An exciting story of American newspaper life. A young Scotch journalist on the staff of the "New York Times," instructed to "cover" a balloon ascent, followed his objective into mid-air, with the result that a most eventful race ensued.
 

ON the evening of May 21st, 1906, the night editor of the New York Times handed me a visiting-card and asked me to ascertain the business of the person who had sent it from the visitors' room.

       "I'm Harry Ormsby, of the Telegram," said the owner of the card, when I went out to interview him. "I have a message from Stephen Chalmers, your man covering the ascent of the balloon Nirvana."

       "What's the message?" I asked.

       "Chalmers took passage in a balloon belonging to a Dutchman named Oscar Haendler, and is following the Nirvana."

       I stared at him in surprise. Chalmers was a personal friend, and I knew that he understood nothing of aeronautics.

       "Just before he went upward," continued the visitor, "he asked me to let his office know, so that the night editor would not be alarmed about his delay in getting in the stuff."

       The balloon Nirvana, with a capacity of sixty-eight thousand cubic feet of gas, carrying provisions for three days and one thousand four hundred pounds of ballast, had sailed away from the gasworks at One Hundred and Thirty-eighth Street and the East River, with the avowed intention of making a record in the air.

       The ascent of the balloon was an event in the history of the Aero Club of America. The club was in its infancy, and boasted few balloonists. I learned from Ormsby that Chalmers had been refused a passage in the balloon, and had promptly hired another, owned by an eccentric Dutchman who was in the neighbourhood, and gone aloft in chase.

       When I broke the news to the night editor that Chalmers had followed his man into the air, he stared at me blankly; then, news instinct rising above all personal feeling, he bade me write the "story" in case — well, in case!

       I immediately called up Leo Stevens, an expert aeronaut and airship-maker, on the telephone. He told me that he had witnessed the ascent of the German and the reporter, and did not expect to see either man alive again, as he had recently put no fewer than fourteen patches in Haendler's balloon at his repair shop, and the ascent had been made so swiftly that there was danger of the envelope exploding from expansion.

       I sat down to knock off the article, but I was confused. We had men on the staff who would eagerly go days and nights without sleep, and with only nibbles of food, in order to give our paper the best "story" in New York, but we had not heretofore possessed a reporter who carried things into the air.

       After securing details of the Nirvana's ascent and that of the imprudent patched balloon, and the flight of both up to the time when night eclipsed them, I began to write, but my work was constantly interrupted by telephone queries from other newspapers. They had seemingly forgotten rivalry in astonishment at this new development of American journalism.

       I was still labouring with my typewriter at midnight, an office-boy tearing sheets of "copy" from it as soon as I had finished them and handing them to the editor, when a long-distance telephone call sounded. The night editor put the receiver to his ear and heard the voice of Chalmers.

       "I'd like to report on my assignment," he said. "I have covered the ascent of —–"

       "Where are you?" came the eager interruption.

       "I'm forty miles from base. Will you take the story?"

       He was hurriedly switched over to me. The story he told was a description of the Nirvana's flight and descent. But the newspapers cared little for that, as may be judged from the headlines reproduced — they were principally interested in the young reporter's own doings. The story of the midnight chase in the cloud was no ordinary narrative. I give it here a nearly as possible in Chalmers's own words:—

       I had become so used to living on this earth during the twenty-six years of my life that when I left it suddenly I got the surprise of my lifetime.

       I do not know why I did it. Sometimes I flatter myself that it was solely in the interests of my paper, but at other moments I suspect it was opportunity and a taste for novelty. The Nirvana was ready to start when I edged up to the owner, Dr. Julian P. Thomas, and asked leave to accompany him in his car. He refused.

       I was a little nettled, but just then opportunity and the idea came in the shape of a fat Dutchman, who slapped the great aeronaut on the back and said heartily:—

       "I haf a palloon, too. I vill gif you race."

       Dr. Thomas smiled good-naturedly. The crowd laughed. Somebody called the fat man the "Flying Dutchman." Thereat he, too, became nettled, and his broad, smiling face grew red with wrath.

       "Flying Deutscher!" he cried, angrily. "Vell, I vill show you, yes, I can fly. I haf a palloon that has made sixty more trips. You haf a pilot? He is joost so mooch pallast. I am mine own pilot, but I vill take von man for pallast. I vill gif you race, my vriendt!"

