THE FLAMING FINISH

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Blue Book, August 1938, with "The Flaming Finish"

TIRREL saluted the colonel and said in fairly good Spanish: "I'd like to take up Tommy's biplane."

The colonel was very drunk. On the white of his face wavered a spot of sunlight let in through the hole which a three-inch shell had clipped through the top of the tent the day before.

"That plane is condemned," said, the colonel.

"I've worked on it for two days," said Tirrel. "It will fly now."

The colonel grew only more pale and; more precise when he was drunk. That is a rare Latin gift. Now he became: extremely logical, saying: "Tomlinson was your friend. Tomlinson was shot out of the sky by the enemy. It will please Tomlinson's ghost if you take his old bus into the sky and shoot something down with it."

"Something like that, I suppose," admitted Tirrel.

"You are—" declared the colonel, pausing for the proper word. "You are—an American. You don't realize that Don Quixote was already ridiculous three hundred years ago; and you are exactly three centuries more stale and out of date than he was."

"Yes sir," said Tirrel, vaguely, for he never knew how to argue with words.

"You think," went on the colonel, sharpening his little mustaches with his fingertips, "that though chivalry is dead on the earth, it is still alive in the air. For that reason you have followed the wars. You have flown in South America;you have flown in China; today you are flying in Spain. You send individual challenges to prominent enemy aviators. You consider yourself a knightly spirit when you encounter them in the clouds. But though you may force us to read headlines about you, you cannot keep us from laughing behind your back."

"No, sir," said Tirrel gently. He put his big hands behind his back, and gripped them hard together.

"I," said the colonel, "as a Spaniard and a patriot, consider you extremely absurd and a little disgusting. But you are efficient in the air; and if you wish to commit suicide in the name of your dead friend, you shall have the plane when you please. You will note, Tirrel, that in this world every man may have what he wants, so long as his desire is foolish enough to keep him from envy. With that—adios!"

Tirrel wanted to do something about the colonel with his hands; so he got himself out of the tent quickly, and went over to the field where the old biplane was standing. He was very angry, but with every step be took, his passion decreased and the words of the colonel began to ring in his brain like solemn truths such as children intone from their first readers. Chivalry was dead. As a matter of fact, he never had thought of himself as a knight of the air; what he felt was quite wordless until the colonel expressed it for him, and now he seemed limited by and bound to the words which the drunken Spaniard had spoken. In this world there was no more high adventure, and he was a fool searching through the world for ghosts. But when he saw Tommy Tomlinson's old machine, once more the great urge came over him to take the rickety bus into the air and try to do something in the name of his dead friend. They had fixed up the plane as well as they could, but the bloodstains were still visible in the cockpit. The sight of them brought the sweat out on the upper lip of Tirrel. It was a ridiculous old machine, German make, and of the 1929 vintage—sound enough for a slow excursion, but not worth a damn for tumbling about in a dog-fight.

"Is there anything around?" he asked at the field.

"There's something up there in those clouds," was the answer of the major in charge of the field.

"I'll go take a look," said Tirrel.

"Don't be a fool," said the major. "That plane handles like a ten-ton truck on a frozen road; and the little devils I saw up there were single-seaters; pursuit planes that can scare three hundred miles an hour."

"I'll run if they look at me," lied Tirrel, and took the old bus off the ground.

THE clouds were white puffs such as shrapnel-bursts leave in the air, but they turned thinner and bluer and bigger when Tirrel got the old biplane up to them. As he rose, he had a perfect picture of the great city, moth-eaten here and there by bombing and shell-fire. For his own part, he had come with such a reputation for combat work that he never had had to do any bombing, for which he thanked God and his good luck; and no matter how the death-grapple went on the Spanish soil beneath, in the air he had felt that there was still something of high chivalry, and men fought duels worthy of filling the throats of poets, if only poets would begin to sing again in this darkened century.

