A second juvenile of the Tent Show, Carl received only $12 a week, but Mr. Ronnie made him promises rich as the Orient barrel, and permitted him to follow the example of two of the bandsmen and pitch a cot on the trampled hay flooring of the dressing room tent behind the stage. There, also, Carl prepared breakfast on an alcohol stove. The canvas creaked all night, Negroes and small boys stuck inquisitive heads under the edge of the canvas, but it was worth it to travel on again, to have his mornings free except for an hour's rehearsal, to climb to upland meadows of Virginia and Kentucky, among the pines and laurel, and rode a dendrum, tramping up past the log cabins plastered with mud, where Piccinini stared shyly, past Glen's shining with dogwood and friendly streams. Once he sat for an hour on Easter Knob, gazing through a distant pass whose misty blue he pretended was the ocean. Once he heard there were moonshiners back in the hills. He talked to bearded drunkards and their sun-bondeted wives, and when he found a Confederate veteran, he listened to the tale of the defense of Richmond, delighted to find that the boys in gray were not merely names in the history books. Of all these discoveries he wrote to his mother, wishing that her weary snow-bleached life might know the southern sun, and the first five dollars he saved, he sent to her. But as soon as Carl became an actor, Parker Hay, grew jealous of him and was gratingly contemptuous when he showed him how to make up. Among the chief actors jammed in the men's dressing room before a pine board set on two saw-horses under the light of a flaring kerosene torch. Carl came to hate Hay, and he splotched face his pale large eyes and yellow teeth and the bang on his forehead, his black string tie that was invariably a screw, his slovenly blue suit, his floppishly shaped tan buttoned-down shoes with bulldog toes, high invariably jeered. Don't make up so heavy. Well, put a little rouge on your lips. What do you think you are, a blooming red-lipped Venus? Try to learn to walk across the stage like you had one leg that wasn't wood, anyway. It's customary to go to sleep when you're playing a listening role, but don't snore. Oh, you're a swell actor. Think of me swallowing your story about having been to college. Don't make up your eyebrows so heavy, you fool. Why, you ever wanted to be an actor. The great Riley agreed with all that Hay said and marveled with Hay that he had ever tried an amateur. Carl found the dressing room a day dusty hell, but he enjoyed acting in the Willows Penny, Alabama Nell, Moonshiner's Daughter, and the Crooks Revenge, far more than he had enjoyed picking phrases out of Shakespeare at a vaguely remembered Plato. Since in Girolaman in Plato, he had been brought up on melodrama. He believed as much as he did the audience in the plays. It was a real mountain cabin from which he fired wonderfully loud guns in the Moonshiner's Daughter, and when the old mountaineer cried, hey, ain't going to steal my gal. Carl was damp at the eyes and swore with real fervor the oath to protect a girl sure that in the ravine behind the backdrop his bearded foe men were lurking. The Crooks Revenge was his favorite, for he was cast as a young millionaire and wore evening clothes, secondhand. He held off a mob of shrieking gangsters crouched behind an overturned table in a gambling den. He coolly stroked the lovely hair of the enjouin, Miss Evelyn Le Iwisei, with one hand leveled a revolver, with the other and made fearless jests the while to the infinite excitement of the audience, especially of the haia, haia, haian negroes, whose faces under the flicker of lowered calcium carbide lights made a segregated strip of yellow-black polka-dotted with white eyeballs. When the people were before him respectful to art under canvas, Carl could love them, but even the tiniest raggedy breech-darky was bold in his curiosity about distrolling players when they appeared outside, and Carl was self-conscious about the giggles and stares that surrounded him when he stopped on the street or went into that drugstore for the comfortable solace of a banana split. He was in a rage whenever a well-dressed girl peeped at him amusedly from a one lung runabout. The staring soul flustered him that even the pride of coming from Chicago and knowing about motors did not prevent his feeling feeble at the knees as he tried to stalk by the grinning motored aristocracy. He would return to the show tent to hate the few tawny drops and flats, the patch of greens battered with dirty white, which variously simulated a daisy field, a mountainside, and that part of Central Park, directly opposite the Fifth Avenue residence, now the millionaire counterfeiter, who you will remember always comes out into the street to plot with his confederates. Carl hated with peculiar heartiness the anemic, paley varnished, folding garden bench, which figured now as a seat in the moonshine's den, and now with a cotton leopard skin draped over it as a faute, in the luxurious drawing room of Mrs. Van Antwerp. The garden bench was, however, associated with his learning to make stage love to Miss Evelyn La-Eluisi. It was difficult to appear unconscious of fifty small boys all smacking their lips in unison while they kissed the air one centimeter in front of Miss La-Esuise's lips. But he learned the art. Indeed, he began to lessen the centimeter for safety. Miss Evelyn La-Esuise, Kristen Lena Ludwig, and her presumptive to one of the best delicatessens in Newport News, reveled in love-making on and off. Carl was attracted by her constantly, uncomfortably. She smiled at him in the wings, smoothed her fluffy blonde hair at him, and told him in confidence that she was a high school graduate, that she was used to much, oh, much better companies, and was playing under canvas for a lark. She bubbled, Huck! Louis, say, ain't it hot? Honest, Mr. Erickson, I don't see how you stand it like you do. Say, honest, that was swell business you pulled in the third act last night. Say, I know what let's do. Let's get up a swell act and get on the peanut circuit. We'll hit Broadway with a noise like 17 Marine Bands. Say, honest, Mr. Erickson, you do awful well for her. I bet you ain't no amateur. I bet you've been on before. He devoured it. One night, finding that Miss Evelyn made no comment on his holding her hand, he lured her out of the tent during a long wait, trembled, and kissed her. Her fingers gripped his shoulders agitately, plucked at his sleeve. As she kissed him back, she murmured, oh, you had not to do that. But afterward, she would kiss him every time they were alone. And she told him with confidential giggles of Parker Hyde's awkward attempts to win her. Hyde's most secret note she read till Carl seriously informed her that she was violating a trust. Miss Evelyn immediately saw the light and promised she would never, never, never do anything like that again. And honest, she hadn't realized she was doing anything disarble. But Hyde was such an old pest, which was an excuse for her weeping on his shoulder and his kissing the tears away. All day he looked forward to their meetings. Yet constantly the law of the adventure, which means the instinct of practical decency, warned him that this was no more for him, that he must not make love where he did not love, that his good-hearted vulgarian was too kindly to tamper with and too absurd to love. Only, and again his breath would draw in with swift exaltation as he recalled how elastic were her shoulders to stroke. It was summer now, and they were back in Virginia. During the Eastern Shore, Carl the Prairie-born had been within five miles of the open Atlantic, though he had not seen it, along the endless flat, potato fields broken by pine groves under whose sultry shadow, negro cabin, sweltered the heat clung persistently. The show tent was always filled with a stale scent of people. At the town of Nankowoc, the hotel was not all it might have been. Evelyn Laévaisee announced that she was good and