Buckin’ the Air

By Bud La Mar

Illustrated by Frank Hoban

The wild, wild adventure of two demon rodeo-riders who dare a new element in a airplane is here picturesquely set forth.

Just previous to the disastrous events which I am about to relate, Bearcat Gibson and me was the happiest cowboys this side of Denver. Old Lady Luck had patted us on the back and filled our pockets. The trail ahead was glitterin’ bright with the promise of more to come. After a long spell of hard luck, we finally stood on our own feet, lookin’ old man Trouble in the eye and daring him to do his worst.

After a great deal of planning and schemin’ we had managed to sneak up on the rest of the boys and win most all the money offered for prizes at the Eldora rodeo. This in itself was reason enough to cause great rejoicing, but on the last day of the Eldora show we had received a message from our old pal Clay Hinkle, bearing news of a very important and joyous nature. The letter read as follows:

Dere boys:

Well, you ok horsethieves, I thot I wood rite you a few lines to let you no thet I had bin elekted head judge of the San Dominick Rodeo. Maybe you thot I had fergit about the time you got me out of jale in Berryville for chawin the cherifs ear off ha ha! Well, ole Clay Hinkle is a man which does not fergit past favors. If yore intrested in splitin 1st and 2d mony in the bronk ridin I beg to state thet I will be only too glad to give it to you. You understand I wood not go around offerin this propozichon to every Tom, Dick and Harry, but you boys bein spechel frends of mine I thot I wood give you 1st krak at it at the reguler rates 50-50. This is a bargin on akount the competichon will be very keen and I feel shure I coud git better terms only ole Clay Hinkle is a man which does not fergit past favors.

I beg to remain as ever yores sincarly and Korjaly yores.

Clay Hinkle.

Of course we aimed to make the San Dominick stampede anyhow, but like Clay wrote, the competition was always very keen at that show on account it caught all the top hands on their way to the Eastern contests. Even after parting with half our winnings, we stood to collect a flock of money which wasn’t to be sneezed at.

We cashed the checks donated to us by the Eldora rodeo committee and proceeded to stage a celebration befitting the occasion, before getting under way for San Dominick.

But as luck would have it, the natives mistook our friendly ceremony for an effort on our part to destroy and plunder their moral community. Trouble came on the heels of this unfounded suspicion, and we was called upon to surrender and be led peaceful from the scene.

The marshal who made the suggestion was a big, tall, nervous-looking hombre with a diving Adam’s apple and a large flowing pinto mustache. The only weapon he carried—that we could see, anyway—was a big crooked cane. And we wasn’t to be overawed by any such ineffective display of force.

“Listen, Wild Bill,” said Bearcat to the marshal. “As much as we ’preciate your kind offer, and not wishin’ to cast any asparagus at your jail, we been in better ones and could not possibly be interested in visitin’ yours.”

A crowd had collected around us. Election-time was drawin’ near, and the marshal had to protect his reputation. His Adam’s apple made a few rapid trips from his chin to his belt-buckle and back again; the spotted misplaced horse’s tail bristled like a bunch of quills; he elevated the crooked cane and charged us in the scientific fashion of a blind bull.

“Whoo—ah!” said the marshal, snorting and pawing at the air like a bear with a wasp up his nose. But immediate developments disclosed the surprising fact that getting hit with a cane wasn’t a thing which we considered a privilege.

Bearcat and me stepped aside and allowed the marshal to get between us. Then Bearcat placed a boot-heel in the seat of his pants and pushed hard. The marshal’s gasping form shot across the sidewalk like a flying comet and plowed its way through a plate-glass window which protected a display of elegant female lingerie.

The old walrus began makin’ frantic swimmin’ motions, wallowin’ in a sea of broken glass and silk negligees. Puffing like a wind-broke horse and clutching madly for support, he pulled down whole rows of pink stockin’s and bright-colored, beflowered shawls and kimonos. Two wax dummies with Fourth-of-July complexions and adorned in glitterin’ Paris creations came tumblin’ down on top of him, addin’ to the final touch of destruction.

