Mysterious Aviator Read Online Free Page A

launch full of stores round by sea to the mouth of the Patuca; he told me that the concession was about a hundred miles up the river. Wilson went with the launch; Lenden and Robertson gave them three days’ start and went after them in the seaplane. In a couple of hours’ flight they had passed the launch, and then they carried on up the river to the agreed meeting place—Jutigalpa.
    He told me that that was a glorified mud village, with a Spanish-speaking half-caste to collect a few taxes from the Indians. They lived in a native hut, picketing the machine inthe shade of the trees on the beach. That was to be their home for the next six months.
    They started flying operations as soon as the launch arrived. They had a very fat mechanic, Meyer by name; within the first three days he was down with fever and some form of heat apoplexy, and had to be sent back to Trujillo in the launch. That delayed them for a week. Then they carried on with the flying, and had surveyed about a third of the area when they crashed a float. Lenden, in taxi-ing the machine on the water, ran her over a submerged snag which ripped their port float from bow to stern; he was fortunate in being able to run the machine ashore before she sank.
    “And there we were,” he said, “for the next three months, till we got a new float out from England. Wilson went back with Robertson to Trujillo to send the order, and then Robertson came back to Jutigalpa, and we built a sort of palm-leaf hut over the machine with the Indians. And then we just sat on our backsides in that rotten little hole and waited for the float.”
    When the float came they repaired the machine and carried on, finishing the survey in about six weeks. From the point of view of the Development Trust it was a success; they had found out what they wanted to know about their land cheaply and accurately.
    “We finished the job, and came back to Trujillo,” said Lenden.
    The coals fell together with a little crash. It was about half-past three in the morning. I had lost all desire to go to bed; now that Lenden was talking freely I wanted to hear the end of his story. I knew what was coming. Gradually, and in his own way, he was working up to the point of telling me what he had been doing with that Breguet on the down. I wanted to know about that.
    I swung round, pitched one or two more lumps of coal into the grate, and poked them up. Lenden got up absently from the table and came and threw himself down into a chair before the fire.
    “No,” he said at last. “You wouldn’t have heard about it here. But there was a tornado out there that year. Sam Robertson and I settled down at Trujillo for a few weeks while he got in touch with some of the mines in Nicaragua. We thought that while we were there we might get one or two more jobs of the same sort in that district, and Wilson gave us a whole lot of help in getting them. We’d just about fixed to go down to the Santa Vanua—it was a sort of forestry survey that they wanted there—when the storm came.”
    He was staring into the fire, and speaking very quietly. “It came one evening, quite suddenly. We had the Fairey pegged down upon the beach in the lee of a cliff—it was the only place we had to put her. But no pickets could have stood against that wind. We got the whole town out to hold her down. I dare say there were fifty of us hanging on to her in the dusk, and she blew clean out of our hands and away up the beach.”
    He glanced at me. “She was all we had, you know—the whole capital. Sam and I hung on to her after she took charge—and she chucked us off like a horse. Robertson fell soft, but I broke an arm as I went down.” He passed his hand absently up his left forearm. “Yes—she was all we had, and she went flying up the beach till she cartwheeled into a little corrugated-iron hut and knocked it flat, and then on—what was left of her—till she fetched up against the forest. We lay on the beach all that night because