sick of eating a vaudeville dinner with the grub axe stuck around your plate in a lot of bird-bath tubs, little masses of turnips and dab of spinach and a fried cockroach. And when it comes to sleeping another night in a bed like a gridiron, no thank you. And believe me, if I see that old rubbe hotel-keeper comb his whiskers at the hall hat rack again, he keeps a baby comb in his vest pocket with a lead pencil and a cigar some drummer gave him. If I have to watch him comb that alfalfa again, I'll bite his ears off and get pinched by the SPCA. With Miss Lovely, the old lady and complacent unofficial chaperone of the show, Eve was going to imitate Carl and the two bandsmen and sleep in the dressing-room tent over half of which was devoted to women of the company. Every day Carl warned himself that he must go no further. But every night, as Eve and he parted to sleep, with only canvas partition between them, he cursed the presence of the show chaperone and the two bandsmen, always distressingly awake and talking till after midnight. A hot June night, the whole company had been invited to a dance at the UCV hall. The two bandsmen were going, the chaperone lively old lady with experience on the Berlesque circuit, was gaily going, Carl and Eve were not. It had taken but one glance between them to decide that. They sat outside the silent tent on a wardrobe trunk. What manner of night it was, whether Starlit or sullen, Carl did not know. He was aware only that it was oppressive and that Eve was in his arms in the darkness. He kissed her moist haunt-neck. He babbled incoherently of the show people, but every word he said meant that he was palpitating because her soft body was against his. He knew and he was sure that he knew that when they discussed high string tie and pretended to laugh, they were agitately voicing their intoxication. His voice unsteady, Carl said. Jiminy, it's so hot, Eve. I'm going to take off this darn shirt and collar and put on a soft shirt. To say, why don't you put on a kimono or something? Be so much cooler. Oh, I don't know as I ought to. She was frightened, awes and laconic madness. Did you think it would be all right? Why not? Yes, anybody's got a right to get cool night like this? Besides, they won't be back till 4 a.m. and you got to get cool, come on. And he knew and he was sure that she knew that all he said was pretense, but she rose and said nebulously. As she stood before him, ruffling his hair, well, I would like to get cool. If you think it's all right. I'll put on something cooler anyway. She went. Carl could hear her rustling in the women's end of the dressing room tent. Fevered, he listened to it. Fevered, he changed to an outing shirt, opened at the throat. He ran out not to miss a moment with her. She had not yet come. He was too overwrought to heed a small voice in him, a voice born of small fields, colored with sunset and trained in the quietudes of Henry Frazier's house, which insisted, go slow, stop. A lot of her voice thrombed like a pulsing in the artery of his neck. She's coming. Through the darkness her light garment switched against the long grass. He sprang up. Then he was holding her, bending her head back. Exalted to find that his gripping hand was barred from the smoothness of her side, only by thin silk that glided and warmed under his fingers. She sat on his knees and snuggled her loosened hair, tingling against his bare chest. It felt that she was waiting for him to go on. Suddenly he could not, would not go on. Dearest, we mustn't, he mourned. Oh, Carl, she sobbed. Stopped his word with clinging lips. He found himself waiting till she should finish the kiss that he might put an end to this. Perhaps he was checked by provincial prejudice about chivalry, but perhaps he had learned a little self-control. In any case, he had stopped for a second to think, and the wind of love was gone flat. He wished she would release him. Also, her hair was tickling his ear. He waited patiently till she should finish the kiss. Her lips grew violently from his, and she accused, you don't want to kiss me. Look here, I want to kiss you all right, Lord. For a second his arms tightened, then he went on cold. But we'll both be good and sorry if we go too far. It isn't just a cowardly caution, it's, oh, you know. Oh, yes, yes, yes, we mustn't go too far, Carl. But can't we just sit like this? Oh, sweetheart, I'm so tired. I want somebody to care for me a little. That isn't wicked, is it? I want you to take me in your arms and hold me close, close and comfort me. I want so much to be comforted. We needn't go any further, need we? Oh, now, good Lord Eve, look here. Don't you know we can't go on and not go further? I'm having a hard enough time. He sprang up, shakily lighting a cigarette. He stroked her hair and begged, please go, Eve. I guess I haven't got very good control over myself, please. You make me? Oh, yes, yes, sure, blame it on me, sure. I made you let me put on a kimono. I am leading your pure wide shriveled peanut of a soul into temptation. Don't you ever dare speak to me again. Oh, you, you, you, she flounced away. Carl caught her in two steps. See here, child, you sit gravely. If you go off like this, we'll both be miserable. You remember how happy we were driving out to the old plantation at Passohint? Oh, God, won't you men never say anything original? Remember it. Of course I remember it. But do you suppose I wore that little branch of laurel you picked for me, wore it here, here at my breast, and I thought you care if I hid it there, where there wasn't any grease paint. And you don't, you don't care. And we picked it, and I sang all the time. I put up those sandwiches and hid the grapefruit in the basket to surprise you. Oh, darling Eve, I don't know how to say how sorry I am, so terribly sorry. I've started things going. It is my fault. But can't you see I've got to stop it before it's too late? Just for that reason. It's me chums again. She shook her head. Her hand crept to his, slid over it, drew it up to her breast. She was swaying nearer to him. He pulled his hand free and fled to his tent. Perhaps his fiercest jive at himself was that he had to play the role of Virgin Galahad, rejecting love, which is praised in books and ridiculed in clubs. He mocked at his sincere desire to be fair to Eve. And between mockeries, he strained to hear her moving beyond the canvas's partition. He was glad when the bandsman came erupting home from the dance. Next day she went out of her way to be chilly to him. He did not woo her friendship. He had resigned from the great Riley show and he was going, going, going anywhere as long as he kept going. End of chapter 14. Chapter 15 of the Trail of the Hawk. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Mike Vendetti, mikevendetti.com. Trail of the Hawk by Sinclair Lewis. Chapter 15. He had been a jolly mechanic again in denim overalls and jumper and a defiant black skull cap with a long shiny visor. The tender of the motorboat fleet at an Ontario summer hotel. One day he had looked up, sweating and greasy, to see Howard Griffin of Plateau, parading past in white flannels. He had muttered, I don't want them to know I've just been bumming around, I'll go someplace else. And I'll do something worthwhile. Now he was on the train for New York, meditating and personally on his uselessness, considering how free of Moss his rolling had kept him. He could think of no particularly masterful plan for accumulating Moss. If he had not bought a ticket through to New York, he would have turned back to seek a position in one of the great automobile factories that now, this early autumn of 1906, were beginning to distinguish Detroit. Well, he had enough money to last for one week in New York. He would work in an automobile agency there. Later he would go to Detroit and within a few years be president of a motor company rich enough to experiment with motorboats and to laugh at Howard Griffin or any other plutonian. So he sketched his conquering entrance into