Mysterious Aviator Read Online Free Page B

we could hear the houses crashing in the town, and Robertson made splints for my arm. And when the morning came and it blew itself out, half the houses in the place were down and Sam was as rich as me.”
    “That’s rotten luck,” I muttered.
    He nodded. “Yes, it was bad luck, because there was all the makings of a survey business out there. But that finished us, and we came home Third Class.”
    And so he gave up aviation. He had been bitten three times, and he’d enough of it. He wanted to settle down, he said, and live with his wife. He told me that he had come to the conclusion out in Trujillo that flying was no good for a married man, and that he must look for more stable employment in thefuture. He realised that he would have to start at the bottom. Wilson stepped in there and gave him an introduction to a cousin who ran a firm of wholesale clothiers in St. Paul’s Churchyard, and Lenden came home to England to start work in the city on four pounds ten a week. With Robertson he had been getting seven hundred a year.
    “I took Mollie out of pawn again,” he said, a little bitterly, “and we got furnished rooms between Eltham and Lewisham, not very far from her people. And that year it went all right.”
    He stared into the fire. “I was the proper city gent. Mr. Everyman. I wore a bowler hat and a morning coat like all the other stiffs, and carried a pair of gloves, and read the
Daily Mail
going up and the
Evening News
coming down.”
    It seemed to have been a poor sort of job. From the first there was little chance that he could make a success of it; the clerks with whom he worked had forgotten more about business than he had ever known. He was unsuited for it temperamentally, and he was getting fifteen shillings a week more than the others, which didn’t make things any easier for him. And he was desperately hard up. He couldn’t live on his pay; his wife’s parents had to come forward again and make him a substantial allowance, and that got him on the raw. He told me all this that night.
    He stuck it out for two years.
    “I chucked it in the early summer of 1924,” he said, and shot the ash from his cigarette into the fire. “It’s the spring that gets you, in a job like that; when the days begin to get a bit warm and sunny, an’ you know you could make better money out in the clean country on an aerodrome.”
    He was quiet for a little after that, and then he said: “We were right on the rocks by then, and not a chance of things getting any better. I was still on four pounds ten a week. The way I put it to the old man—I said I simply had to go where I stood a chance of earning a bit more money. It wasn’t good enough to stick on like that. He cut up pretty rough about it, but I was through with the City. Mollie went home again for a bit, and I went back to the old game.”
    It was joy-riding again this time, as a paid pilot to a concern called the Atalanta Flying Services. The Atalanta Flying Services was a three-seater Avro, painted a bright scarlet all over. The pilot who had been flying her before had just cut off with all the loose cash in the kitty, and while they tracked him down Lenden got the job to carry on. This time, however, the directors put a secretary into the concern to keep him company.
    “We picked up the machine at Gloucester,” he said, “where the other fellow left her when he vanished. There were four of us in the game. There was the secretary—a chap called Carpenter—and a ground engineer, and an odd-job man, and myself. We had the Avro, and a Ford lorry that was all covered-in with tarpaulins and fitted up for sleeping and living in, and a Cowley two-seater. Carpenter used to drive the Cowley on in front and get to the next town a day or so ahead of us, and fix up the landing-ground with the farmer, and get out the posters.”
    He thought for a minute. “I dare say you’ve seen the posters,” he said. “We came all round this part of the country. We had ’em