“Whoo—ah!” screamed the marshal from under the smiling dummies. “Just wait till I git my hands on ye!”

We was willing to wait. We couldn’t got away had we wanted to. Holding our shaking sides with both hands, we howled like a pair of treed panthers. This was too gosh-awful funny for words. Tears running from our eyes, we failed to notice the approach of a new and unlooked-for enemy, which turned out to be far more dangerous than the befuddled marshal.

The first I knew of it was when something heavy crashed on top of my head, which was luckily protected by my big hat. I sat down on the sidewalk and rolled to the side, lookin’ up to see who was attackin’ me. I beheld a large, powerful female belaborin’ Bearcat with what looked to me like a bare human leg cut off above the knee. Not considering it safe to remain gazing at this strange, grisly spectacle, I regained a standing posture and took out from there like a wild colt with his tail on fire.

On the edge of town I was passed by a flyin’ shadow which I recognized as Bearcat Gibson. I glanced fearfully back over my shoulder and saw a big mob of people hot on our trail. The marshal led the chase, waving a big old pistol he had produced from somewhere, and scattering silk doodads in his wake. Right on his heels Battling Mary followed, brandishing the human leg and uttering blood-curdling yells. In another half-second I had caught up with Bearcat.

We was leavin’ Eldora, havin’ become awful tired and disgusted with that particular metropolis.

A mile farther and still goin’ strong, we caught up with a dilapidated flivver which was fluttering between the fences at the speed of a limping turtle. Two men dressed in greasy unionalls sat in the front seat, fiddling with numerous buttons and levers which seemed to have bearin’ on the exhausted engine under the hood.

“Hop in, boys!” said the driver. “You might beat us on a short spurt, but you’ll get farther with old Lili.”

We agreed with him on that, as we was beginning to falter in our stride. We scrambled inside the car, which seemed to grunt and squeak in protest at the added weight. Our pursuers had not yet appeared over the last hill, and we sank down on the back seat, feeling very kindly toward the men which had surely rescued us from a terrible fate.

“Lord! Knockin’ folks around with human legs!” said I, shuddering at the thought. “Can you imagine anything so crool?”

“It wasn’t no human leg,” put in Bearcat. “It was one of them there artificial things they display stockings on, in stores. The woman was the owner of the layout spoilt by the marshal. They should watch that woman. She’ll murder somebody one of these days. I swear I never see such a mad person!” Bearcat rubbed various parts of his anatomy, very careful.

“Where you boys goin’?” grinned one of the men in the front seat.

“We aint so much goin’ anywheres,” I answered. “We’re just leavin’ Eldora.”

“Well, we’ll have to let you out pretty soon. We aint goin’ far,” continued the man.

Disaster was starin’ us in the face, and despair settled upon us. We knew them mad natives wouldn’t give up the chase so easy. Most likely they’d have reward-posters out before morning. Dead or alive!

The little car had come to a stop in front of a gate opening into a large pasture. In the pasture we saw an airyplane setting on the ground.

“As far as we go!” said the man, gettin’ out of the car to open the gate. “That’s our crate in there.”

The other fellow turned around and looked us over.

“Don’t want to take a ride in the old lady, do you, boys?” he said anxious-like. “The thrill of a lifetime, and safer than old Lili, here. Three dollars only for fifteen minutes of exhilarating flying through the ether!”

I have a suspicion we could of went for a dollar and a half. You could tell at a glance that prosperity had deserted them particular aviators at the last crossroads. But as much as I desired to leave these parts, I did not crave any flying experiences. It was too much like jumping from the skillet into the stove.

But my crazy partner right away shut both eyes and jumped astraddle of the idea with all the enthusiasm of a roving preacher for a repenting sinner.

“Shore!” he whispered, nudging me in the ribs. “We could get them fellows to take us to San Dominick, where a rodeo is to be put on in a few days. Boy, we’re shore lucky!” Then, without waitin’ for me to say a word, he assumed the important and worried expression of a man who has just bought a string of oil-wells and has only a few minutes to reach a radio in order to accept the nomination.

“We’d like to go to San Dominick,” he said to the aviator. “And we’d like to leave fairly soon.”