New York. Unfortunately it was an evening and having fallen asleep in Pukipsky, he did not awake till the breakman shook his shoulder at the Grand Central Station. He had heard of the old Grand Union Hotel in Drouserly with the stuffy nose and sandy eyes and unclean feeling about the teeth at overpower one who sleeps in a smoking car. He staggered across to the hotel and spent his first conquering night in filling a dollar room with vulgar sounds of overwears slumber. But in the morning, when he started along 42nd Street, when he breakfasted at child's restaurant, like a gigantic tiled bathroom and realized that the buckwheat cakes were New York buckwheats. When he cited the Noble Times Building and struck out for Broadway the magic name that promised marble palaces even if it provided two-story shacks. When he bustled into a carburetor agency and demanded a job, then he found the gateway of wonder. But he did not find a job. Eight nights after his arrival he quietly paid his bill at the hotel, tipped a curly-headed bellboy, checked his baggage, was consisted of a shirt, a razor, and an illustrated catalog of automobile accessories, put his toothbrush in his pocket, bought an evening paper in order to feel luxurious and walked down to the charity organization society with 10 cents in his pocket. In the joint application bureau, filled with desks and filing cabinets where poor men cease to be men and become cases, Carl waited on a long bench till it was his turn to tell his troubles to a keen, kindly gray-bearded man behind a roll-top desk. He asked for work. Work was it seemed, the one thing the society could not give. He received a ticket to the municipal lodging house, this was not a hygienic hostelry of today, but a barracks on First Avenue. Carl had a chunk of bread with too much soda in it and coffee with too little coffee in it, from a contemptuous parsonage in a white jacket who, though his cuffs were grimy, showed plainly that he was too good to wait on bumps. Carl leaned his elbows on the long scrub table and chewed the bread of charity suddenly, resolving to catch a freight next day and get out of town. He slept in a narrow bunk near a man with consumption, the room reeked of disinfectants and charity. The east side of New York, a whirlwind of noise and smell and hovering shadows, the jargon of Jewish matrons and brown shawls and orthodox wigs, shaffering for cabbages and black cotton stockings and gray woolen undershirts with excitable push-card proprietors who had beared so prophetic that it was startling to see a frivolous cigarette among the river in Maine. The scent of fried fish and decaying bits of kosher meat and hallways as damnably rotten as floor as they were profitable to New York's nicest circles. The tall gloom of six-storey tenements that made a prison wall of dull yellow bristling with bedding piled fire escapes and the curious heads of frowsy women, a potpourri of Russian signs, Yiddish newspapers, synagogues with six-pointed gilt stars, bakeries with piles of rye bread crawling with caraway seeds, shops for renting wedding finery that looked as if it could never fit anyone, secondhand furniture shops with folding iron beds, a filthy baby holding a baby slightly younger and filthier, mangy cats slinking from pile to pile of rubbish and a withered geranium in a tin can whose label was hanging loose and showed rust stains amid the dry paste on its back. Everywhere crowds of vulnerable Jews and dark clothes and noisily playing children the catapulted into your legs, the longer blocks in which we train the victims of Russian tyranny to appreciate our freedom, a whirlwind of alien ugliness and foul smells and incessant roar and the deathless ambition of young Jews to know ebbsen and syndicalism. It swamped the courage of Hungry Carl as he roamed through Rivington Street and Essex and Hester, vainly seeking jobs from shopkeepers too poor to be able to bathe. He felt that he, not these matter of fact crowds, was alien. He was hungry and tired. There was nothing heroic to do just go hungry. There was no place where he could sit down. The benches of the tiny hard-trutton parks were full. If he could sit down, if he could rest one little hour, he would be able to go and find free yards where there would be the clean clang of bells and rattle of trucks instead of garbled Yiddish. Then he would ride out into the country away from the brooding shadows of this town where there were no separable faces but only a fog of ceaselessly moving crowds. Late that night he stood aimlessly talking to a hobo on a dirty corner of the Bowery where the early September rain drizzled through the gaunt structure of the elevated. He did not feel the hunger so much now but he was meekly glad to learn from his new friend, the hobo, that in one more hour he could get food in the breadline. He felt very boish and would have confided the fact that he was starving to any woman, to any one, but this transcontinental hobo, the tramp royal, trained to scorn hunger. Because he was one of them he watched incuriously the procession of vagrants in coats whose collars were turned up and fastened with safety pins against the rain. The vagrants shuffled rapidly by, their shoulders hunched, their hands always in their trouser pockets, their shoe heels always ground down and muddy. And incuriously he watched a saloon keeper whose face was plastered over with a huge mustache come out and hang a sign. Porter wanted an AM on the saloon door. As he slouched away to join the breadline, a black deuce in the world's discard, Carl was wondering how he could get that imperial appointment as porter in a Bowery saloon. He almost forgot it while waiting in the breadline so occupied was he in hating two collegians who watched the line with that open curiosity of which nice, clean, respectable young men suppose the poor never notice. He restrained his desire to go over and quote Greek at them because they were ignorant and not to blame for being sure that they were of clay superior to anyone in the breadline and partly because he had forgotten his Greek. He came back to the Bowery briskly alone with the manhood of a loaf of bread in him. He was going to get that job as porter. He planned his campaign as a politician plans to become a statesman. He slipped the sign, Porter wanted an AM, from its nail and hid it beneath his coat. He trapped the block all night and as suspicious characters always do to avoid seeming suspicious, he begged a match from a policeman who was keeping an eye on him. The policeman chatted with him about baseball and advised him to keep away from liquor and missions. At five AM Carl was standing at the saloon door. When the bartender opened it, Carl bounced in, slightly dizzy, conscious of the slime of mud on his fraying trouser ends. The saloon had an air of cheap crime and a floor covered with clotted sawdust. The bar was a slab of dark brown wood, so worn that semicircles of slivers were showing. The nasty gutter was still filled with cigarette ends and puddles of beer and bits of free lunch cheese. I want that job as Porter, said Carl. Well, you do, do you? Well, you wait and see who else comes to get it. Nobody else is coming to come. How do you know they ain't? Carl drew the sign from beneath his coat and carefully laid it on the bar. That's why. Well, you got nerve. You got the nerve of a Republican on 14th Street. Like the fellow says, you must want it. Well, all right, I guess you can have it if the boss don't kick. Carl was accepted by the boss who gave him a quarter and told him to go out and get a regular feed. He hummed over breakfast. He had been accepted again by all men when he had been accepted by the proprietor of a Bowery saloon. He was going to hold this job no matter what happened. The Rolling Stone was going to gather moss. For three months Carl took seriously the dirtiest things in the world. He worked 16 hours a day for $8 a week, cleaning cuspidores, scrubbing the floor, scattering clean sawdust, cutting the