e and a half, Carl
was steaming out of El Paso for California, with one thousand dollars
in savings, a beautiful new Stetson hat, and an ambition to build up a
motor business in San Francisco. As the desert sky swam with orange
light and a white-browed woman in the seat behind him hummed Musetta'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 grub
out a hundred thousand dollars.

CHAPTER XVII

On a grassy side-street of Oakland, California, was "Jones & Ericson's
Garage: Gasoline and Repairs: Motor Cycles and Bicycles for Rent:
Oakland Agents for Bristow Magnetos."

It was perhaps the cleverest garage in Oakland and Berkeley for the
quick repairing of motor-cycles; and newly wed owners of family
runabouts swore that Carl Ericson could make a carburetor out of a
tomato-can, and even be agreeable when called on for repairs at 2 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 business man. The
game had hypnotized him for nearly a year. He whistled as he cleaned
plugs, and glanced out at the eucalyptus-trees and the sunny road,
without wanting to run away. But just to-day, 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. Bleriot had crossed the English Channel; McCurdy had,
in March, 1909, calmly pegged off sixteen miles in the "Silver Dart"
biplane; Paulhan had gone eighty-one miles, and had risen to the
incredible height of five hundred feet, to be overshadowed by Orville
Wright's sixteen hundred feet; Glenn Curtiss had won the Gordon
Bennett cup at Rheims.

California was promising to be in the van of aviation. She was
remembering that her own Montgomery had been one of the pioneers. Los
Angeles was planning a giant meet for 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 a