Or else had it all been foolish tommy-rot and pretense: that quiet London mansion, the portrait of noble old red-faced Dunsbury, with underneath it the benediction which he had left to the world: "Peace in the air"? For Lord Dunsbury had conceived the idea of an international but secret society of the greatest air-men in the world, men who would represent every air-minded nation and meet together in the London home which he provided for them out of his great estate. It was not a public matter, but it was the greatest honor that could befall a flyer; and when Tirrel on his initiation night took the oath of that fraternity, with the great air-men of a dozen nations around him, he had been sure that knighthood was again in flower, and that in the sky he had found the wild blue fields of romance, where a day of riding is worth a life of mundane wretchedness. But now he felt that the colonel was right. And the Halcyon Club was only a bright bubble of the mind, a fiction pleasantly housed.

HE lifted his hand and touched the little golden "H" which he wore under the lapel of his coat. He was troubled. What had he done to keep "peace in the air"?

His mind was dimmed by that feeling, The air is not a good place for trouble to darken the eyes; and he was aware of this immediately after he entered the lowest drift of blowing clouds; for three blurred lines of speed slid out of the upper mist and turned into three monoplanes, smart as devils, that dropped at him.

He turned through a cloud no bigger than a cannon-puff of smoke, but it gave him a chance to change his angle of flight, and he came out with his nose pointing up and aslant at the last and tardiest of the enemy planes. He put a good long burst right into the heart of her, the white chasers hitting the mark as though his hand were guiding them home to the last; when he tumbled into a twisting descent, he saw that plane sag off to the side in a long swoop, like a seagull blowing down the wind. A moment later it was falling out of control.

Well, that was enough for honor. It seemed to him that the jolly face of Tommy Tomlinson looked in upon him again, and that the voice of the friendly ghost was saying: "Good boy! Now go home!"

Tirrel turned and ran for his life.

It was no good. A fat old bulldog with plenty of jaw-muscle but no legs under him against a pair of dodging, snapping terriers—it was like that, except that each of these terriers was able to bite to the heart when the right moment came. He had to hold the right amount from them. The temptation, as always, was to slide straight for the ground; but that was of course the perfect way to let them level off behind, and blow the target right out of the sky.

It was not the first time he had been in a dog-fight against odds. There had been a period during which he was able to challenge individual enemies, and then go up into the blue to meet them by courteous, and deadly,appointment; but that time had ended after he encountered, in the flawless pure sky above Salamanca, that hero and exquisite airman Francisco Gonzales. After Gonzales went down in flames, a special order forbade anymore of these romantic trysts in the sky. The two who now hounded Tirrel were not good flyers. In his single-seater he would have knocked them over with no trouble at all; but this old bus creaked in the joints with rusty age. He had to keep turning, twisting, tumbling, almost jerking the wings out at their roots. He was looking at the sky about as much as he was looking at the earth, when a bullet slammed through his right shoulder. The shock and the pain took his breath, but that was not so bad as the fact that he was turned into a clumsy, left-handed worker, no longer able to tool the plane through the sky with the old delicate surety.

The city was far down beneath the horizon. There were ragged hills, scattering shrubbery, big raw-faced bluffs that looked like terrain of the American West as he sprawled toward the earth. Once he spilled the machine in a sort of tumbler pigeon dive, and got in a couple of bursts at the pursuers; after that, they shot the life out of his motor, and he had to swoop right down into the unexpected mercy of a squall of rain which was falling from a long, low cloud.

Under that shadowy curtain he passed and slid into a field of low, spreading shrubbery. A roaring ghost rushed over him; a burst of machine-gun fire played ring-a-ting on his biplane; and then a tree that lay half on the ground reached out an unexpected arm and snagged him. The old plane flipped over on its back. He got a whang on the head, and dangled on the safety-belt like a fish from a line. As he reached for the release lever, the second monoplane zoomed over him and sprayed the dying biplane with lead. A smell of gas arose, and flames spurted. When he got out of the plane, he dived into the thick of a shrub and wallowed in it. That was how he put out the spots of eating fire. The wet leaves and the sweeping rain helped in the good work.

Everything seemed little and unimportant, down there on the earth. The thunderhead from which the storm was streaming, the trees, the hills, even the pain in his back and shoulder scarcely mattered. All that really counted were the two planes which kept dipping out of the sky and putting bursts of machine-gun fire into the flaming plane. Their motors to the ear were like two ragged lines of red fire to the eye, swinging down and up, writing a big sprawling message of revenge. Perhaps they were pals of that fellow he had shot down. Tirrel, watching the way they handled their buses, set his teeth a bit and breathed more deeply. He could fly left-handed better than that; be wanted to be up among them and doing things.