more rotten portions off the free lunch meat. As he sloped about the half-frozen brittle rags, hobos pushed him aside and spat on the floor. He had just cleaned. Of his $8 a week he saved four. He rented an air-shaft bedroom in the flat of a Jewish sweatshop, working for $1.75 a week. He was occupied daytime by a cook in an all-night restaurant, who had taken a bath in 1900 when at Coney Island on an excursion of the Pip O'Keligan Association. The room was unheated and every night during January, Carl debated whether to go to bed with his shoes on or off. The sub-landlord's daughter was a dwarfish, blotch-faced, passionate child of 15, with moist eyes and very low-cut waist, of course, foil, which she pronounced voyle. She would stop Carl in the dark, railroad hallway, and chewing gum rapidly chatter about the Eilman at Ormancy's and what a small time there would be at the coming ball of the Thomas J. Monaghan Literary and Social Club, tickets $0.25 for Lady and Chant, including Hatchack. She let Carl know that she considered him close-fisted for never taking her to the movies on Sunday afternoons. But he patted her head and talked to her like a big brother and kept himself noticing that she had clinging hands and would be rather pretty. And he bought her a wholesome woman's magazine to read, not an entirely complete solution to the problem of what to do with the girl whom organized society is too busy to nourish, but the best he could contrive just then. Sundays, when he was free for part of the day, he took his book of recipes for mixed drinks to the reading-room of the Tompkins Square Library and gravely studied them, for he was going to be a bartender. Every night, when he staggered from the comparatively clean air of the street into the fetid chill of his room, he asked himself why he, son of Northern Tamaracks and quiet books, went on with this horrible imitation of living, and each time answered himself that, whether there was any real reason or not, he was going to make good on one job, at least, and that the one he held, and admonished himself that he was very well paid for a saloon porter. If Carl had never stood in the bread-line, if he had never been compelled to clean a saloon gutter artistically, in order to keep from standing in that bread-line, he would surely have gone back to the common place in this, from which everyone except Boone Stelman and Henry Frazier had been assuredly training him all his life. They, who knew how naturally life runs on in any sphere, will understand that Carl did not, at this time, feel that he was debased. He lived 24 hours a day and kept busy, with no more wonder at himself than is displayed by the professional burglar or the man who devotes all his youth to learning Greek or soldiering. Nevertheless, the work itself was so much less desirable than driving a car or wandering through the moonlight with Eve la Iwici. In days wonderful and lost that. To endure it, to conquer it. He had to develop a control over temper and speech and body, which was to stay with him in windy mornings of daring. Within three months Carl had become assistant barkeeper, and now he could save $8 a week. He bought a couple of motor magazines and went to one vaudeville show and kept his sub-landlord's daughter from running off with a cadet, wondering how soon she would do it in any case, and receiving a depressing insight into the efficiency of society for keeping in the mire, most of the people born there. Three months later at the end of winter, he was ready to start for Panama. He was going to Panama because he had read in a Sunday newspaper of the canal's marvels of engineering and jungle. He had avoided making friends, there was no one to give him farewell when he emerged from the muck. But he had one task to perform, to settle with the saloon snob, Petey McGuff was the name of this creature. He was an oldish and wicked man born on the bowery. He had been a heavyweight prize fighter in the days of John L. Sullivan. Then he had met John and been ever since an honest crook who made an excellent living by conducting a boxing school in which the real work was done by assistance. He resembled a hound with a neat black bow tie. And he drew all tobacco juice down his big raw looking moist bristly, too masculine chin. Every evening from 11 to midnight, Petey McGuff sat at the round table in the mildewed corner at the end of the bar, drinking old fashioned whiskey cocktails made with bourbon, playing canfield, staring at the nude models plastered on the milky surface of an old mirror and teasing Carl. There boy, come here and wipe off that whiskey you spilled. Come on you tizzy cat, get on the job. You look like Sunday school Harry, mommy little rosy cheek boy. Someday I'm gonna bust your beaser. God, it makes me sick to sit here and look at those goily goily cheeks. Come here, Lizzie, and wipe this table again on the jump, daughter. Carl held himself in, hundreds of times he snarled to himself. I won't hit him. I will make good on this job anyway. He created a grin which he could have fixed easily. Now he was leaving. He had proven that he could hold a job. Had answered the unspoken criticism from Plato, from Chicago Garages, from The Great Rally Show, for the first time since he had deserted college he had been able to write to his father to answer the grim, carpenter's unspoken criticisms of the son who had given up his chances for an education. And proudly he had sent to his father a little check. He had a beautiful new $15 suit of blue surge at home. In his pocket was his ticket, steerage by the P.R.R. line to Cologne, and he would be off for blue water next noon. His feet danced behind the bars as he filled schooners of beer and scraped off their foam with a cellulite ruler. He saw himself in Panama, with a clean man's job, talking to cosmopolitan engineers against the background of green and scarlet jungle. And oh yes, he was going to beat P.D. McGuff that evening, and get back much of the belligerent self-respect which he had been drawing off into schooners with the beer. Oh, P.D. rolled in at two minutes past 11, warmed his hands at the gas stove, poked disapprovingly at the pretzels on the free lunch counter, and bawled at Carl. Hey, you'll keep away from that cash register, wipe them golly-steers away, will you, angus, and bring us a little health destroyer in a couple of matches. Carl brought a whiskey cocktail. Where'd the matches, you tissy cat? Carl wiped his hands on his apron and beamed. Well, so the old soak is getting too fat and lazy to reach over the bar and get his own. You'll last quick now. Oh, is that so, for dear lover Mike? Do you mean to tell me Lizzie is talking back? What do you know about that? What do you know about that? You'll get sick on us here. First thing we know. When was you hoided? Peter McGaff's smile was absolutely friendly. He made Carl hesitate. But it had become one of the principles of cosmic ethics that he had to thump P.D. And he growled. I'll give you all the talking back you want, you big stiff. I'm getting through to-night. I'm going to Panama. Oh, straight as that? That's what I said. Well, that's fine, boy. I've been watching you, and I see you wasn't cut out to be no saloon porter. I made a little bed with myself. You was educated. Why, your cuffs ain't even dirty. Not very dirty. Of course, you kind of need a shave, but them little blonde hairs don't show much. I seen you as a gentleman, even if the bombs didn't. You're too good to be a rum peddler. Glad you're going, boy, mighty glad. Sit down and tell us about it. We'll miss you here. I was just saying the other night to Mike, here there ain't one fella and one hundred could have stood the kitten from an old he-one like me. Kept his mouth shut and grinned, and he said nothing to nobody. That's what Wins fights. But say, boy, I'll miss you, I sure will. I get to be kind of lonely as the boys drop off like boozers always does. Oh, hell. I won't spill me troubles like an old, tizzy cat. So you're