Mysterious Aviator Read Online Free PDF Page A

printed in red, very big and staring. Like this:
    WATCH
    FOR THE RED AEROPLANE!
    You’ve seen people walking on the wings at the cinema, but have you ever seen it with your own eyes? Have you ever flown in an aeroplane at a dizzy height above the ground while a man walked coolly to the extreme tips of the wings?
    NO!
    BUT YOU CAN NEXT WEEK!
    The Atalanta Flying Services are coming, with Captain Lenden, M.C., who shot down fourteen enemy machines in the war and is one of Britain’s most experienced airmen. The Air Ministry have certified that Captain Lenden is
    ABSOLUTELY SAFE!
    Flying daily from Shotover Farm, by kind permission of Mr. Joshua Phillips.
    “And a lot more of the same sort of thing,” he said. “You know.”
    Two very happy years followed. The job was one that suited Lenden; it was a country life with few business worries. The pay worked out at about four hundred and fifty, and that enabled him to make a respectable allowance to his wife, though he seldom had an opportunity of seeing her. With the Avro, the Ford lorry, and the Morris-Cowley, the Atalanta Flying Services went wandering, and for the first eighteen months wherever they wandered they made money. They were entirely self-contained.
    “We did it this way,” he said. “We’d pick our field, and put up a fence of sackcloth round as much of it as we could. We charged sixpence for admission to see the flying. Just by the entrance we had the lorry, and we used it as a sort of office in the day. At night we used to picket the machine as close to the van as we could get her, and then turn in, all snug for the night.”
    They went all over the country in the next two years, staying ten days at each little town. From Gloucester they worked down through Devon into Cornwall; then back along the whole length of the south coast, till in the winter of 1924 they found themselves in Kent. At Croydon they overhauled the machine and went north into Essex, and up the coast to Sheringham and Cromer. In 1925 they went right up the east coast as far as Edinburgh, and back through the Midlands; till in the spring of 1926 they found themselves again in Gloucester.
    He glanced at me. “I don’t know that I’ve ever enjoyed a job so much as that, taking it all round. It was damn hard work. But it suited me—the life did.”
    He stopped talking, and remained staring moodily into the fire. I realised that the next episode had proved less prosperous and left him to himself for a bit. The fire was dyingdown; I got up and threw a few more lumps on, and raked the ashes from the hearth. I settled down into my chair again and lit a pipe. It was about four o’clock in the morning.
    “What happened next?” I asked. I wanted to hear the end of this story if it meant sitting up all night.
    He roused himself, and smiled a little. “What happened next,” he said quietly, “was that Mollie left me.”
    I wasn’t prepared for that, though on his own showing nothing was more probable. I said something or other, but he went on again without listening.
    “It was my fault, of course. We’d never been able to have a proper home, or the kids we wanted. And one way or another I’d given her a rotten time of it. We hadn’t lived together for two years when that happened. There was a cousin of hers, a chap in the Navy … She was still a girl, you know—a good bit younger than me. I went down to see her at her people’s place.”
    He was quiet for a minute, and then he laughed. “I came away out of it as soon as I could. There was a girl at Gloucester who got me out of that mess. Worked in an office there. She was a damn good sort, an’ her name was Mollie, too. I took her to the Regent at Cheltenham, and we spent a night there, and I sent my wife the bill. And presently I got a notice that she was suing for divorce….”
    He sat brooding in his chair for a bit then, staring into the fire, immersed in memories. But presently he roused himself again.
    “That killed my