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Thus he limited his personal expenses to the preservation of his wardrobe, and he had cut down his cost of living to a degree that permitted only a very low, lunch-wagon diet. He saw in Mrs. Sammet's hospitality the prospect of a meal, and although he was by no means courageous, his appetite spurred him on to brave his creditors' wrath.
He preached at a little one-night stand of a Methodist church. There was to be a parsonage the size of a lunch-wagon, and hens and honeysuckles when we were married. Arthur used to preach to me a good deal about Heaven, but he never could get my mind quite off those honeysuckles and hens. "No; I didn't tell him I'd been on the stage.
And then he took another peek at me, as much as to say, 'Well, let's get it over. Where shall I soak him first? And while he's doing this I get in range and I put my left pretty smart into his lunch-wagon and I pick up my right off the carpet and hand it to him, and down he goes. And when he gets up again it's pretty nearly to-morrow morning and I've drawn the winner's end and gone home."
He was one of the real martyrs of aviation, this sapless, oldish man, never knowing the joy of the air, yet devoting a lifetime of ability to helping man sprout wings and become superman. His generosity did not extend to living-quarters. Most of the students lived at the hangars and dined on Hamburg sandwiches, fried eggs, and Mexican enchiladas, served at a lunch-wagon anchored near the field.
He pretended to be enthusiastic about the lunch-wagon, and never referred to his three generations of army officers. But most of the others were shy of him, and Jack Ryan, the "school grouch," was always trying to get him into a fight. Finally, there was Carl Ericson, who slowly emerged as star of them all.
Brown fields came up at him through the paling darkness. A sign-board showed that he was a few miles from Mineola. Letting the coming dawn uplift him, he tramped into Mineola, with a half-plan of going on to the near-by Hempstead Plains Aviation Field, to see if there was any early-morning flying. It would be bully to see a machine again! At a lunch-wagon he ordered buckwheat-cakes and coffee.
At four or five Carmeau would crawl out, scratch his beard, start a motor, and set every neighborhood dog howling. The students would gloomily clump over to the lunch-wagon for a ham-and-egg breakfast. The first flights began at dawn, if the day was clear.
Wrenn, who had permitted the teasing of even Tim, the hatter, "wasn't going to stand for no kidding from nobody not when Nelly was there," and he called for a glass of water with the air of a Harvard assistant professor forced to eat in a lunch-wagon and slapped on the back by the cook. Nelly soothed him. "The play is going well, isn't it?"
That lunch-wagon was their club. Here, squatted on high stools, treating one another to ginger-ale, they argued over torque and angles of incidence and monoplanes vs. biplanes. Except for two unpopular aristocrats who found boarding-houses in San Mateo, they slept in the hangars, in their overalls, sprawled on mattresses covered with horse-blankets. It was bed at eight-thirty.
They sat about the lunch-wagon wrangling endlessly, or, like Carl and Forrest Haviland, wandered through fields which were all one flame with poppies. Lieutenant Haviland had given up trying to feel comfortable with the naval ensign student, who was one of the solemn worthies who clear their throats before speaking, and then speak in measured terms of brands of cigars and weather.
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