Read Ebook: Tales of the Air Mail Pilots by McConnell Burt M Burt Morton

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Ebook has 109 lines and 9977 words, and 3 pages

"You don't mean to imply," broke in the colonel, "that the news of this catastrophe is a pure invention--an invention of the English papers in Hong-Kong?"

"Don't know, I'm sure," said Harryman. "Hong-Kong papers are no criterion for me." And then he added quietly: "Yes, man is great, and the newspaper is his prophet."

"But you can't dispute the fact that a seaquake may have taken place, when you consider the striking results as shown by the cable interruptions which we have been experiencing for the last six days," began Webster again.

"Have we really?" said Harryman. "Are you quite sure of it? So far the only authority we have for this supposed seaquake is a Japanese captain--whom, by the way, I am having sharply watched--and a bundle of worthless Hong-Kong newspapers. And as for the rest of my hallucinations"--he jumped down from the window-sill and, going up to Webster, held out a sheet of paper toward him--"I'm in the habit of using other sources of information than the English-Japanese fingerposts."

Webster glanced at the paper and then looked at Harryman questioningly.

"What is it? Do you understand it?"

"Yes," snapped Harryman. "These little pictures portray our war of extermination against the red man. They are terribly exaggerated and distorted, which was not at all necessary, by the way, for the events of that war do not add to the fame of our nation. Up here," explained Harryman, while several officers, among them the colonel, stepped up to the table, "you see the story of the infected blankets from the fever hospitals which were sent to the Indians; here the butchery of an Indian tribe; here, for comparison, the fight on the summit of the volcano of Ilo-Ilo, where the Tagala were finally driven into the open crater; and here, at the end, the practical application for the Tagala: 'As the Americans have destroyed the red man, so will you slowly perish under the American rule. They have hurled your countrymen into the chasm of the volcano. This crater will devour you all if you do not turn those weapons which were once broken by Spanish bondage against your deliverers of 1898, who have since become your oppressors.'"

"Where did you get the scrawl?" asked the colonel excitedly.

"Do you want me to procure hundreds, thousands like it for you?" returned Harryman coolly.

The colonel pressed down the ashes in his pipe with his thumb, and asked indifferently: "You understand Japanese?"

"Tagala also," supplemented Harryman simply.

"Millions of these pictures, with Japanese and Malayan text, are being circulated in the Philippines," said Harryman positively.

"Under our eyes?" asked a lieutenant na?vely.

"Under our eyes," replied Harryman, smiling, "our eyes which carelessly overlook such things."

Colonel Webster rose and offered Harryman his hand. "I have misjudged you," he said heartily. "I belong to your party from now on."

"It isn't a question of party," answered Harryman warmly, "or rather there will soon be only the one party."

"That question cannot be answered unless you know who gave the document to the Shanghai paper, and what object he had in doing so," replied Harryman.

"How do you mean?"

"The document was therefore not genuine?" asked the colonel.

"Think it over. What was it that the supposed plan of attack set forth? A Japanese invasion of Manila with the fleet and a landing force of eighty thousand men, and then, following the example of Cuba, an insurrection of the natives, which would gradually exhaust our troops, while the Japanese would calmly settle matters at sea, Roschestwenski's tracks being regarded as a sufficient scare for our admirals."

"That would no doubt be the best course to pursue in an endeavor to pocket the Philippines," answered the colonel thoughtfully; "and the plan would be aided by the widespread and growing opposition at home to keeping the archipelago and putting more and more millions into the Asiatic branch business."

"Quite so," continued Harryman quickly, "if Japan wanted nothing else but the Philippines."

"What on earth does she want in addition?" asked Webster.

"No; political, too, and with solid foundations," answered Harryman.

Colonel McCabe had sat down again, and was studying the pamphlet, Parrington picked at the label on his whisky bottle, and the others remained silent, but buried in thought. In the next room a clock struck ten with a hurried, tinkling sound which seemed to break up the uneasy silence into so many small pieces.

"And if it was not genuine?" began Colonel McCabe again, hoarsely. He cleared his throat and repeated the question in a low tone of voice: "And if it was not genuine?"

Harryman shrugged his shoulders.

"Then it would be a trap for us to have us secure our information from the wrong quarter," said the colonel, answering his own question.

"A trap into which we are rushing at full speed," continued Webster, laying stress on each word, though his thoughts seemed to be far in advance of what he was saying.

Harryman nodded and twisted his mustache.

"What did you say?" asked Parrington, jumping up and looking from Webster to Harryman, neither of whom, however, volunteered a reply. "We are stumbling into a trap?"

"Two regiments," said Webster, more to himself than to the others. And then, turning to Harryman, he asked briskly: "When are the transports expected to arrive?"

"The steamers with two regiments on board left 'Frisco on April 10th, therefore--he counted the days on his fingers--they should be here by now."