going to Panama. I want you to sit down and tell me about it. What you taking, boy? Just a cigar. I'll miss you, too, Petey. Tell you what I'll do. I'll send you some postcard from Panama. Next noon, as the SS Panama pulled out of her ice-line Doc Carlson, old man, shivering on the war, and frantically waving goodbye. Petey McGuff. End of Chapter 15. Chapter 16. The SS Panama had passed Wobblings Island and steamed into storyland. On the white scrubbed decked after the wheel-house Carl sat with his friends of the steerage, Sturdyman, all. Used to open places, old Ed, the rock-driller, long Irish, huge-handed, I rate kindly. Harry the young mechanic from Cleveland. Ed and an oiler were furiously debating about the food aboard. Ah, it's rotten, all of it. Look here, Ed. How about the chicken they give the steerage on Sunday? Chicken? I didn't see no chicken. I see some seagulls, though. No wonder there ain't no seagulls following us. They shot him, cooked him on us. They mused, Harry. Make me think of when I was ship-building in Philly. No, it was when I was broken, K.C. in a guy. Carl smiled and content, exalting in the talk of the men of the road, exalting in his new blue-surge suit, his new silver-gray tie with no smell of the saloon about it, fingernails that were growing pink again, and the sunset that made glorious his petty prides. A vast plain of unrippling plum-colored sea was set with mirror-like pools, where floated tree branches so suffused with the light that the glad-heart blessed them. His first flying fish leaped silvery from the silver sea, and Carl cried almost aloud. This is what I've been waiting for all my life. Allowed to Harry? Say, what's it like in Kansas? I'm going down through there some day, he spoke harshly. But the real Carl was robed in light and murmurous wake of evening, with the tropics down the skyline. Lying in his hot-stirred bunk, stripped to his undershirt, Carl peered through the stateroom window to the swishing night sea, conscious of the rolling of the boat of the engine shaking her, of bolts stunning the white iron wall of life-preservers over his head, of stokers singing on the gangway as they dumped the clinkers overboard. The Panama was pounding on, on, on, and he rejoiced. This is just what I wanted, always. They are creeping in toward the wharf at Colón. He is seeing Panama, first a point of palms, then the hospital, the red roofs of the ICC quarters at Cristobal, and Negroes on the sun-blistered wharf. At last he is free to go to shore, in Wonderland, a melody of Colón and Cristobal Panama, and the canal zone of 1907. Spigoty policemen like monkeys chattering bad Spanish, and big smiling canal zone policemen and khaki with the air of soldiers, Jamaica Negroes with the conical heads and brown barbados Negroes with cockney accents, English engineers and lordly pug-grease, and tourists from New England who seem servants of their own tortoise shell spectacles, comfortable ebb and mammies with silver bangles and kerchiefs of stabbing scarlet, dressed in starched pink and blue ginga, vendez guavas and green tobacco island pineapples, Carl Gapes at Panamanian nuns and Chilean consuls, French peasant laborers, and indigent Irish foremen and German concessionaires with dueling scars and high collars, gold Spanish signs and spigotry money and hotels with American cuspidors and job hunters, tin roofs and arcades, shops open to the street in front but mysterious within, giving glimpses of the canny Chinese proprietors, smoking tiny pipes, trains from towns along canal and sometimes the black funeral car, bound for Monkey Hill Cemetery, gambling houses where it is considered humorous to play, where is my wandering boy tonight? On the phonograph while wandering boys sit at poker and less cleanly places named after the various states. Negro wenches in yellow calico dancing to fiddle tunes older than voodoo, Indian planters coming sullenly in with pale green bananas, memories of the Spanish mane and Morgan's braid of pieces of aid and cutlass so, capes of coconut palms running into a welter of surf, huts on piles streaked with moss, round whose bases landcraft scuttle with a dry rattling that carries far in the hot, moist still air and suggest the corpses of disappeared men found half devoured. Then for contrast the transplanted north, with its seriousness about the service, the American avenues and cool breezes of crystal ball, where fat ball chiefs of the ICC, drive poppously with political guests who in 1907 are still incredulous about the success of the military socialism of the canal, and where wives from Oklahoma or Boston seated in grand rapids golden oak rockers on the screen porches of bungalows, talk of hats and children and mail orders and carts, and the Colonel and malaria fever, and jacuda and the colubrits slide, colon, a kaleidoscope of crimson and green and dazzling white warm-hued peoples and sizzling roofs, with echoes from the high endeavor of the canal and whispers from the unknown bush, drenched with sudden rain like escaping steam or languid under the desert glare of the sky, where hangs a guy of buzzards whose slow circles are stiller than death and calmer than wisdom. Lord, sighs Carl Erickson from Giroleman, this is what I've wanted ever since I was a kid. At Pedro Miguel, with the canal employees always called Peter McGill, he found work, first as an unofficial timekeeper, presently after examinations as a stationary engineer on the role of the ICC. Within a month he showed no sign of the bowary experiences beyond a shallow hollow in his smooth cheeks. He lived in quarters like a college dormitory, communistic and jolly, littered with shoes and cube-cut tobacco and college banners, clean youngsters dropping in for an easy chat and behind it all, the mystery of the bush. His roommate, a conductor on the PRR, was a globetrotter. And through him Carl met the adventurers whom he had been inquesting ever since he had run away from Oscar Erickson's woodshed. There was a young engineer from Boston Tech, who swore every morning at 7.07 when it rained boiling water. He has enthusiastically, as though it had never done such a thing before, that he was going to Chihuahua mining. There was Cokkeye Corbett, an exhaler who was a moral and a lankersherman, and knew more about Blackbirding and Cobra and Kennex, and the rum holes from Nagasaki to Mambosa, than it is healthy for a civil servant to know. Every Sunday a sad-faced man with ash-colored hair and bony fingers, who had been a lieutenant in the Peruvian Navy, a teacher in St. John's College, China, and a subcontractor for railroad construction in Montana and, who was now a minor clerk in the cool lofty offices of the Materials and Supply Department, came over from Cologne, relaxed in a tilted back-chair, and fingered the masonic charm on his horse-hair watch-guard. While he talked with the PRR conductor and the others about Ruby Hunting and the Relief of Peking, and where is Hector McDonald, and is John Orth dead, and shall we try to climb Chimukin Bazo, and jesuit guns and pig-sticking and Swahili tribal lore. These were a few of the topics regarding which he had inside information. The other drawled about various strange things which make a man discontented and bring him no good. Carl was a full member of the circle because of his tales of the Bowery and the Great Riley Show and because he pretended to be rather in an authority on motors for dirgeables, about which he read in aeronautics at the YMCA Reading Room. It is true that at this time, early 1907, the Wrights were still working in obscurity, unknown even in their own Dayton, though they had a completely successful machine stowed away, and as yet Glenn Curtis had merely developed a motor for Captain Baldwin's military dirgeable. But Langley and Maxim had endeavored to launch power-driven, heavier-than-air machines. Lively Santos Dumont had flipped about the Eiffel Tower in his dirgeable and actually raised himself from the ground in a ponderous aeroplane. And in