Hurtling Wings

 

Three hundred miles an hour is too fast for anybody,” said Georgia Kyle positively, but Cal only poised for the briefest instant on the catwalk of his racing plane to answer.

 

“Somebody will do it and it might as well be yours truly.” With that, he lowered himself into his pit and pulled his goggles down over his forehead.

 

The girl’s long black lashes dropped uncertainly down over her eyes, her face startlingly white under the jet of her hair. She looked up again and saw the picture Cal Bradley made sitting there in the narrow confines of his “office.” She saw his striped helmet, his brown leather jacket, his frank blue eyes and his rugged face—the face of a man born to take chances.

 

Georgia laid her hand on the cowling. “Cal, I wish you’d listen to me just once. I’ve a feeling that—”

 

Cal Bradley paused in his perusal of the sky and the hundreds of ships lined up on the tarmacs of the great hangars. Puzzled, he looked down.

 

“Maybe it’s silly,” she went on, “and I know you’ll laugh, but I have a premonition that you’re going to crash today.”

 

“The first day of the meet?” True to her prophecy, Cal laughed. “You’ve just got a case of jitters, honey. I’m going to live through this meet and a good many more. In fact, I’m going to live long enough to buy out your dad and marry you and win a thousand races. Maybe this ship is all I’ve got in the world, but it’s enough. Now, if you don’t look out, I’ll blast the engine and blow you clean through the grandstand!”

 

Georgia laughed and backed away, almost bumping into her father, Speed Kyle, who was hobbling up in time to wish Cal luck.

 

“Be careful!” Georgia called, above the growing roar of the engine.

 

“Good luck, Cal!” shouted Speed, and with a beaming smile on his weather-beaten face, he watched the small but speedy racing plane taxi away toward the line.

 

When the dust had settled from Cal’s prop wash, Speed turned to his daughter with pretended ferocity. “The idea, telling that youngster to be careful, just when he’s out to make the record!”

 

“He can be careful and fly fast, too, can’t he?”

 

“Humph!” Speed grunted, and took her arm, leading her away toward the grandstand. “There’s not so much difference between auto racing and plane racing, Georgia, and there’s no difference at all between the fellows that do the driving. Why, as old as I am, I’d give my eye teeth to be up there in one of the Kyle racers giving Cal Bradley the run of his young life.”

 

“You aren’t so old, Dad,” said Georgia.

 

“No? Well, I’m the deuce of a lot older than I care to be. I was in the auto racing game in 1902, and I’ve been building airplanes for fourteen years.”

 

Having heard the story since the days of her hair ribbons, Georgia diverted her attention to the line where three ships were coming in side by side.

 

“All ready to go,” she said. “I hope Cal doesn’t turn the pylons too fast.”

 

Speed’s grunt was interrupted by the grinding voice through the microphones saying that Cal Bradley, Bill Conklin and Smoke Gregory, the three speed kings of the air, were about to race against each other and the record, and that this was the first of a series of high-speed events which would be held at the National Air Meet.

 

Speed looked at Conklin’s ship with shrewd, appraising eyes. This was Speed’s own entry, and though he half-hoped Cal Bradley would win, the flimsy thing of wood and steel which bore the Kyle Aircraft Eagle carried all Speed’s hope for immediate glory.

 

“Wish Bill had some of Cal’s fire,” he growled. “That ship of mine is twice as good as Cal’s. One of these days, Georgia, I’m going to sign up young Bradley and make a star out of him.”

 

“You mean you’d like to have him race for you?”

 

“Why not? He’s the coming bet of the country today, and with him at my sticks, we’d lead the field. I build ’em best, he flies ’em best. Say!” Speed’s frown went away under the light of sudden inspiration—“Why don’t you persuade him?”

 

Georgia’s glance was meant to be withering, but at that instant the ship flashed across the starting line and captured all of Speed’s attention.

 

Five hundred feet up, Cal Bradley looked to the right and left to assure himself that the other two contestants were regularly spaced out behind him and shot the gun up into its last notch. The three-hundred-horsepower engine chattered and clanked and sent four hundred and forty feet of air behind it in the space of a single second. Three hundred miles an hour, and the air speed indicator was creeping even higher.

 

It was good to have a live motor in front of him, a sensitive stick in his fingers and a hurtling plane around him. Up ahead there were pylons to turn and wind currents to fight, but they were still ahead. Right now, Cal Bradley was perfectly content to sit in his cockpit and fly.

 

Directly to the rear, Smoke Gregory was hurling his Jupiter Aircraft ship into Cal’s wake. Third in line came Bill Conklin, in the Kyle Eagle. Ahead of them the checkered pyramid which was Pylon One was looming.

 

Cal settled himself on the cushion his parachute made and prepared for the vertical which would soon be his lot. He spared the briefest glance to the rear to make certain of his airway and saw that Smoke Gregory, in the Jupiter ship, was gaining.