HE put a half-mile between him and the biplane, holding his right arm at the elbow like a package of meat. Then the pain made him sick at his stomach and kept him groveling on his knees for a while. After that he lay back and relaxed, but there was no real rest, because the pain kept running through a devilish crescendo; when he forced his brain to think of something else, all it could conceive were the highest, brittle notes on a piano, or a violin squeaking shrilly.

He had to use a pocket-knife to get himself out of his clothes. Everything was blood-soaked. When he was stripped to the waist, he tried to make a bandage, but he saw at once that to fit a bandage across his shoulder would be impossible with his single hand.

He got to his knees. He got to his feet. His legs were betraying him, as they betray a punch-drunk prizefighter; and the blood kept running down his back and his breast. The wound in front, where the bullet had issued, was much the worse. He gave over supporting his right arm, merely stuffing the hand inside his belt. That left his other hand free to comfort the bleeding mouth of the wound.

The day, too, was, unfriendly, for instead of blowing away, the storm had spread over the entire sky, bringing on an early twilight. He oriented himself. He might have twenty miles of hell to walk through. He might have only five. If there were only five, he could make it, possibly. So he walked on until his knees let him down in a mud-puddle, and he had to use up nearly all his strength before he was out of it. Another fit of nausea wrung out his insides like wet rubber.

Even then his heart did not leave him entirely. The sou) went out of him only when he managed to get to his feet again, and saw a little yellow eye of light shining from a hovel not far away. Reason kept telling him these peasants were apt merely to stick him in the throat as they might slaughter a swine; but beyond the voice of reason there was the cry of his body for a bed and something other than ditch-water to drink.

He went toward the light.

The moon came blinking through the wash of clouds, though rain still was falling, and it gave him light enough to see that the hut stood at the foot of a high place on which the ruins of a castle stuck broken fingers into the sky. No doubt in the lost centuries a little village bad huddled around the feet of the castle to serve the will of its master; but of the village only one hovel remained, and the masonry of the castle had spilled down the sharp slope in tumbled masses. The ponderous keystone of an arch lay at the very side of the muddy road, and on it was carved a coat of arms that startled Tirrel like a familiar face. Somewhere in his past he had seen the lions rampant and the winged serpent subdued between them; somewhere he had read the Latin motto, which seemed to make little sense as a caption tor the picture. "Timidus Plutus." Which was to say: "Plutus (wealth) is full of fear."

He turned from that problem of memory and went toward the small yellow light again until his bowed bead struck against a wall.

By fumbling, he found the door and pushed at it until it was jerked open suddenly, A big bow-legged peasant with a hairy face as round as the head of an owl confronted him.

"Ah?" he said. And reaching out, he took Tirrel by the hair of the head and pulled him inside. Tirrel fell on his knees. He would have fallen on his face, except that the strong hand held him up.

"Look, Mamá," said the peasant, and shook Tirrel's head.

A WOMAN sat in the corner between the bed and stove, sewing with an awl and a bit of scrubby leather to put a patch on the side of a shoe. She stuck the awl into a wall-crevice, leaving the shoe hanging while she got up and went to Tirrel. She had greasy black hair, and her face was dark, as though some of the stain from her clothes had rubbed off on her skin; the neck was darker than the face. She leaned over Tirrel and pushed a forefinger at the wound, She drew the finger back, looked at the blood, and wiped it off in the palm of the other hand.

"But this!" said the peasant, and tapped his sandal against the leather puttees. "Air! Air! He's one of them out of the air."

Tirrel got to his feet. He could see the strong foretaste of his death working in their faces. They had plenty of tools for slaughter, from the short-handled double-bitted axe in the corner to the butcher knife stuck into a chunk of bread like a pin into a pin-cushion.

"I can send for money," said Tirrel. He tried to make a gesture to indicate a great sum, but the peasant caught him by the wrist and squeezed the life out of his hand.

"A great deal of money," went on Tirrel, feeling his way through the strange language, "—it will make you—"

"Mamá," said the peasant, "he can send for money. Do you want his money? He has plenty of it."