May 1907, a sculptor named Del Range flew over 600 feet in France. Various crank inventors were solving the problem of flight every day. Man was fluttering on the edge of his earthly nest, ready to plunge into the air. Carl was able to make technical-sounding predictions which caught the imagination of the restless children. The adventurers kept moving. The beach-combing ex-sailor said that he was starting for Valparaiso, started for San Domingo, and landed into Haiti once he sent Carl one postcard worded. What price, TT? The engineer from Boston Tech kept his oath about mining in Chihuahua. He got the appointment as Assistant Superintendent of the Trace Ray's Mine, and he took Carl with him. Carl reached Mexico and breathed the air of high-lying desert and hill. He found rare days purposeless and wonderful as the voyagers of ancient Norse Ericsons. Days of learning Spanish and sitting quietly balancing a 3220 Marlin, waiting for bandits to attack. The joy of repairing machinery and helping to erect a new crusher, nursing peons with broken legs, and riding coponies down black mountain trails at night under an exiled-riding splendor of stars. It never seemed to him that the machinery desecrated the mountains during grandeur. Stolen hours he gave to building of box kites with cambered wings after rapturously learning, in the autumn of 1908 that in August a lanky American mechanic named Wilbur Wright had startled the world by flying an aeroplane many miles publicly in France that before this on July 4, 1908, another yanky mechanic, Glenn Curtis, had covered nearly a mile for the Scientific American Trophy, after a series of trials made in company with Alexander Graham Bell, J. A. D. McCurdy, Casey Baldwin, and Augustus Post. He might have gone on until death dealing with excitable greasers and hysterical machinery, but for the coming of a new mind-superintendant, one of those Englishmen, Stolid Red Mustache, pipe-smoking eyebrow-lifting, who at first seemed beefily dull, but proved to have known everyone from George Moore to Marconi. He inspected Carl hundreds of times, then told him that the period had come when he ought to attack a city, concrete, build up a reputation, cumulatively, that he needed a contrast to plutonians and bowery bums and tropical tramps, and even to his beloved engineers. You can do everything but order a petit doradoo, but you must learn to do that, too. Go make ten thousand pounds and study Paul Maul and the boulevards and then come back to us in Mexico. I'll be sorry to have you go, with your damned old silky hair like a woman's in your wink like guitaris when it comes up here to threaten us, but don't let the hinterland enslave you too early. A month later, in January 1909, aged 23 and a half, Carl was steaming out of El Paso for California, with $1,000 in savings of beautiful new Stetson hat, and an ambition to build up a motor business in San Francisco. As a desert sky swam with orange light and a white-browed woman in the seat behind him hummed Mercedez's song from La Boheme. He was homesick for the outlanders, whom he was deserting that he might stick for twenty years in one street and grow about a hundred thousand dollars. End of Chapter 16 Chapter 17 of the Trail of the Hawk. The Slipper Box recording is in the public domain, recording by Mike Vendetti, MikeVendetti.com. Trail of the Hawk by St. Clair Lewis. Chapter 17 On a grassy side street of Oakland, California, was Jones and Erickson's garage, gasoline and repairs, motorcycles and bicycles for rent. Oakland agents for Bristol Moignitos. It was perhaps the cleverest garage in Oakland in Berkeley for the quick repairing of motorcycles and newly wed owners of family runabouts, swore that Carl Erickson could make a carburetor out of a tomato can, and even be agreeable when called on for repairs at two a.m. He had doubled old Jones's business during the nine months, February to November 1909, that they had been associated. Carl believed that he thought of nothing but work and the restaurants and theaters of civilization, no more rolling for him until he had gathered moss. He played that he was a confirmed businessman. The game had hypnotized him for nearly a year. He whistled as he cleaned plugs and glanced out at the eucalyptus trees in the sunny road without wanting to run away. But just today, just this glorious rain cleansed November day, with high blue skies and sunlight on the feathery pepper trees, he was going to sneak away from work and have a celebration all by himself. He was going down to San Mateo to see his first flying machine. November 1909. Bloit had crossed the English Channel McCurdy had in March 1909 calmly pegged off sixteen miles in the silver dart biplane. Poulin had gone eighty-one miles and had risen to the incredible height of five hundred feet. To be overshadowed by overrides sixteen hundred feet, Glenn Curtis had won the Gordon Bennett Cup at Reims. California was promising to be the van of aviation. She was remembering that her own Montgomery had been one of the pioneers. Los Angeles was planning a giant meet in January. A dozen cow pasture aviators were taking credulous young reporters aside and confiding that next day or next week, or at latest, next month, they would startle the world by ascending in machines on entirely new and revolutionary principles on which they had been working for ten years. Sometimes it was for eight years they had been working. But in all ways they remarked that the model from which the machine will be built has flown perfectly in the presence of some of the most prominent men in locality. These machines had a great deal to do with the mysterious qualities of gyroscopes and helicopters. Now Dr. Josiah Bagby, the San Francisco physician and oil burning marine engine magnet, had really brought three genuine Beloit monoplanes from France, with Carmo graduate of the Beloit School and licensed French aviator for working pilot, and was experimenting with them at San Mateo near San Francisco, where the grandsons of the 49ers play polo. It had been rumored that he would open a school for pilots and build Beloit type monoplanes for the American market. Carl had lain awake for an hour the night before picturing the wonder of flight that he hoped to see. He rose early, put on his politis garments, and informed grumpy old Jones that he was off for a frolic. He wasn't sure, he said, whether he would get drunk or get married. He crossed the bay, glad of the seagulls, the glory of Mount Tamapias, and San Francisco's hill behind Fairy Hill. He consumed a Pacific Sunday with the feeling of holiday and hummed mandalay. On the trolley to San Mateo he read over and over the newspaper account of Bagby's monoplanes. Walking through San Mateo, Carl swung his cocky green hat and scanned the sky for aircraft. He saw none. But as he tramped out on Flying Field, he began to run at the sight of two wide cambered wings, rounded at the ends like the end of one's thumb attached to a fragile, long body of open framework. Men were gathered about at a man with a short, crisp beard, and a tight woollen toboggan cap was seated in the body, the wings stretching on either side of him. He scratched his beard and gesteculated. A mechanic revolved a propeller, and the un-muffled motor burst out with a moan, whose music rocked Carl's heart. Black smoke hurled back along the machine. The draught tore at the hair of two men crouched on the ground holding the tail. They let go. The monoplane ran forward along the ground and suddenly, was off it. A foot up, ten feet up, really flying. Carl could see the aviator calmly staring ahead, working his arms as the machine turned and slipped away over distant trees. His first impression of an aeroplane in the air had nothing to do with birds or dragonflies or the miracle of it, because he was completely absorbed in an impression of Carl Erickson, which he expressed after this wise. I am going to be an aviator. And later, yes, that's what I've always wanted. He joined the group in front