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CHAPTER ONE

THE RIVER WAS WINE beneath our wings-dark royal June Wisconsin wine It poured deep purple frohway leaped across it once, twice, twicea thread of hard concrete

Along the thread, as we flew, ca, washing their trees in a clean wind It was all the tapestry of su, and for us, of adventure

Two thousand feet above the ground, the air was silver about us, sharp and cold, rising on up over our two old airplanes so deep that a stone dropped up into it would have been lost forever Way high up in there I could just barely see the dark iron blue of space itself

Both of these guys trustingto happen to us It doesn’t matter howisI should have told them to stay home

We swam the silver air like a pair of oceanahead at a hundredback to stay in sight ofopen-cockpit wind-and-wire flyingour airplanes loose over the land and letting the on for the ride and waiting to see the golden world of gypsy pilots forty years gone We agreed on one thing—the grand old days of the barnstormer must still be around, somewhere

Silent and trusting, Stuart Sandy MacPherson, age nineteen, peered over the edge of the cockpit in front of les to the bottom of an ocean of crystal air Barnstormers always had parachute jumpers, didn’t they? he had said, and parachute jumpers were always kids orked their way and earned their keep selling tickets and putting up signs, weren’t they? I had to ad to stand between him and his dream

Once in a while now, looking down through the wind, he smiled to himself, ever so faintly

We flew in a sheet of solid thunder The clatter and roar ofas it did in 1929, brand new, seven years before I was born, and it soaked us in the srease; it shook us in the blast of propeller-torn air Young Stu had once tried to shout a word across the space between our cockpits, but his voice ept away in the wind and he hadn’t tried again Those gypsy pilots, ere learning, didn’t dowhen they flew

The river turned sharply north, and left us We pressed on overland into soft lowlakes, and farms everywhere

Here it was … adventure again The three of us and our two airplanes were the re as The Great A Displays of Aerial Acrobatics, Authentic Great War Dogfighting, Thrilling and Dangerous Aeroplane Stunts, and the Incredible Free-Fall Parachute Leap (Also, Safe Government-Licensed Pilots Take You Aloft to See Your Town Frohts Without a Mishap)

But the other Great American aviators and airplanes had commitments in modern times; they had flown their planes back into the future from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and had left Paul and Stu and I flying alone in 1929