"You beast!" screamed Mamá. "You have plenty of money, have you? But how much blood is left in you? Can you bring Gonzales back to life? Can you take our Pedro out of the air where you've been hawking at him? Oh, my God! José, stand away from him; let me use my hands on him—"

"Hush, Mamá! Hush, hush!" said José, with a sort of husky sweetness in is voice. "We must think about it. We must find the best way. If this were a chicken, now, we could scald off the feathers before we wring the neck. And even with a man, there are some pretty things we could do for him. But Pedro may be home tonight, and he is sure to have ideas."

"Pedro? He will never get home tonight," said Mamá. "This beast probably has killed him today in the air!" She was weeping and screaming out the words at the same time, until her throat filled, and she struck Tirrel with her fist, not as a man strikes with the knuckles, but as a smith hammers on an anvil. There was weight enough in the blow to knock Tirrel out of the grasp of José and fell him to the floor. His full weight whacked against the rearward bullet-wound, and set a burning tree of agony blossoming through his brain.

JOSÉ picked him up and laid him on the bed. He was saying: "Gently, Mamá. There isn't much life left in him, and we must treat him like a baby. We must give him milk and wine and keep him strong, or else he will die at a touch."

They did in fact put pads over the mouths of the wound and tie them in place with a string harness. Afterward, Tirrel found his head being lifted. A smell stronger than old garlic entered his nostrils. It was Mamá who raised him so that he could drink the soup which José held at his lips. Then they lowered his head again.

"Thank you, friends," whispered Tirrel.

"He thanks us, Mamá," said José, and laughed.

THE pain began to go to sleep as though there had been a strong drug in the food. Tirrel closed his eyes, and saw the little Ohio town white with winter and brilliant with yellow lights by night. For three years it had been no more than a pin-point on his map; but now it filled half the horizon of his world. Time went slowly by him. He opened his eyes, and in the grinning, speculative face of José he read again all the fictions of Inquisitional tortures that had frightened his boyhood. Mamá, on her knees under the wall-niche where the saint was standing, prayed loudly and rapidly for the safe return of Pedro, a gush, a bursting torrent of words.

"Shut up, Mamá!" shouted José suddenly.

He jerked the door open and ran out into the night. The smell and the softly pattering sound of the rain entered the hut. A whistle, and then a shout from the distance set Mamá screeching with joy. A moment later a sour-faced young Spaniard with the air insignia on his coat came into the room. Both his mother and father were explaining the stranger, and pointing him out.

Pedro came over to the bed and looked down steadily into the face of Tirrel.

"Speak!" he commanded.

"What shall I say to you, señor?" asked Tirrel.

Pedro turned on his heel.

"An American," he said.

"Why should we not do to him what he has done to us?" asked José.

"Why? In God's name, why?" asked Pedro. "There is no reason."

"Señor," said Tirrel, "I have tried to speak about money, and to suggest—"

Pedro, in the act of taking off his cap, slashed Tirrel back and forth across the face with the wet cloth.

"Money?" said Pedro. "Filthy beast!"

"Will money buy back Gonzales?" asked Mamá, whimpering.

"Yes," said Pedro softly, "Gonzales—Gonzales is dead. Tell me, Señor the American, what you—"

But here be broke off his words, staring down at the breast of Tirrel For the wet cap bad struck away most of the thin mask of mud and blood, and in flicking over the lapel of the coat, it had exposed the little golden "H."

"Get the cart and throw some hay into it," said Pedro.

"Why the cart? And why should I be your servant?" demanded the father.

Pedro turned his eyes slowly from Tirrel and looked at his parents in such away that the mother exclaimed: "Come, come, José! He has a thought!"

José still lingered for a moment, but the authority of his years seemed to shrink away before the new dignity of his son, for some of the grim majesty of war itself seemed to cling to the starved body of Pedro. So José allowed his wife to pull him out of the room; and presently Tirrel could hear the pair of them cursing the mule in the adjoining lean-to.

In the meantime, with a heartsick anxiety, he watched the son of the house go to the fireplace and swing out on the iron crane a large iron pot. He took a big spoon and commenced to rake up from the pot steaming beans, which had simmered and stewed almost to blackness, Pedro crouched on his heels and munched steadily on the beans until he heard the wheels of the cart creaking outside the house. Then he went to a gallon jug, lifted it, and supped noisily of the pink wine which it contained.