The aviator’s knees kinda buckled under him. All he could do for a spell was to look at us with tears in his eyes.

“Do you mean it?” he asked. “Boys, please don’t kid a poor old man!”

“Shore we mean it,” answered Bearcat. “If the price is right.”

“The price couldn’t be anything but right,” said the aviator. “A few twists here and there, and we’re goin’ from here, gentlemen.”

“Hey!” I put in, alarmed at the way things were coming out. “Who said I wanted to fly? I’m askin’ you. Did I ever express the slightest wish to do so? Did I, eh?”

The aviator cast a murderous and poisonous look upon me. Words dropped from his mouth like sweet drops of strychnine.

“Oh, come, now!” he said, trying to be pleasant. “There’s no danger, you know. Surely a brave cowboy like you is not afraid of a little spin in the air!”

“I might be brave,” said I. “And I might be a cowboy. But,”—and I pronounced every word clear and loud,—“I wouldn’t care to take any spins in the air!”

“Never mind him,” put in Bearcat. “He’s only foolin’. He just dotes on airyplanes and aviators and things like t Why, that fellow is the original aviation fan!”

Cleanin’ me! Can you beat that—or tie it, even? I was struck dumb.

The flivver went bouncing across the pasture and stopped alongside the airyplane. The aviators got out and started screwing up loose connections.

“It’s no use, Bearcat,” I stated very firm. “I have no taste for aviation.” I’d heard about people riding in airyplanes, but I wasn’t sufficiently informed on the subject to enter into discussion of it. Furthermore, I’d just as soon it hadn’t been brought to my attention.

But Bearcat was a stubborn cuss and gifted with the power of persuasion. There wasn’t nothing he didn’t know about the safety devices used in modern aviation. For instance: out of 15,347 flights launched in the State of Maryland alone, in one year, fourteen only had been fatal. Which to his way of thinkin’ was a very low rate. Accordin’ to my opinion, fourteen dead men was fourteen dead men, even if everybody in Maryland had all gone crazy and took to leaping around in the air like a bunch of whizzing pelicans.

“Here!” said Bearcat. “While the man is tyin’ a few of the vital parts together with hay-wire, I will explain the fundamental principles to you. This,” he declaimed, pointing to a couple of oars, “this is the paddle. It paddles the wings. This,” he continued, indicating a growth on the tail end, “this takes the place of the tailfeathers on a bird.”

But I wasn’t to be misled so easy; and anyway, if Bearcat knew the difference between a doughnut-cutter and a two-dollar bill, he had never showed any signs of it to me. Besides, I have an eye for details, and he can’t make me believe that a good Number One airyplane should have rusty spots on it and be punched full of holes. When a Ford leaks oil, there’s something wrong with it. Well, that thing leaked oil. And the longer I inspected the wreck of old 97, the more I was reminded of a busted kite which had been drug through a prickly-pear thicket.

Just then I overheard part of the conversation between the aviators.

“You give me a hand gettin’ started,” said one. “Then you can take our stuff to San Dominick in the car.”

“Got enough gas for this flight?” asked the other.

“Well, I wouldn’t be too sure, but I think there’s enough.”

He thought there was enough! Well sir, right then is when I made up my mind to take a airyplane trip. If that bleary-eyed fool was willin’ to run out of gas while flyin’ through the ether, I was too!

I noticed Bearcat had bleached out some. “Did you hear that?” he whispered.

I glanced fearfully back over my shoulder. The marshal led the chase; right on his heels Battling Mary followed, brandishing her human leg.

“Shore!” says I. “Did you know that out of twenty-six fatal airyplane wrecks in Arkansaw alone, twenty-five was caused from runnin’ out of gas? But shucks, there aint nothing to worry about. The gadget paddles the wings and the pin-feathers do the rest. Nothing to it!”

“Hum!” growls Bearcat lookin’ suspicious. “Hum!”

About then the experts had decided everything was O.K., and they got ready to start her up. Me and Bearcat moved to a safe location where we could watch, and the pilot clumb in and fiddled around with various gimmicks. The other bird stood by the paddle.

