Adventure Magazine Cover — page 167: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Don’t Swat a Flyer time in his existence. It was the result of months in a hospital at full pay. That note from Tampico had been like a spark igniting the temporarily vanished flame in the flyer’s bosom. In three hours his resignation was in. In two more days he would be on his way again—Tampico, then Central America, then somewhere else. Probably Turkey, if the bank-roll would- permit. Thickening clouds ahead of him brought the pilot out of his revery. They were not only increasing, but they were getting darker. ‘The air was extremely bumpy, too—hot sun, many plowed fields alter- nating with splotches of mesquite, and the clouds accounted for that. The Fokker was frequently carried a hundred feet upward in a rising current, only to drop an equal distance in cooler air above woods or ponds. In a moment he had to dive slightly to avoid going through a tremendous mass of murky mist. As he dropped earthward he could see slanting lines of rain beneath it, so he made a half-mile circle around the shower. There were a flock of showers round about, it seemed. For the next five minutes he dodged in and out of them, trying at the same time to keep an eye on the rail- road. The ground was divided into alter- nate patches, a mile or two square, of per- fectly dry and extremely muddy earth. “Hope no cloud-burst has put Lockville afloat,” he reflected. It would be suicide to land in a muddy field, unless there was a thick growth of grass. There was a moment’s respite when he drove along beneath a smiling blue sky and the sun played over the wires of his ship with blinding radiance. Ahead, however, a tremendous black cloud, miles long and easily fifteen thousand feet high, barred his progress. He studied the ground a moment. He was less than ten miles from Lockville. There was the edge of the big tract of mes- quite which the railroad traversed just be- fore it got to the junction point whence a ten-mile ride on the branch line brought one to Lockville. The Mercedes ran pretty well in the rain—nothing to do but go through. If the country around Lockville was too wet he’d have to turn around and go home. He throttled the motor and dropped into a steep dive. Finally he was in the fringe 16f of the mist, and his goggles fogged sud- denly. He turned and circled earthward in a tight spiral. He was trying to get underneath the cloud, preferring the rain to the opaque blackness of the storm-center. Occasionally he could see a jagged streak of lightning split the cloud. He was seven hundred feet high when he decided to try it. Not low enough. Ina second he was surrounded with dense mist, and could barely see the end of his wings. His little ship was being buffeted cruelly in ferocious air-currents that tossed it around like a leaf. With motor full on he nosed over. The ship flashed downward toward the invisible earth, quivering with the speed. The rain. stung his face cruelly, every drop feeling like the prick of a needle. It took but a few seconds for the earth to loom vaguely through the gray mist and rain. He pulled up gradually, and found himself two hundred feet above thin mes- quite. It was a veritable cloudburst he was in. He was soaked to the skin. It was only a matter of minutes before that terrific rain would penetrate the motor somewhere. It was like trying to run it immersed in water. The unruffled pilot grinned slightly as he thought of that old superstition of the flyer about “last rides.” “That would be a fine how-do-you-do,” he reflected. ‘Get smacked on a forty minute cross-country trip—and my last one at that!” He raised his useless goggles and peered out over his arm, which was shielding his tortured face. It was rough, hilly country, covered with a thin growth of mesquite and bushes. No possible landing-place—— Suddenly a conical structure of unpainted wood loomed ahead. It was so high that Brannon instinctively pulled back on the stick. Then he saw what it was—an oil- derrick. Directly beyond it there was a grass field. Puddles of water stood all over it. He could not see it at all plainly, but he decided instantly that it would be sheer foolishness to attempt to look further. At any second the motor might quit. He looked down at the trees coolly and saw that they were bending backward in the force of the gale. He was flying into the wind, which allowed him to land in the direction in which he was going. It was totally impossible to look steadily ahead—goggles fogged into uselessness in an nA) S COMmicloo C©