"AND now?" asked José, coming in with his wife, both faintly bedewed by the rain.

"Help me with him," said Pedro, taking Tirrel under the armpits. The mother obediently seized on the legs of Tirrel beneath the knees, but José, standing back beside the door, kept crying out: "Why take him away? There's, light enough to see him, here, and room enough to do what we want with him."

But the other two carried Tirrel out of the garlic-stained air of the hovel and into the open, where the cool of the rain began to touch his hot face with a thousand delicate fingers. He was lifted over a huge cartwheel whose rim was clotted with mud, and so lowered into the hay which filled the cart.

"I'll be back before morning," said Pedro, settling down in the driver's seat and picking up the reins.

"Ah hai! Pedro! Are you crazy?" shouted José. "Do you think you can take him away and have him all to yourself?"

For an answer, Pedro cracked the whip; the mule started with a jump, and the cart went thumping and groaning down the road. José followed a few paces, cursing, but presently he gave up the pursuit, and Tirrel saw the two squat figures standing in the dim wedge of light that spread from the door of the hut.

AFTER that, time was multiplied for Tirrel a thousandfold by pain. The ascents were comparatively peaceful, but the jolting on the downward slopes put teeth in his wounds and bit him to the bone. But he knew that this Pedro and whatever companions Pedro was taking him to, could invent torments to make the present moment seem nothing at all.

His universe turned into waves of red pain and black unconsciousness, with a few open-eyed moments in between, when he was aware of the cool mercy of the rain. In one of those moments he determined to attack Pedro, rather than lie there waiting to be carried to his death; but when he tried to sit up, a shuddering weakness made him sink back again, and he lost his senses through a long interval.

When he regained them, a hand was shaking his foot, and the voice of Pedro was saying: "Wake up! Wake up! We have come to the place."

"To what place?" asked Tirrel.

"Where should I take you, except back to your lines, my captain?" asked Pedro. "Here are the reins. Drive on down the hill until the lights shine on you. Cry out, then, and friends will come to you."

Tirrel, lifting his head, could in fact see the dim lights near at hand. The rain had ceased, leaving his body clammy with cold, and a thin moon was now pouring light on the broken clouds of the storm.

"Pedro—my friend!" cried Tirrel; and the very air he breathed changed, suddenly, and gave him the strength of hope.

"Friend?" said Pedro. "If God is kind to me, one day He will put a knife in my hand and show me a way to your throat with it! But in the name of Señor Don Francisco Ortego Gonzales, I give you back your life today, as he would have given it."

"Gonzales? Francisco Gonzales?" repeated Tirrel faintly. "Was he the man who challenged me to fight in the air over Salamanca?"

"He was our señor; he was our friend; he was our god!" said Pedro. "And after you killed him at Salamanca, in a newspaper I found your picture and kept it with me, so that I could know your face one day in this war, or after if. But tonight, tonight when I saw your face at last, I also saw on you the golden letter which he also wore—"

"Oh, my God!" cried Tirrel. "Do you mean that he wore a golden 'H' like this?"

Pedro began to weep aloud, words coming singly through the sobbing: "Tonight I thought you were given into my hands by God, and I could have broken your body like old bread. Then I saw the letter that was sacred to my señor. And I understood what Don Francisco would have done for you. In my name I promise to find you again, one day; but in his name, with his dead hands— Oh, God! I give you back your life.... Ah hai! Bella! Get on!"

THE mule lurched forward with the cart down the slope until sudden loud voices shouted near Tirrel; the cart was stopped, and soldiers began to climb into it. But Tirrel for a moment looked up with uncomprehending eyes toward the thunder-forms of the clouds, and the moon which kept a small bright heaven among them. He was remembering, at last, where he had seen the coat of arms that showed the rampant lions and the winged serpent, and the motto: "Timidus Plutus." He had seen it on the keystone beneath the castle ruins, and he had seen it before in the same newspaper which described the death of that fearless Spanish knight of the air, Francisco Ortega Gonzales.

A ruinous sense of loss blew like a wind through the soul of Tirrel, and he felt alone in the world. It seemed to him that the voice of old Dunsbury lived again, saying: "Peace in the air!" And a new resolution grew up in him as silently as a tree grows, and striking as deep a root.

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THE END

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