Twice Carl rode to Tamarack Lake with Gertie. They sat on the shore, and while he shied flat skipping-stones across the water and flapped his old cap at the hovering horse-flies he babbled of the Turk's "stunts," and the banker's car, and the misty hinterlands of Professor Frazer's lectures. Gertie appeared interested, and smiled at regular intervals, but so soon as Carl fumbled at one of Frazer's abstract theories she interrupted him with highly concrete Joralemon gossip.... He suspected that she had not kept up with the times. True, she referred to New York, but as the reference was one she had been using these two years he still identified her with Joralemon.... He did not even hold her hand, though he wondered if it might not be possible; her hand lay so listlessly by her skirt, on the sand.... They rode back in twilight of early June. Carl was cheerful as their wheels crunched the dirt roads in a long, crisp hum. The stilly rhythm of frogs drowned the clank of their pedals, and the sky was vast and pale and wistful.
Gertie, however, seemed less cheerful.
On the last evening of his stay in Joralemon Gertie gave him a hay-ride party. They sang "Seeing Nelly Home," and "Merrily We Roll Along," and "Suwanee River," and "My Old Kentucky Home," and "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean," and "In the Good Old Summertime," under a delicate new moon in a sky of apple-green. Carl pressed Gertie's hand; she returned the pressure so quickly that he was embarrassed. He withdrew his hand as quickly as possible, ostensibly to help in the unpacking of the basket of ginger-ale and chicken sandwiches and three cakes (white-frosted, chocolate layer, and banana cake).
The same group said good-by to Carl at the M. &D. station. As the train started, Carl saw Gertie turn away disconsolately, her shoulders so drooping that her blouse was baggy in the back. He mourned that he had not been more tender with her that week. He pictured himself kissing Gertie on the shore of Tamarack Lake, enfolded by afternoon and the mystery of sex and a protecting reverence for Gertie's loneliness. He wanted to go back-back for one more day, one more ride with Gertie. But he picked up a mechanics magazine, glanced at an article on gliders, read in the first paragraph a prophecy about aviation, slid down in his seat with his head bent over the magazine-and the idyl of Gertie and afternoon was gone.
He was reading the article on gliders in June, 1905, so early in the history of air conquest that its suggestions were miraculous to him; for it was three years before Wilbur Wright was to startle the world by his flights at Le Mans; four years before Blériot was to cross the Channel-though, indeed, it was a year and a half after the Wrights' first secret ascent in a motor-driven aeroplane at Kittyhawk, and fourteen years after Lilienthal had begun that epochal series of glider-flights which was followed by the experiments of Pilcher and Chanute, Langley and Montgomery.
The article declared that if gasoline or alcohol engines could be made light enough we should all be aviating to the office in ten years; that now was the time for youngsters to practise gliding, as pioneers of the new age. Carl "guessed" that flying would be even better than automobiling. He made designs for three revolutionary new aeroplanes, drawing on the margins of the magazine with a tooth-mark-pitted pencil stub.
Gertie was miles back, concealed behind piles of triplanes and helicopters and following-surface monoplanes which the wizard inventor, C. Ericson, was creating and ruthlessly destroying.... A small boy was squalling in the seat opposite, and Carl took him from his tired mother and lured him into a game of tit-tat-toe.
He joined the Turk and the wire-stringers at a prairie hamlet-straggly rows of unpainted frame shanties, the stores with tin-corniced false fronts that pretended to be two stories high. There were pig-pens in the dooryards, and the single church had a square, low, white steeple like the paper cap which Labor wears in the posters. Farm-wagons were hitched before a gloomy saloon. Carl was exceeding glum. But the Turk introduced him to a University of Minnesota Pharmacy School student who was with the crew during vacation, and the three went tramping across breezy, flowered prairies. So began for Carl a galloping summer.
The crew strung telephone wire from pole to pole all day, playing the jokes of hardy men, and on Sunday loafed in haystacks, recalling experiences from Winnipeg to El Paso. Carl resolved to come back to this life of the open, with Gertie, after graduation. He would buy a ranch "on time." Or the Turk and Carl would go exploring in Alaska or the Orient. "Law?" he would ask himself in monologues, "law? Me in a stuffy office? Not a chance!"
The crew stayed for four weeks in a boom town of nine thousand, installing a complete telephone system. South-east of the town lay rolling hills. As Carl talked with the Turk and the Pharmacy School man on a hilltop, the first evening of their arrival, he told them the scientific magazine's prophecies about aviation, and noted that these hills were of the sort Lilienthal would probably have chosen for his glider-flights.
"Say! by the great Jim Hill, let's make us a glider!" he exulted, sitting up, his eyelids flipping rapidly.
"Sure!" said the Pharmacy man. "How would you make one?"
"Why-uh-I guess you could make a frame out of willow-have to; the willows along the creeks are the only kind of trees near here. You'd cover it with varnished cotton-that's what Lilienthal did, anyway. But darned if I know how you'd make the planes curved-cambered-like he did. You got to have it that way. I suppose you'd use curved stays. Like a quarter barrel-hoop.... I guess it would be better to try to make a Chanute glider-just a plain pair of sup'rimposed planes, instead of one all combobulated like a bat's wings, like Lilienthal's glider was.... Or we could try some experiments with paper models--Oh no! Thunder! Let's make a glider."
They did.
They studied with aching heads the dry-looking tables of lift and resistance for which Carl telegraphed to Chicago. Stripped to their undershirts, they worked all through the hot prairie evenings in the oil-smelling, greasy engine-room of the local power-house, in front of the dynamos, which kept evilly throwing out green sparks and rumbling the mystic syllable "Om-m-m-m," to greet their modern magic.
They hunted for three-quarter-inch willow rods, but discarded them for seasoned ash from the lumber-yard. They coated cotton with thin varnish. They stopped to dispute furiously over angles of incidence, bellowing, "Well, look here then, you mutton-head; I'll draw it for you."
On their last Sunday in the town they assembled the glider, single-surfaced, like a monoplane, twenty-two feet in span, with a tail, and with a double bar beneath the plane, by which the pilot was to hang, his hands holding cords attached to the entering edge of the plane, balancing the glider by movements of his body.
At dawn on Monday they loaded the glider upon a wagon and galloped with it out to a forty-foot hill. They stared down the easy slope, which grew in steepness and length every second, and thought about Lilienthal's death.
"W-w-well," shivered the Turk, "who tries it first?"
All three pretended to be adjusting the lashings, waiting for one another, till Carl snarled, "Oh, all right! I'll do it if I got to."
"Course it breaks my heart to see you swipe the honor," the Turk said, "but I'm unselfish. I'll let you do it. Brrrr! It's as bad as the first jump into the swimming-hole in spring."
Carl was smiling at the comparison as they lifted the glider, with him holding the bars beneath. The plane was instantly buoyed up like a cork on water as the fifteen-mile head-wind poured under it. He stopped smiling. This was a dangerous living thing he was going to guide. It jerked at him as he slipped his arms over the suspended bars. He wanted to stop and think this all over. "Get it done!" he snapped at himself, and began to run down-hill, against the wind.