of the hangar tent. Working men were hammering on wooden sheds back of it. He recognized the owner Dr. Bagby from his pictures. A lean man of sixty with a shallow complexion, a gray mustache, like a rat tail, a broad black country-fied slouch hat, on the back of his head, a gray sack suit which would have been respectable but unfashionable at any period whatsoever. He looked like a country lawyer who would serve two terms in the state legislature. His shoes were black but not blackened, and had no toe caps, the comfortable shoes of an oldish man. He was tapping his teeth with a thin corded forefinger and remarking in a monotonous voice to a Mexican youth plump and polite and well-dressed. Well, Tony, I guess those plugs were better. I guess those plugs were better, eh? Bagby turned to the others, marvelled at them as if trying to remember who they were and said slowly, I guess those plugs were all right, eh? The model plane was returning for a time apparently not moving like a black mark painted on the great blue sky. Then soaring overhead the sharply cut outlines clear as a pen and ink drawing, then landing, bouncing on the slightly uneven ground. As the French aviator climbed out Dr. Bagby's sad face brightened, and he suggested, those plugs went better, on sir, eh? I've been thinking. Maybe you've been giving your too rich a mixture. While they were wiping the gnome engine, Carl Shiley approached Dr. Bagby. He felt frightfully an outsider, wondered if he could ever be intimate with the magician as was the plump Mexican youth they called Tony. He said, eh? Once or twice and blurted, I want to be an aviator. Yes, yes, said Dr. Bagby gently glancing away from Carl to the machine. He went over twang to supporting wire and seemed to remember that someone had spoken to him. He returned to the fevered Carl, walking sideways, staring all the while at the resting monoplane. So efficient, yet so quiet now and slender and feminine. Yes, yes, so you'd like to be an aviator. So you'd like, like, hey, boy, don't touch that. To be an aviator. Yes, yes. They all would, my boy. They all would. Well, maybe you can be some day. Maybe you can be some day. I mean now. Right away. Heard you were going to start a school. Want to join. Hmm, hmm, signed Dr. Bagby tapping his teeth, jingling his heavy gold watch chain, brushing a trail of cigar ashes from a lapel. Then staring abstractly at Carl, who was turning his hat swiftly round and round so flushed of cheeks so excited to buy, that he seemed twenty instead of twenty-four. Yes, yes, so you'd like to join. But that would cost you five hundred dollars, you know. Right. Well, you go talk to Monsir about it. Monsir Camero. He is up very good aviator. He is a licensed aviator. He knows Henry Farman. He studied under Berloyte. He is the boss here. I'm just the poor old fellow that stands around. Sometimes Monsir takes me up for a little ride on our machine. Sometimes he takes me up. But he is the boss. He is the boss, my friend. You'll have to go see him. And Dr. Bagby walked away, apparently much discouraged about life. Carl was not discouraged about life. He swore that now he would be an aviator even if he had to go to Dayton or Hammonsport or France. He returned to Oakland. He sold his share in the garage for eleven hundred and fifty dollars. Before the end of January he was enrolled as a student in the Bagby School of Aviation and Monoplane Building. On an impulse he wrote to of his wondrous happiness to Gertie Cowles, but he tore up the letter. Then proudly he wrote to his father that the lost boy found himself. For the first time in all his delusory writing of home letters he did not feel impelled to defend himself. CHAPTER XVIII Crude were the surroundings where Karmu turned out some of the best monoplane pilots America will ever see. There were two rude shed hangers in which they kept the three imported Berloyte's single seat racer of the latest type. Berloyte XII passenger carrying machine with the seat under the plane and the petit marie, the school machine, which they usually kept throttled down to four or five hundred, but in which Karmu made such spirited flights as the one Carl had first witnessed. Back of the hangers was the workshop, which had little architecture but much machinery. Here the pupils were building two Berloyte-type machines and trying to build an eight-cylinder V-motor. All these things had bag be given for the good of the game. Expecting no profit in return. He was one of the real martyrs of aviation, this sapless, oldish man, never knowing the joy of the air yet devoting a lifetime of ability to helping man sprout wings and become Superman. His generosity did not extend to living quarters. Most of the students lived into hangers, dined on hamburger sandwiches, fried eggs, and Mexican enchiladas served at a lunch wagon anchored near the field. That lunch wagon was their club. Here squatted on high stools, treating one another to ginger ale. They argued over torque and angles of incidence in monoplanes versus biplanes. Except for two unpopular aristocrats who found boarding houses in San Mateo, they slipped into hangers in their overall sprawled-on mattresses covered with horse blankets. It was bed at 8.30. At 4.00 or 5.00, Carmo, would crawl out, scratch his beard, start a motor, and set every neighborhood dog to howling. The students would gloomily clump over to the lunch wagon for a ham and egg breakfast. The first flight began at dawn if the day was clear. At 8.00, when the wind was coming up, they would be hurt in a workshop, adjusting and readjusting machining down bearings, testing wing strength, humming and laughing and busy. A life of gasoline and hammers and straining arm temps to get balance exactly right. A happy life of good fellows and the achievements of machinery and preparation for daring the upper air. A life of very ordinary mechanics and of sheer romance. It was a grievous hearsay that aviation is most romantic when the aviator is portrayed as a young god of noble rank and a caller high and spotless, carelessly driving a transatlantic machine of perfect efficiency. The real romance is that a perfectly ordinary young man, the sort of young man who cleans your car at the garage. A peressically real young man, wearing overalls faded to a thin blue, splitting his affinities and frequently having, for idle, a bouncing, ingenue, should be a rickety structure of wood and a pericle, be able to soar miles in the air and fulfill the dream of all the creeping ages. In English and American fiction there are now nearly as many airplanes as rapiers or roses. The fictional aviators are society amateurs, wearers of evening clothes, frequenters of the club, journalists and civil engineers, and lordlings and international agents and gentlemen detectives who draw, oh yes, I fly a bit. New sensation, you know? Part of Polo. And immediately thereafter use the airplane to raid arsenals, rescue a maiden from robbers, or a large ruby from its lawful but heathenly possessors, or prevent a zeppelin from raiding the coast. But they never by any chance fly these machines before gum-chewing thousands for hire. In England they absolutely must motor from the club to the flying field in a powerful Rolls-Royce car. The British aviators of fiction are usually from Oxford and Eaton. They are splendidly languid and modest and smartly dressed in society, but when they condense into an adventure or to a coincidence they are very devils six feet of steel and sinew boys of the bulldog breed with a strong trace of hummingbird. Like their English kindred the Americans take up aviation only for gentlemanly sport, and they do go about rescuing things. Nothing is safe from their rescuing. But they do not have Rolls-Royce cars. Carl and his class at Bagby's were not of this gilded race. Carl's flying was as sorely real as laying brick for a one-story laundry in a mill-town. Therefore, being real it was as romantic and miraculous. Among Carl's class was Hank O'Dell, the senior