"No, they were to go straight to Mindanao," said Parrington.

"Exactly," interrupted Parrington, "we have known nothing, either of the fleet or of anything else, for the last six days."

"Harryman," said Colonel McCabe seriously, "do you think there is danger? If it is all a trap, it would be the most stupid thing that we could do to send our transports unprotected-- But that's all nonsense! This heat positively dries up your thoughts. No, no, it's impossible; they're hallucinations bred by the fermented vapors of this God-forsaken country!" He pressed the electric button, and the boy appeared at the door behind him. "Some soda, Pailung!"

"Parrington, are you coming? I ordered my boat for ten o'clock," said Harryman.

"As early as this, Harryman?" remonstrated Webster. "You'll be on board your boat quite soon enough, or do you want to keep a night watch also on your Japanese of the-- What sort of a Maru was it?" he broke off, because Colonel McCabe pointed angrily at the approaching boy.

"Oh, nonsense!" growled Webster ill-humoredly. "A creature like that doesn't see or hear a thing."

The colonel glared at Webster, and then noisily mixed his drink.

"I don't know, I really don't know," said Harryman nervously. Then, seizing Parrington's hands, he continued hurriedly, but in a low voice: "For days I have been living as if in a trance. It is as if I were lying in the delirium of fever; my head burns and my thoughts always return to the same spot, boring and burrowing; I feel as though a horrible eye were fixed on me from whose glance I cannot escape. I feel that I may at any moment awake from the trance, and that the awakening will be still more dreadful."

"You're feverish, Harryman; you're ill, and you'll infect others. You must take some quinine." With these words Parrington climbed into his gig, the sailors gave way with the oars, and the boat rushed through the water and disappeared into the darkness, where the bow oarsman was silhouetted against the pale yellow light of the boat's lantern like a strange phantom.

Harryman could not sleep, and joined the officer on duty on the bridge, where the slight breeze which came from the mountains afforded a little coolness.

"A ship at last," said Parrington. "Let's wait and see what sort of a craft it is."

Parrington put down his glass and said: "About four thousand tons, but she has no flag. We can soon remedy that." And turning to the signalman he added: "Ask her to show her colors." At the same time he pulled the rope of the whistle in order to attract the stranger's attention.

In a few seconds the German colors appeared at the stern of the approaching steamer, and the med likely that he might have to use it for a blanket that night, he threw the legs of the suit over his shoulders, strapped them there in order to walk more freely, and floundered forth into the snow, now three feet deep.

Soon Bishop was wallowing in drifts higher than his waist. For hours he continued on, overheated by his exertions, and rapidly growing weaker with each stride. There was nothing from which to make snowshoes for his feet, even if he had had the tools and the time before darkness fell. The storm still howled about his ears and shut off the view ahead. But with his compass he kept a course toward a farmhouse which he knew nestled at the foot of a mountain some twenty miles to the westward.

For more than six hours Bishop, who was born on an Iowa farm and is sturdily built, staggered wearily along through the snowdrifts, traveling in that time about ten miles. At this critical juncture, half way between the ship, where he could at least have built a fire, and the farmhouse where he was sure to find warmth, food, and shelter, Bishop realized that his fast waning strength was not equal to the task of reaching the one or retreating to the other. He was becoming drowsy by this time, but he struggled onward, still carrying his heavy flying suit, for it seemed certain that he would be compelled to spend the night in the open. No one could possibly have seen him land, and certainly he, a mere speck against the spotless white, could not be discerned from the farmhouse, even with the aid of glasses. Besides, no one would expect even an Air Mail pilot to venture out in such a blizzard.

Taking along a mechanic in case of accident to his own motor, and food and coffee for Bishop, Ellis set out in the face of the gale to find among a thousand hills a stalled machine and its helpless pilot.

When I remarked to Ellis, a few weeks ago, in a conversation at Salt Lake City, that this was a "mighty fine thing" for him to do, he replied: "Oh, that's nothing; Bishop or any other pilot would do the same thing for me. We realize that any one of us may get into a jam at any time. And then it's up to his fellow pilots to get him out of it." This is the code of those who go down to the sea in ships.

After a flight of less than an hour, Ellis and his mechanic sighted Bishop's machine, half buried in the snow; a dead thing. There was no sign of Bishop. Moreover, his trail had been blotted out by the drifting snow. Ellis, flying low and in wide circles about the stalled machine, asked himself what he would do in similar circumstances. Immediately he concluded that he would make for the farmhouse, twenty miles away. With an Air Mail pilot, to decide is to act and within fifteen minutes, Ellis, flying a hundred feet above the snow, had "picked up" a floundering figure half way between the stalled machine and the farmhouse. Settling gradually, in order not to break the undercarriage of his plane and thus leave all three at the mercy of the blizzard, Ellis and his mechanic landed near their exhausted comrade.

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