Bill Barnes Air Adventurer, July 1935 — page 102: what you’re looking at

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

100 his custom, he had just waved to them as the airplane took off over their heads, but this time he had waved a clenched fist and backed it up with a sardonic grimace. He was not feeling the least bit friendly or cordial toward his public, as he had so often jokingly referred to them. AS THEY FLEW on and upward, he felt irresistibly drawn to the other side of the cockpit and found himself unconsciously looking for a familiar lit- tle white farmhouse on the mountain- side, the home of a dark-haired, brown- eyed girl named Gloria Emory, who taught school in Beaufort, on the other side of the mountain, and took flying lessons at Snowden Field. He found it readily enough on such a day as that was—the kind of day on which, even from a good height, objects on the ground are seen through the in- tensifying heat haze clearly, as if through a giant reading glass; just such a day as he had patiently waited for to make his first parachute jump a long, long time ago, before he had become service man for a nationally known parachute manufacturer and himself had become nationally known. That had been a big day for him—a momentous day—on which he had first received a “big hand’ and then been acclaimed and féted far into the night by most of the air-minded folk in the little backwoods town outside of which it all had started—the day that marked the beginning of his successful career. Almost every day since then had been momentous and vibrantly lived; each marked by more daring and spectacular stunts, with bigger “hands” and louder public acclaim, with write-ups and in- terviews, with news-reel movie shots and posed publicity photographs. Although his personality had re- mained that of the unspoiled, level- headed, rugged son of the soil, all this had come to be as food and drink and BILL BARNES life itself to him. Now he was putting it aside as meaningless and nonessen- tial. As they passed closer to the house, he wondered whether those little light- colored patches near it were Mr. Em- ory’s chickens or Mrs. Emory’s wash spread out to dry and if that dark blur was the pet Airedale sprawled at the top of the porch steps. Those were steps that he knew well. He had often buoyantly bounded up them; had often contentedly sat on them evenings—and afternoons, too—when Gloria and he had watched the ever-unfolding pageant of arriving, departing, and maneuvering airplanes above the field, while they chatted in sweetheart fashion. Like many other families living on the hills that bounded the flying field, Gloria and her folks were fortunate in that they were able to look down into the valley and see their fill of aviation with- out leaving their front yard. It was true that they could not actually see the field itself with all the take-offs, land- ings, and other ground operations. Part of the mountain hid that much of the view from them, but they were able to see all that went on above a height of about four hundred feet, though, of course, that had not been enough for Gloria. ; For an instant the sight of those porch steps conjured up an old image that Harper fondly used to see of his own front porch of the future with Gloria and himself sitting on it happily married. His dreams of settling down had been the logical ones for him. They had been the dreams of a homeless orphan, a vagabond of the air, a wan- derer with nomad flying circuses and barnstormmg expeditions, a rolling stone. But all that happy envisioning had been prior to a day two months’ gone by when they had quarreled bitterly and separated. It had been over the long- debated question of her quitting flying oO CON) Ghook (C©