d in the hope that he might do something
for the girl who had been going wrong. The tenement had been torn
down, with blocks of others, to make way for a bridge-terminal, and he
saw the vision of the city's pitiless progress. This quest of old
acquaintances made him think of Joralemon. He informed Gertie Cowles
that he was now "in the aviation game, and everything is going very
well." He sent his mother a check for five hundred dollars, with
awkward words of affection.

A greater spiritual adventure was talking for hours, over a small
table in the basement of the Brevoort, to Lieutenant Forrest Haviland,
who was attending the Belmont Park Meet as spectator. Theirs was the
talk of tried friends; droning on for a time in amused comment, rising
to sudden table-pounding enthusiasms over aviators or explorers, with
exclamations of, "Is that the way it struck you, too? I'm awfully glad
to hear you say that, because that's just the way I felt about it."
They leaned back in their chairs and played with spoons and
reflectively broke up matches and volubly sketched plans of controls,
drawing on the table-cloth.

Carl took the sophisticated atmosphere of the Brevoort quite for
granted. Why _shouldn't_ he be there! And after the interest in him at
the meet it did not hugely abash him to hear a group at a table behind
him ejaculate: "I think that's Hawk Ericson, the aviator! Yes, sir,
that's--who--it--is!"

Finally the gods gave to Carl a new mechanic, a prince of mechanics,
Martin Dockerill. Martin was a tall, thin, hatchet-faced,
tousle-headed, slow-spoken, irreverent Irish-Yankee from Fall River;
the perfect type of American aviators; for while England sends out its
stately soldiers of the air, and France its short, excitable geniuses,
practically all American aviators and aviation mechanics are either
long-faced and lanky, like Martin Dockerill and Hank Odell, or slim,
good-looking youngsters of the college track-team type, like Carl and
Forrest Haviland.

Martin Dockerill ate pun'kin pie with his fingers, played "Marching
through Georgia" on the mouth-organ, admired burlesque-show women in
sausage-shaped pink tights, and wore balbriggan socks that always
reposed in wrinkles over the tops of his black shoes with frayed
laces. But he probably could build a very decent motor in the dark,
out of four tin cans and a crowbar. In A.D. 1910 he still believed in
hell and plush albums. But he dreamed of wireless power-transmission.