“We” · Chapter 4 (2/2)

The section boss was living alone. He was soon to be relieved and stationed in some more populated locality. We spent the night with him and in the morning cleared a runway for the ship. Maxon was quite a distance above sea level and as the air was less dense, an airplane required a longer distance to take off in. There was a small mountain on the east end of the field and the land sloped upwards toward the west. We worked until midday cutting sagebrush and cactus. There was a light breeze from the west and the air was hot and rough. After using three-quarters of the runway the Canuck rose about four feet above the ground but stopped there, and when the end of the runway was passed the wings and landing gear scraped along on the sagebrush. As soon as we picked up a little extra flying speed, another clump of sagebrush would slow the ship down again until, after we had gone about two hundred yards, a large Spanish dagger plant passed through the front spar of the lower left wing. After being cut off by the internal brace wires, it remained firmly planted in the center of the outer bay. We landed immediately and found the plane to be undamaged except for a fourteen inch gap in the spar and a number of rips in the wing fabric.

The engineer on a passing freight train had seen us go down and stopped long enough for Klink to climb on board. It was agreed that Klink would go to the nearest place where he could get the material to make repairs, while I remained with the plane. We were thirty-two miles from the nearest store and as the section boss was leaving that day for his new location, I walked a mile and a half to a ranch house, where I arranged for accommodations until we were ready to fly again.

Klink went all the way to El Paso before he could get any dope and wing fabric. Meanwhile I spent the day with the plane, and a large part of the night following the ranchers’ hounds in their search for wildcats and panthers. They had treed a large cat the night before while we were staying in the section house, but were unable to duplicate their performance for my benefit. About all I succeeded in accomplishing after following them for hours, was to pull one dog out of a wire fence which had caught his foot as he jumped over.

Klink returned with a can of pigmented dope, two lengths of crating board, some nails and screws, a can of glue, several balls of chalkline, and enough fabric to replace the torn wing covering. We borrowed a butcher knife, a needle and thread, and an axe from the rancher, and set in to make the Canuck airworthy once more. We hewed the crating down roughly to size, cut it into proper lengths with an old hacksaw blade from our toolkit, and finished it off with the butcher knife. In a short time we had constructed a second box splice similar to the one at Pensacola, but a few feet farther out on the spar.

We had just enough dope to cover the splice, so the fabric in the outer bay was left undoped; and after we had sewed up the longer rents caused by the sagebrush, we were once more ready to take the air.

It was too near the fifteenth of March to continue west, so we decided to take the Canuck back to San Antonio where we would finish off the repairs and Klink would continue on to California alone.