Conquerors of the Sky by Thomas Fleming Read Free Book Online

out and surrendered.
    The extra seat they had added to the plane was a moneymaker. After William Randolph Hearst took a ride with Louis Paulhan and reported it in his newspapers like the Angel Gabriel announcing the second coming, hundreds of people were eager to fly at five dollars a head. Few pilots were more popular than Craig. With his racing car driver’s peaked hat perched sideways on his head, a big cigar clamped in his mouth, he was the essence of heroism on the ground and in the air.
    So here it was, 1912. They were on the way to an air show in San Diego. As they climbed aboard Rag Time, Frank said: “Can we stop in Santa Ana and see Mother?”
    â€œHow many times do I have to tell you to put that crazy woman out of your mind once and for all?” Craig said.
    That was not easy for Frank to do. He had spent his boyhood defending Althea Buchanan from the ridicule of her neighbors and his friends. She never sought the messages that came to her in the night, voices of guardian spirits who told her of forgotten wars and evil conspiracies in the blank centuries before history began in books. The English-born pastor of the Church of the Questing Spirit said she was one of the rare few who could communicate directly with the world beyond the grave. But outside the tiny circle of true believers in the church, her gift had brought Althea Buchanan little but scorn and heartbreak.
    Craig flew Rag Time above the coast highway, telling Frank to get over his
“momma’s boyitis.” They were going straight to San Diego. But Frank knew they had to land for gas somewhere. When the village of Santa Ana appeared on the left, he grabbed Craig’s sleeve and pointed to it. Cursing, Craig banked over the town and circled the Buchanan ceramics factory, with its beds of blooming flowers between the office and kiln. He landed in a grassy field just beyond it.
    Althea Buchanan manufactured plates and pitchers and platters portraying Spanish days in old California. She had no training as a painter. Her designs were primitive but the colors were vivid and the expressions on the faces of her Mexicans and Indians emanated an innocence that Anglos found irresistible. There was scarcely a house in the Southwest that did not have at least one of her creations.
    She had come to the sleepy town in Orange County just after Frank was born in freezing Kansas. One of her guardian spirits had told her to seek warmth and sunshine for the infant or he was doomed. Her husband, delighted (according to Craig) to find an excuse to split up, declined to accompany her. She had taken ten thousand dollars from him and headed for California with her two sons, confident that her guardian spirits would guide her when she arrived. They had told her to found the ceramics factory and she had done so with astonishing success.
    Althea hurtled toward Frank and Craig, her cheeks streaked with dirt, her red hair cascading in all directions beneath an immense sun hat. Behind her trooped the twenty Mexicans who did the hard labor at the furnaces. Althea was only four feet eleven and at fifty still had the complexion of a sixteen-year-old. Her perpetual youth sharpened the aura of unreality that always surrounded her.
    â€œWhat is it? Where did you get it?” she cried.
    â€œIt’s a plane, Madam,” Craig said. He always treated her with mocking courtesy, no matter how much she abused him.
    â€œIt’s beautiful,” she said, making a wide circle around Rag Time. “Does it have a soul?”
    â€œIt’s a machine, Madam. Machines don’t have souls.”
    â€œI’ve seen a creature like it in a dream,” she said. “Galdur, the tyrant who ruled Palestine a thousand years before the Jews came there, used it to conquer Atlantis.” She glared at Craig. “You were born under the same dark sign. You’ll turn this into a death machine!”
    She whirled on Frank. “Have you given up your great