As he soared to earth he looked at the crowd for the first time. His vision was so blurred with oil and wind-soreness that he saw the people only as a mass and he fancied that the stretch of slouch-hats and derbies was a field of mushrooms swaying and tilted back. He was curiously unconscious of the presence of women; he felt all the spectators as men who had bawled for his death and whom he wanted to hammer as he had hammered the wind. He was almost down. He cut off his motor, glided horizontally three feet above the ground, and landed, while the cheers cloaked even the honking of the parked automobiles. Carl's manager, fatly galloping up, shrilled, "How was it, old man?" "Oh, it was pretty windy," said Carl, crawling down and rubbing the kinks out of his arms. "But I think the wind 's going down. Tell the announcer to tell our dear neighbors that I'll fly again at five." "But weren't you scared when she dropped? You went down so far that the fence plumb hid you. Couldn't see you at all. Ugh! Sure thought the wind had you. Weren't you scared then? You don't look it." "Then? Oh! Then. Oh yes, sure, I guess I was scared, all right!... Say, we got that seat padded so she's darn comfortable now." The crowd was collecting. Carl's manager chuckled to the president of the fair association, "Well, that was some flight, eh?" "Oh, he went down the opposite side of the track pretty fast, but why the dickens was he so slow going up my side? My eyes ain't so good now that it does me any good if a fellow speeds up when he's a thousand miles away. And where's all these tricks in the air----" "That," murmured Carl to his manager, "is the i-den-ti-cal man that stole the blind cripple's crutch to make himself a toothpick." CHAPTER XXI The great Belmont Park Aero Meet, which woke New York to aviation, in October, 1910, was coming to an end. That clever new American flier, Hawk Ericson, had won only sixth place in speed, but he had won first prize in duration, by a flight of nearly six hours, driving round and round and round the pylons, hour on hour, safe and steady as a train, never taking the risk of sensational banking, nor spiraling like Johnstone, but amusing himself and breaking the tedium by keeping an eye out on each circuit for a fat woman in a bright lavender top-coat, who stood out in the dark line of people that flowed beneath. When he had descended--acclaimed the winner--thousands of heads turned his way as though on one lever; the pink faces flashing in such October sunshine as had filled the back yard of Oscar Ericson, in Joralemon, when a lonely Carl had performed duration feats for a sparrow. That same shy Carl wanted to escape from the newspaper-men who came running toward him. He hated their incessant questions--always the same: "Were you cold? Could you have stayed up longer?"