       I tapped the Dutchman on the shoulder as he turned away. Here was my chance as a newspaper reporter. Professional enthusiasm saw no difference at that moment between following a man through the street in a hansom and following him through the clouds in a balloon. I had been ordered to "cover" the trip of the great balloon Nirvana. I would.

"I TAPPED THE DUTCHMAN ON THE SHOULDER."

       Then a cold chill crept down my spine, for I was conscious that I had said, "I am your ballast!" and that the Dutchman had said,"Goot! Goot!" and was shaking my hand.

       I was immediately an object of considerable interest to the crowd, who indulged in much commentary of encouragement, warning, and sympathy. I felt sorry for myself. Then the glamour of it dawned upon my imagination and I longed to be off, despite the funereal warnings of some of my newspaper contemporaries.

       The Flying Dutchman presently appeared, dragging the parts of his balloon from a shed near by. The basket looked like one of the kind in which clothes are carried. It measured four feet by four, was brown with age, and very "wobbly." The silk envelope, at first glance, appeared to be a mass of dirty yellow oilskin.

       The Dutchman patiently waited until the Thomas balloon got her clearance and rose majestically into the air amid mighty cheering.

       Then, in an almost incredible time he had the gas pumping into the envelope. The creases came out of the old yellow oilskin, the netting was extricated from its tangles and adjusted, then the basket was made fast to ropes which did not look remarkably new.

       When ready for the start there was a short delay while the Flying Dutchman went for a glass of beer and a cheese sandwich. The crowd swarmed around the balloon to look and laugh. Compared with the Thomas balloon, with its padded car, powerful ropes, and capacity, the Flying Dutchman's craft, with its eighteen thousand cubic feet capacity, looked like an old "wind-jammer" beside a tea-trade clipper. An aeronaut who was standing near declared the balloon unsafe. He said it had fourteen patches on it and was not properly ballasted. But think of the romantic possibilities of going adrift in the clouds with a Flying Dutchman for skipper!

       I jumped into the basket, where the Dutchman had already taken his place. Among the surging crowd around us I recognised many friends. Dr. O'Gorman, a New York coroner, who lived in the neighbourhood, wagged a warning finger at me and cried, laughingly: "I shall declare. it suicide." My newspaper acquaintances were well in front, of course. I dully wondered whether any of them wanted to change places with me, or I with any of them. Gray, of the Tribune, handed me a package of sandwiches; Ormsby, of the Telegram, I appointed my executor; while the representatives of the World and the Herald accepted small souvenirs in the way of my pipe, my tobacco, and my knife. An employé of the gasworks — a man of practical forethought — took off his coat and said I might need it "up there." I took the coat gratefully, and was about to ask the donor's name when the Flying Dutchman bellowed: "Clear avay!"

       The crowd fell back. Everything was in readiness, the ballast in, and the men hanging to the car. The balloon swayed and tugged and creaked as if it yearned to be off on its crazy voyage.

       "Let go!" cried the skipper, and with that our wind-jammer gave a sob and shot up.

       "The rising journalist," yelled Ormsby.

       I was about to retort when there came a great crash; the Dutchman lurched heavily against me in the narrow basket and something snapped like a fiddle-string. The balloon had plunged headlong against a tall chimney!

"THE BALLOON HAD PLUNGED HEADLONG AGAINST A TALL CHIMNEY!"

       As the great sphere whirled and staggered in recoil, I saw a mixed vision of tense faces, roofs, bit of blue sky, and a great swaying thing above. Then, while I gripped the basket in fright, the gas-bag suddenly righted itself. There was a whistling of air, the shouts of the crowd below died into a murmur, and to my blank astonishment the earth receded as in the wrong end of a telescope.

       Presently there was no sound. The landscape compressed itself more and more. Houses lost shape, hillocks flattened out, people became as specks. The hundreds who had seen us off appeared as a blot in a small triangular space; trees became shrubs, and finally appeared as spots on a great green map, intersected by a network of white lines, marked with squares, and just as different from the earth I had lived on as a map from the country it represents.

       I confess that I was afraid. The sense of lost gravity gripped me. I was not ascending in a balloon; I was falling into an abyss. Something leaped in my throat and stopped there. Every nerve was fluttering; my muscles were aching with the strain of grip and contraction. Then came relaxation, resignation, and a dreamy sense of indifference which did not altogether leave me until I got back to earth.

