Mysterious Aviator Read Online Free

presently he died.
    “We got a bit more careful after that,” he said.
    For Lenden that had been a good job. He told me that he had been making about nine hundred a year while it lasted. He took a little flat in Croydon and lived there with his wife for twelve months or so.
    “That was a fine time,” he said. “The best I’ve ever had. We’d got plenty of money for the first time since we weremarried. An’ Mollie liked the flat all right, and she made it simply great. We thought we was going on for ever, an’ we were beginning to make plans to get into a house with a bit of garden where we could have fruit trees and things. And we were going to have a pack o’ kids—two or three of them, as soon as we got settled.”
    There was silence in the room for a minute. “You can’t run a show like that without a subsidy,” he said at last. “Or you couldn’t in those days, with the equipment we had. It lasted on into the winter of 1920. Then Aircraft Transport and Travel—it was a damn good name, that—they packed up. And that was the end of that.”
    He was staring into the shadows at the far end of the room, and speaking in a very quiet voice. I had heard something of that early failure in the heroic period of aviation, but this was the first time that I had heard a personal account.
    This time he was longer out of a job. The flat in Croydon was broken up and his wife went back again to her people, while Lenden went wandering around the south of England in his search for flying work. The time had gone by when motor-cars could be bought and sold at a profit by those outside the trade, and I gathered that by the end of four months his wife’s parents were financing him. In the end he found a job again in his own line of business, as pilot for an aerial survey to be made in Honduras.
    “D’you ever meet Sam Robertson?” he inquired. “He was an observer in the war, and he got this contract for a survey for the Development Trust. Raked round in the city and got it all off his own bat. And he got me in on it to do the flying for him.
    “In Honduras. They’d taken over a concession up the Patuca—there’s lashings of copper up there if only you could get it out. Lashings of it. This survey was one of the first shows of that sort to be done. It was a seaplane job. Sam bought a Fairey with a Rolls Eagle in her from the Disposals crowd, and we left for Belize in March, 1921.
    “It meant leaving Mollie with her people,” he said. “I couldmake her a pretty fair allowance, of course. I’d got the money then—for as long as the job lasted.”
    I stirred in my chair. “Was this a photographic survey, then?” I asked.
    He nodded. “In a way. The contract didn’t run to a proper mosaic of photographs. There wasn’t any need for it for what they wanted, and, anyway, we’d have had a job to line it up because there’s never been any sort of ground work done there to give you a grid. No. We picked up one of their people at Trujillo, a fellow called Wilson who was their resident out there, and he came on up the Patuca with us. We did most of the work with oblique photographs, and each evening he made up a rough map of the country we’d flown over.”
    He paused. “It was the copper he was mostly interested in. You can tell it by the colour of the trees, you know. They look all dusty and dried up from the air, different to the rest of the jungle. You can see the copper areas quite clearly that way.”
    He said it was the devil of a country. From Belize they had gone by a little coastal steamer, Brazilian-owned, to Trujillo. There they erected the machine, on the beach, in the sun. The inhabitants were a sort of Indian, very quiet and mostly diseased.
    “They used to come and sit round staring at us, without saying anything at all,” he said. “And then when we’d sweated a bucket we’d go in to the pub and drink with the Dagoes. It was a rotten place, that. Rotten.”
    When the machine was ready they sent a