“Contact!” he yells—just like that.

“Contact!” growls the other fellow in a deep tone of voice. Then the hombre outside puts on a dance, the likes of which I have never witnessed before, not even durin’ my stay with the Osages. He grabs one end of the paddle, throws one leg up in the graceful fashion of a toe-dancer, swings and shivers a couple of times and jerks down on it.

Nothing happens. I felt sorry for him. You could tell he was disappointed. Something big should have come of it.

He looks up pitiful-like and yelps again: “Contact!”

“Contact!” rumbles the pilot, and on with the dance. The fellow goes through every single motion again. You could tell it was a question of great importance not to miss anything. He pounces down on that paddle like a hungry coyote on a gopher. And then—hell busts loose!

My hat is jerked off my head like it had been shot off, and my shirt casts loose from its moorings and flies up in my face, blinding me complete. I falls over backward, clutching wildly for support. I feels a form wriggling under me. “Get off’n me, you idjit!” yelps a faint voice through the roar and thunder of the cyclone and hailstorm raging around us. “Get off from under me,” I replies, peeved. “I saw that hole first!”

I managed to pull the shirt off my face and took a quick look around. Well, could you believe it? There wasn’t no cyclone. Everything was fine and serene as before, only the old paddle had gone wild, and the tin whipporwill was shakin’ fearsome, and roaring like four hundred mad bulls in a tunnel. The aviator was waving for us to get on. Holding our hats against our ears, we circled the old butter-tub on the run and approached it from the rear. I clumb in a hole in front of the pilot, and Bearcat settled himself in another hole in front of me.

All at once the roaring increased—although I wouldn’t of thought it possible—and we started bumping across the field. Faster and faster we lunged along until the air was slapping me in the face like a wet saddle-blanket.

Ever since a safe fell on me when I was little, I have been given to imagining wrecks and catastrophes. I didn’t need to stretch my imagination now. First I got to thinkin’ what would happen if we come across a big ditch, or a rock, or a cow or other objects too ghastly to dwell upon. Then I looked down, and there it was—a fresh-plowed field which looked rougher to me than a chain of mountains.... Lord, Lord, thinks I, this is no place for old Slocum Bill. I still have a chance to get away from this hell-bending Roman candle, and I aims to take it. I starts to climb off, whatever comes of it. I am accustomed to fallin’ and rollin’ on the ground. I know how to relax and protect myself. But all them fine principles don’t apply to a smashed-up orange crate with wings. Now is the time for me and 97 to separate, for better or for worse.

I am about half out when I feels a hand on my shoulder. I takes a look and sees the pilot smiling, and then I makes a startling discovery. We had left old Mother Earth and I was about to fling myself through a hundred feet of empty air and not a hand-holt in sight! What’s more, I caught a glimpse of a big car tearing down the road toward us, and in it was the marshal and Battling Mary and several other warlike-looking parties.

I settled back in my seat and watches the plowed field shrink to the size of a handkerchief. Well, here we are—it’s too late to do anything now! I have one happy thought, and that’s what I will do to Bearcat Gibson for getting me into such a predicament. We fly on and on through the exhilarating ether, gasping for breath and watching the scenery from where no scenery should be seen.

After about ten minutes my sensible ears began to tell me there was something rotten somewhere not connected with the state of Denmark. I don’t know if an airyplane in good working order is supposed to sputter, but this one was sputtering, and I didn’t like it. Bearcat looked back at me, and his bogged-out eyes did not indicate a peaceful state of mind, either. I craned my neck around, and while I was doing so the sputtering changed to coughing, and the coughing died out, and our pilot said so we both could hear it: “Outa gas ... Hold tight ... I’ll land ’er ... No trouble.”

Can you imagine a ring-tailed son-of-a-gun like that one? No trouble! Oh, no, no trouble at all! Maybe he thought us being in front, we would kinda break the fall for him. He began circling his busted skyrocket in wide loops, and the first thing I knew we was skimming trees and housetops.

