Bill Barnes Air Adventurer, July 1935 — page 126: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A life sketch of “CY” HAWKINS Air Adventurer by Frank Tinsley T WAS just a couple of days past | “Cy’s” sixteenth birthday that “Buck” Cheever handed the kid the newspaper photo of the famous Yankee flier and his pinto plane. From that exact moment young Cyrus Crook Haw- kins was hipped with the idea of flying. The War had been dragging along for two years but fighting was still a hazy and distant thing to Cy. After all, what could a kid brought up on a secluded ranch in the Texas Panhandle know about the momentous European conflict? Except for an occasional week-old local newspaper left behind at the bunk house by some passing rider, the only news received at the ranch was ordinary word-of-mouth gossip that had been altered by repetition until it bore no resemblance at all to the true and original facts. “T understand,” one of the boys would say, “that them Frenchmen and Dutch- men just up and fit another battle. Yep. Met one of the Q-Cross boys out at Stinking Springs and he allowed that *bout a million of ’em on each side been rubbed. out in a fight over a piece of range. Four hundred yards, the paper said. Reckon them European fellas must be plumb loco, killing off such a heap o’ hands over a little patch o’ rang like that.” | The waddies of the Hawkins spread would shift their cuds and wag their heads in agreement. “Yes, suh! Sure sounds crazy t’ me!” Young Cy used to nod with them. It did seem pretty crazy, this war business ; and yet, after his first glimpse of that tiny wasplike fighting plane in the photo- graph, with its paint-pony markings and the hawk-faced, young-old pilot in the cockpit, the kid had felt a strange urge stirring within him. He had sat on a hill one day shortly afterward and watched a pair of golden eagles wheeling and diving in the bright sunlight. It must feel grand to fly like that, he thought; to swoop and climb in the stainless blue sky, to gaze down with eagle eyes at plodding antlike mortals far below. Cy had pretended that sunny afternoon that one of the tawny birds aloft was the pinto plane of the newspaper photo and the other a black-crossed German ace out to make a kill. In.Cy’s fervid imagination the golden eagles were transformed into vividly painted battle planes, spitting hot lead at each other in a duel to the death. The great world struggle across the distant Atlantic began to take on a new meaning for the boy. In the air, at least, the War held dreams of bright romance. A knightly jousting of winged tricolored Galahads and the flapping blood-dyed dragons of the Kaiser. The oO COA) ebook CO