student, tall, thin, hopelessly plain of face, a drawing, rough-haired, eagle-nosed Yankee, who grinned shyly in whose Adams Apple worked slowly up and down when you spoke to him, an unimaginative lover of dogs and machinery, the descendant of Lexington and Gettysburg, and a flinty Vermont farm, an ex-fireman, a sergeant of the Army, ex-teamster. He always wore a khaki shirt, the wrinkles of which caught the grease in black lines like veins, with black trousers, fluttoned-toed shoes, and a pipe, the most important part of his costume. There was the round, anxiously polite Mexican Tony Beano, called Tony Bean, wealthy, simple, fond of the violin and a fast motoring. There was the school grouch, Sirly Jack Ryan, the chunky ex-shauffeur. There were seven nondescripts, a clever Jew from Seattle, two college youngsters, an apricot rancher's son, a circus acrobat who wanted a new line of tricks, a dull ensign detailed by the Navy, and an earnest student of aerodynamics age forty, who had written marvellously dull books on air currents, and had shirkingly made himself a fair balloon pilot. The Navy ensign and the student were the snobs who lived away from the hangars in boarding houses. There was Lieutenant Forrest Haveland, detailed by the Army. Haveland, the perfect gentle night, the well-beloved, the nearest approach to the gracious fiction aviator of them all, yet never drawing in effected modesty, never afraid of grease, smiling and industrious and reticent, smooth of hair and cameo of face, wearing khaki riding breeches and tan patees instead of overalls, always a gentleman, even when he tried to appear a workman. He pretended to be enthusiastic about the lunch wagon, and never referred to his three generations of Army officers. But most of the others were shy of him, and Jack Ryan, the school grouch, was always trying to get him into a fight. Finally there was Carl Erickson, who slowly emerged as star of them all. He knew less of varro dynamics than the timid specialist, less of practical mechanics than Hank O'Dell, but he loved the fun of daring more. He was less ferocious in competition than was Jack Ryan, but he wasted less of his nerve. He was less agile than the circus acrobat, but knew more of motors. He was less compactly easily than Lieutenant Haveland, but he took better to overalls and sleeping in hangars and mucking in Greece. He whistled ragtime while Forrest Haveland, a McDowell. Carl's earliest flights were in the school machine, Petite Marie, behind Carmo the Interstructor. Reporters were always about talking of impressions, and Carl felt that he ought to note his impressions on his first descent, but all that he actually did notice was that it was hard to tell at what instant they left the ground. That, when they were up, the wind threatened to crush his ribs and burst his nostrils, that there must be something perishly wrong because the machine climbed so swiftly, and, when they were down, that it had been worth waiting a whole lifetime for the flight. For days he merely flew with the instructor till he was himself managing the controls. At last his first flight by himself. He had been ordered to try a flight three times about the aerodrome at a height of sixty feet, and to land carefully without pancaking. And be sure, monseur, be very sure you do not cut off too much high from the ground, said Carmo. It was a day when five reporters had gathered, and Carl felt very much in the limelight, waiting in the neck hole of the machine for the time to start. The propeller was revolved. Carl drew a long breath and stuck up his hand, and the engine stopped. He was relieved. It had seemed a terrific responsibility to go up alone. He wouldn't now, not for a minute or two. He knew that he had been afraid. The engine was turned over once more, and once more stopped. Carl raged and never again in all his flying did real fear return to him. What a deuce is the matter, he snarled. Again the propeller was revolved, and this time the engine hummed sweet. The monoplane ran along the ground, its tail lifting in the blast, till the whole machine seemed delicately poised on its tiptoes. He was off the ground. His rage leaving him as his fear had left him. He exalted at the swiftness with which a distant group of trees shot at him. Under him he turned, and the machine mounted a little on the turn, which was against the rules, but he brought her to even keel so easily that he felt all the mastery of the man who has finally learned to be natural on a bicycle. He tilted up the elevator slightly and shot across a series of fields climbing. It was perfectly easy. He would go up, up. It was all automatic now, cloaked toward him for climbing, away from him for descent, toward the wing that tipped up in order to bring it down to level. The machine obeyed perfectly, and the foot-bar for steering to right and left responded to such light motions of his foot. He grinned exultantly. He wanted to shout. He glanced at the barometer and discovered that he was up to two hundred feet. Why not go on? He sailed out across San Mateo in the sense of people below running and waving their hands, increased his exaltation. He curved about at the end, somewhat afraid of his ability to turn, but having all the air there was to make the turn in, he headed back toward the aerodrome. Already he had flown five miles. Half a mile from the aerodrome he realized that his motor was slacking, missing fire, that he did not know what was the matter, that his knowledge had left him stranded there two hundred feet above the ground, that he had come down at once with no chance to choose at landing-place and no experience in gliding. The motor stopped altogether. The ground was coming up at him too quickly. He tilted the elevator and rose, but as he was full-planning this cut down the speed and from a height of ten feet above the field the machine dropped to the ground with a flat plop. Something gave way, but Carl sat safe, with the machine canted to one side. He climbed out, culled about the spine, and discovered that he had broken one wheel off of the landing-chasses. All the crowd from the flying field were running toward him yelling. He grand at the fully sight they made with their legs and arms strewn about in the air as they galloped over the rough ground. Lieutenant Havlin came up panting, all right, old man? Good, he seized Carl's hand and rung it. Carl knew that he had a new friend. Three reporters poured questions on him. How far had he flown? Was this really his first ascent by himself? What were his sensations? How had the motor stopped? Was it true he was a mining engineer, a wealthy motorist? Hank O'Dell, the shy eagle-nosed Yankee, running up as jerkly as a cow in a plowed field, silently padded Carl on the shoulder and began to examine the fractured landing-wheel. At last the instructor, Monsour Carmel, Carl had awaited Mr. Carmel's praise as the crown of his long fright. But Carmel pulled his beard open his mouth once or twice, then shrieked. What the devil you think you are! A millionaire that we build machines for you to smash them? I told you to fly three times around. You fly to Algiers and back. You think you are another farming brother? You are a damn fool. Suppose your motor he stopped while you fly over San Mateo. Where you land? In a well? In a chimney? I ain't. You know nothing yet. Next time you do want I tell you, you son. That was a flight. A flight to make a flight. That was fine, fine. You make the heart to swell. But next time you break the chassis and kill yourself? Monde du tonne? I scold you! Carl was humble. But the courier reporters read upon the front page the story of marvellous first flight by Bagby student and predicted that a new Curtis was coming out of California. Under a half tone ran the caption, Erickson the new hawk of the Birdmen. The camp promptly nicknamed him the hawk. They used it for plucking him at first, but it survived as an expression of fondness, hawk, Erickson, the cheeriest man in the school and the coolest flyer.