Roy Rockwood - Dave Dashaway the Young Aviator - or, In the Clouds for Fame and Fortune

“You don’t mean to say that new-fangled air ship of yours will fly, Dave Dashaway?”

“No, it’s only a model, as you see.”

“Would the real one go up, though?”

“It might. I hope so. But this is a start, anyway.”

“Yes, and a fine one,” said Ned Towner, enthusiastically. “You’re a smart boy, Dave, and everybody says so.”

“I wish my dear old father was living,” remarked Dave in a tone of sadness and regret. “There wasn’t much about sky sailing he didn’t know. In these times, when everybody is so interested in airships, he would be bound to make his mark.”

The two, manly-appearing youths stood in the loft of the dilapidated old barn of Silas Warner’s place in Brookville. It held a work bench and some tools, and on one end of the bench was the model at which they were looking.

It was neat enough and intricate enough, being made by a mere lad, to have attracted the attention of any inventor or workman. An outsider, however, would have been puzzled, for while its shape suggested a bird kite with an umbrella top, it had so many rods, joints and levers that a casual observer would have wondered what they were all there for.

Dave showed a good deal of pride in his model. It had cost him all his loose change to buy the material to construct it, and many a busy hour during the preceding few weeks. He sighed as he turned from it, with the words:

“All I need now is some silk to cover those wings. That finishes it.”

“Then what will you do?”

“Well,” replied Dave vaguely, “then I hope I can find some practical airship man who will tell me if it’s any good.”

“Say, it will be a fortune if it works, won’t it, Dave?” exclaimed Ned.

“Oh, hardly that. They are getting up so many new kinds all of the time. It would get me into the swim, though. All I want is to have a chance to make the acquaintance of some expert airman. I reckon the flying fever was born in me, Ned.”

“Well, that’s quite natural,” responded Ned. “Your father must have been famous in his line, according to all those scrap-book articles you showed me the other day.”

“Anyhow, I’m getting tired of the dull life I’m leading here,” went on Dave seriously. “I’d like to do something besides slave for a man who drives me to the limit, and amount to something in the world.”

“Good for you!” cried Ned, giving his friend and chum an encouraging slap on the back. “You’ll get there – you’re the kind of a boy that always does.”

“Hey, there! are you ever going to start?” rang out a harsh, complaining voice in the yard outside.

Dave hurriedly threw an old horse blanket over his model and glanced out of the window.

“It’s Mr. Warner,” he said, while Ned made a wry face. “I’ll have to be going.”

Old Silas Warner stood switching his cane around and growling out threats, as Dave reached the yard and crossed it to where a thin bony horse and an old rickety wagon stood. The vehicle held a dozen bags filled with potatoes, every one of which Dave had planted and dug as his hardened hands bore proof.

“You’ll quit wasting my time, Dave Dashaway,” carped the mean-faced old man, “or there’s going to be trouble.”

“I was just showing Ned about the loft,” explained Dave.

“Yah! Fine lot of more valuable time you’ve been wasting there, too,” snorted old Warner. “I’ll put a stop to some of it, you mark me. Now then, you get those bags of taters down to Swain’s warehouse and back again afore six o’clock, or you’ll get no supper. There’s a lot more of those taters to dig, but an hour or two this evening will finish them.”

Dave’s face was set and indignant, but he passed no more words with the unreasonable old man who called himself, and was in fact, legally his guardian.

“I’ll keep you company as far as our house,” said Ned, as Dave got up into the wagon seat, and he climbed up beside his friend, heedless of the grumblings of the old man about over loading.

“He’s a pretty mean old fellow,” flared out Ned, as they drove out of the yard and into the country road leading towards the town. “It’s the talk of the neighborhood, the way that old miser makes you work.”

“I wouldn’t mind the work if he would only treat me half human,” replied Dave in a subdued tone.

“It isn’t in him to do it,” scolded Ned. “If I was in your place I’d just cut out, and let him find some other fellow to do his slaving. Why, my folks say your father left enough to take care of you in a good way. And send you to school, and all that. I’d find out my legal rights, if I were you, and I’d fetch that old fellow to time.”

“It would be no use, Ned,” declared Dave. “I tried it once. I went over to Brocton, where the lawyer of my father’s estate lives, and had a talk with him.”

“What did he say?”

“He said that my father had left no property except the old hotel at Brocton. It is old, for a fact, and needs lots of repairs, and the lawyer says that this takes most of the income and makes the rent amount to almost nothing. I found out, though, that the lawyer is a relative of Mr. Warner, and that Warner gives most of the repairing jobs to other relatives of his. I went and saw the court judge, and he told me that Mr. Warner’s report, made each year, showed up clear and straight.”

“Judge another relative of old Warner?” insinuated Ned.

“I shouldn’t wonder.”

“Neither would I. It’s strange to me, though, Dave, that your father ever made such a notorious old skinflint your guardian.”

“He didn’t,” asserted Dave.

“Who did, then?”

“The court, and I had no voice in it. Mr. Warner let me stay at the school I was attending when my father died, for about a year. Then he claimed the estate couldn’t bear the expense, and he has had me home ever since.”

“Why don’t they sell the old hotel, and give you a chance to live like other boys who are heirs?” demanded Ned, in his ardent, innocent way.

“Mr. Warner says the property can’t be sold till I am of age,” explained Dave. “That time I went away and got work in the city, I even sent Mr. Warner half of what I earned, but he sent the sheriff after me, made me come home, and said if I tried it again he would send me to a reformatory till I was twenty-one.”

“Say that’s terrible!” cried Ned, rousing up in his honest wrath. “Oh, say – look there!”

“Whoa!” shouted Dave, but there was no need of the mandate. In sudden excitement and surprise he had pulled old Dobbin up dead short. Then he followed the direction indicated by the pointing finger of his companion. Both sat staring fixedly over their heads. The air was filled with a faint whizzing sound, and the object that made it came within their view for just a minute. Then it passed swiftly beyond their range of vision where the high trees lining the road intervened.

“An airship – a real airship!” cried Ned with bated breath.

“Yes. It must have come from the big aero meet at Fairfield,” said Dave.

“Is there one there?”

“Yes. I read about it in the paper.”

Both Dave and Ned had seen an airship before. Besides two that had passed over the town the day previous, they had once witnessed an ascent at a circus at Brocton.

Every nerve in Dave’s body was thrilling with animation. He had dropped the lines, and Dobbin had wandered to the side of the road seeking for grass, nearly tipping over the load. Dave righted the wagon.

“Say,” spoke Ned, “stop at the house, will you?”