he ground, falling straight, when he got
back to even keel and shot ahead. How safe the nest of the nacelle
where he sat seemed then! Almost gaily he swung her in a great
wavering circle--and the wind was again in his face, hating him,
pounding him, trying to get under the wings and turn the machine
turtle.

Twice more he worked his way about the track. The conscience of the
beginner made him perform a diffident Dutch roll before the grand
stand, but he was growling, "And that's all they're going to get.
See?"

As he soared to earth he looked at the crowd for the first time. His
vision was so blurred with oil and wind-soreness that he saw the
people only as a mass and he fancied that the stretch of slouch-hats
and derbies was a field of mushrooms swaying and tilted back. He was
curiously unconscious of the presence of women; he felt all the
spectators as men who had bawled for his death and whom he wanted to
hammer as he had hammered the wind.

He was almost down. He cut off his motor, glided horizontally three
feet above the ground, and landed, while the cheers cloaked even the
honking of the parked automobiles.

Carl's manager, fatly galloping up, shrilled, "How was it, old man?"

"Oh, it was pretty windy," said Carl, crawling down and rubbing the
kinks out of his arms. "But I think the wind 's going down. Tell the
announcer to tell our dear neighbors that I'll fly again at five."

"But weren't you scared when she dropped? You went down so far that
the fence plumb hid you. Couldn't see you at all. Ugh! Sure thought
the wind had you. Weren't you scared then? You don't look it."

"Then? Oh! Then. Oh yes, sure, I guess I was scared, all right!...
Say, we got that seat padded so she's darn comfortable now."

The crowd was collecting. Carl's manager chuckled to the president of
the fair association, "Well, that was some flight, eh?"

"Oh, he went down the opposite side of the track pretty fast, but why
the dickens was he so slow going up my side? My eyes ain't so good now
that it does me any good if a fellow speeds up when he's a thousand
miles away. And where's all these tricks in the air----"

"That," murmured Carl to his manager, "is the i-den-ti-cal man that
stole the blind cripple's crutch to make himself a toothpick."

CHAPTER XXI

The great Belmont Park Aero Meet, which woke New York to aviation, in
October, 1910, was coming to an end. That clever new American flier,
Hawk Ericson, had won only