       The stillness, sepulchral in its density to one who had lived a moment before in a roaring city, was deepened by the creaking of ropes, my own hard breathing, and the gentle sigh of the air as it flung past the ascending balloon. I saw the Flying Dutchman out of the corner of my eye; he was tearing paper into small pieces and, with a bland smile on his fat face, idly throwing them out of the basket one by one. Each piece fluttered, then shot downward like a plummet.

       "Ve are still rising," said the skipper. "Now eight hundred and fifty metres."

       He threw out another piece of paper. It shot down, but not so quickly.

       "Still — nine hundred and fifty."

       The Flying Dutchman continued to throw out pieces until two or three remained in the air, fluttering level with the balloon for a moment, then dancing naturally to earth.

       "Drifting," said the skipper. "Ve are oop four thousand five hundred feet."

       I did not trust myself to move or say anything until I was satisfied that I might do so without danger to the balloon and myself. I noticed with considerable nervousness that I was not standing on a level. We presently discovered that, through the breaking of a rope in the collision with the chimney, the basket was hanging unevenly. It was such a small car that during the four hours we were cruising in the clouds the Flying Dutchman and his mate were compelled to squeeze up together on the high side of the basket in order to preserve our balance. At no stage of the trip was I able to move except to shift the weight of my body from one leg to another. On these occasions the Flying Dutchman cried:—

       "Shently — be shently!"

       When we had ascended to an altitude of five thousand feet above earth there was a chance to breathe more freely. It was then, too, that I looked for my quarry, the Nirvana. She was about seven miles to the westward, hung against the red sunset like a great, over-ripe pear. The beautiful balloon did not seem to be so high as we were. I calculated that the breeze would carry us in the same direction, and that the end of the race would be a question of the speed of a light balloon versus a big balloon in the same wind.

       But I was wrong. Our patched old wind-jammer caught an upper current of air which drove us north-eastward toward Long Island and the sea. The ocean, dreaded by all aeronauts, arose before us like a great blister on the earth's surface.

       The eastward trend of the balloon, however, was slow, but its very slowness set my nerves on edge. I was seized with an inclination to tell the Flying Dutchman that I had had enough. But pride and the professional desire to "cover" my assignment to the letter choked bark the words of truce. And when I looked around above and below, I was seized with a new wonder and glamour, for my eyes gazed upon four States of the Union — Jew York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. And the evening was cloudless, save where the city smoke dulled the land horizon, and where the sunset's deepening tints blended quietly into the colours of earth.

       Soon the rarefied atmosphere began to tell upon me. Something purred and sputtered in my ears, and I suggested to the Flying Dutchman that we might be a little too high. Receiving no answer, I turned and found that his mouth was too full for words. He grinned and went on eating sandwiches — my sandwiches' I afterwards discovered.

       We continued to drift towards the sea, but the leakage of the crazy gas-bag gradually brought us down a few hundred metres. While sinking towards the wide Long Island Sound the Flying Dutchman dropped a little sand. His aerial wind-jammer leaped up from seven hundred metres to a thousand. This was an error on his part, he afterwards told me, for we entered a zone where the air was perfectly still.

       For forty minutes we hung motionless in air, and the Flying Dutchman returned to the sandwiches. He gave me one. It was made of Limburger cheese and brown bread.

       Amid the silence, broken only by the drip of the condensed moisture from the quivering balloon above, I ate that Limburger sandwich, leaning over the edge of the basket and taking in the beauty of the dusk that slowly wrapped the earth in the blanket of night.

       There was not a ripple on the Sound. At different points of the great passage were the fine steamers that nightly leave New York. We could see the people look up at us from the decks, hear the musical throb of engines, and even the talking of the passengers when a vessel came directly beneath us.

       Away to the north-west, apparently making good headway in that direction, was the Nirvana, and I chafed at the delay. But at eight o'clock, just as darkness and distance almost blotted the Thomas balloon from sight, our old gas-bag descended into a strong current of air which blew us along rapidly in the exact trail of the Nirvana. I, of course, was elated; so was the Flying Dutchman, for another reason. Like his namesake, he hated the sea and ever prayed for breezes to blow him landward.

