roplane to raid arsenals, rescue a maiden from robbers or a large
ruby from its lawful but heathenish 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 Eton. They are splendidly languid and modest and smartly
dressed in society, but when they condescend to 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 humming-bird. 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 sordidly real as laying brick for a one-story laundry in
a mill-town. Therefore, being real, it was romantic and miraculous.

Among Carl's class was Hank Odell, the senior student, tall, thin,
hopelessly plain of face; a drawling, rough-haired, eagle-nosed
Yankee, who grinned shyly and whose Adam's 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, ex-sergeant of the army, and ex-teamster.
He always wore a khaki shirt--the wrinkles of which caught the grease
in black lines, like veins--with black trousers, blunt-toed shoes, and
a pipe, the most important part of his costume.

There was the round, anxious, polite Mexican, Tony Beanno, called
"Tony Bean"--wealthy, simple, fond of the violin and of fast motoring.
There was the "school grouch," surly Jack Ryan, the chunky
ex-chauffeur. 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, aged forty, who had
written marvelously dull books on air-currents and had shrinkingly
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 Haviland, detailed by the army--Haviland
the perfect gentle knight, the well-beloved, the nearest