The trouble was the fields in that country was too small, and there was too many obstacles in the way, and we was goin’ too fast to let a little thing like a greenhouse stop us. The only indication we had of goin’ through that greenhouse was a merry tinkle of broken glass and a whiff of flowers in bloom. Two big red geraniums fanned my cheeks; a bunch of gladiolas settled in my streamin’ hair: and my lap was suddenly piled high with an assortment of posies and ferns.

On, like a wild bounding antelope we went, over a clover-field, bouncing over a culvert, across a road, into a cemetery, sowin’ flowers and airyplane parts over the graves, merrily knockin’ down tombstones and monuments right and left.

The thrill of a lifetime? Well, I hope to tell you!

Once I thought I lost an eye in an apple orchard, but it wasn’t knocked out for good. It got all right in a couple of months. We also visited a watermelon patch, but soon left it behind after a good deal of crunching, and uprootin’ of trailin’ vines.

Bumping across a terrorized countryside at the speed of a comet, we met head-on with a herd of geese, and their goslings trooping innocently behind. A large cloud of feathers arose and was gone. A big red barn took a wing from us; a henhouse got the other. The paddle had busted in ten thousand splinters when crossin’ the cornfield.

A creek loomed ahead, but it was a shallow one, and we forded it successfully. Had it not been for the opposite bank, which rose straight in the air, there is no tellin’ how much farther we would have roamed, scattering death and destruction in our wake. But even that go-devil of an outfit couldn’t get the best of a bank composed mostly of large rocks. There was a terrible crash; then the peaceful silence of an afternoon in the country.

I don’t recollect much after that, only it seemed that I had a wonderful dream in which I lived over some of the past happenings. Bearcat floated through the air by my side. There was a ring of light around his big hat, and he flopped around with the help of a pair of wings. His open mouth was relaxed in the loving smile of an angel, and a large floral wreath bearing the golden inscription Rest in Peace hung about his shoulders. You could just imagine the mourners, heads bowed in sorrow, and the soft, mellow notes of an organ playing, “Here comes the bride—”

I could have remained in that position for hours, thinking beautiful thoughts. Our breathless dash across the country was something to look back on and write home about—the informal visit in the greenhouse, the evening scamper across the cemetery, the good-natured pushin’ over of tombstones, the playful manner in which we had destroyed orchards, cornfields and barnyard fowls; I’ll tell you, it was something to quicken a man’s breath and make his eyes sparkle!

Then a harsh note tore me from this dream—several harsh notes, to be exact. I opened one eye—and then I shut it again very sudden.

The dream had changed now to a nightmare. Loud, grinding voices argued back and forth. I pinched myself to make sure I was awake....

I lay in a bed, a nice clean white bed. The well-known hospital smell was in the air. Cautiously, I opened the eye again to make sure I’d seen right the first time.

A group of excited people stood by my bed. Two of the figures I recognized only too well. One was tall and had a long flowing spotted mustache. The other had black skirts and a terrible disposition. Old Walrus and Battling Mary!

“Yes indeed, it’s them!” screamed Mary. “Don’t I know the scoundrels? Didn’t I see them destroy hundreds of dollars’ worth of merchandise for me? Will I, or will I not, get justice?”

“Be calm, madam, be calm!” said a soothing voice. “They are in no shape to be questioned now. They have some money which we have deposited in our safe. We feel sure it will more than cover your claims—”

The group moved from the bed, and I took a look around. Bearcat was stretched out in another cot, close by. Unconsciousness had give him a look of almost human intelligence.

Our good bronk-ridin’ money to go for ruint lingerie!

Just then I saw old Walrus glarin’ at me. His Adam’s apple was travelin’ at a terrific rate of speed. Gosh, that man was mad! I remembered him wallowin’ under the dummies and all the silk what-nots—and I covered up my head, and the white sheet began to shake, quiver and roll.

A nurse run out and pulled the covers from my tearful face. She was a stunning-looking girl!

She patted my pillow, a smile on her lips. Oh, well, maybe things wasn’t as bad as they looked.

“You’re a funny one,” said the nurse. “Unconscious one minute, laughing fit to be tied the next. You cowboys are strange fellows.”

“Lady,” said I, “you don’t know the half of it!”