"AWAY TO THE NORTH-WEST, APPARENTLY MAKING GOOD HEADWAY IN THAT DIRECTION, WAS THE NIRVANA."

       As the balloon sailed over the mainland, at an altitude of two thousand five hundred feet, my strange companion came out of his shell. He spoke very little English, and at first I had been inclined to believe that he was a morose fellow. He opened up abruptly by singing a verse of a Hollander song. Then he said:—

       "Vhat your name?"

       I told him, thinking it was a queer place and time for us to get acquainted.

       "You Scotch?"

       "Yes."

       He nodded his head and held out his hand.

       "Holland like you. Plenty Yacobite coom from Scotland to live in Holland. My name iss Oscar Haendler. From Holland one year. Live in Hoboken. It is not such goot place as Berlin, where I fly many time. Where iss Hoboken?"

       I pointed across Manhattan to the city of breweries, where the first evening lights were

       "You sing too," he said. "Make both merry."

       To humour him I sang a verse. My voice boomed through my head, but seemed thin and lost in the abyss around and beneath. The air I hit upon was oddly appropriate:—

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone — Say, could that lad be I? He sailed away one summer morn Over the sea — to Sky.

       I laughed as I concluded, and he coaxed me to tell him the joke; but I don't think he saw the point, for he became silent.

       The balloon sank very near to earth as we passed over a little village called Baychester. We could hear people in dusky gardens calling to one another and hailing us. Five or ten minutes later our patched wind-jammer swooped down, for some unknown reason, toward a dense wood. The motion of rising or sinking was so imperceptible that we might have crashed to earth in the darkness had not a nasal Yankee voice said from beneath: "Was you people comin' down?"

       "No, we wass not!" yelled the Flying Dutchman.

       "Well, I guessed you might be, seein' as how you come back. Seed you pass an hour ago."

       Obviously he took us for the Nirvana, so that I was on the trail still, even though I could not see the Thomas balloon.

       "What place is this?" I yelled, while the Flying Dutchman threw out sand.

       "It's near Mount Vernon," replied the man, adding, in a howl of anger, "Say, who's throwin' sand in my eyes?"

STEPHEN CHALMERS, THE PLUCKY JOURNALIST WHO HERE TELLS THE STORY OF HIS EXCITING BALLOON ASCENT AND CHASE IN THE CLOUDS. From a PHoto by J. B. Valdes.

       The balloon, thus lightened, sailed up to three thousand feet. It was then, as we again caught the favouring breeze, that I saw the most magnificent sight it has been my good fortune to look upon. The hand of the magician had touched the button, and from the Statue of Liberty to Mount Vernon, and from Coney Island to the Hudson, Greater New York was a dream city outlined in electric light. No words can ever express the glory of that scene. The eye could place the avenues and the buildings by their lights and contour. The fairy-like aspect of the great city was further heightened by street arc-lights unseen from the balloon glancing on the white walls of high buildings, which shot up spectral and finger-like, only to lose themselves in dim shadows.

       Ere long a breeze from the east-south-east blew us toward the Hudson River. The Flying Dutchman looked pleased, then puzzled, then amazed. "I did not see Dr. Shulian P. Thomas's palloon, and I think he haf already gone down," said he. "But what is dat?"

       He pointed to the wide river ahead of us. In the centre of it a great black mass was dancing weirdly up and down, now almost touching the water, again gliding upward a thousand feet.

       "Thomas," I said.

       "He is hafing drohble, I tink," said the Dutchman.

       As we ourselves drifted toward the water the big balloon caught a breeze that drove it back to the New York shore. The Hudson River at this point divides the two states, New York and New Jersey.

       "Ach!" exclaimed the Dutchman, joyously. "Ve vill keep op here and keep de vind, and so cross dot Hoodson and sail all night. Ha! he vill be peaten, yes."

       But the wind was fickle, so fickle that quick action was necessary to save our lives. When we were nearly over Ardsley-on-Hudson, and about to take the flight over the river, the wind veered to the south. We drifted along almost parallel with the river. But our course was slightly diagonal, and, as the river is four miles broad above this point, the chances were that we should travel twenty miles over water before we could gain the other shore.

       The Thomas balloon had now drifted into the north, sinking against the land in a way that suggested an attempted descent.

       As by this time the first nervousness of my aerial voyage had passed, I was anxious to cross the river, but the Flying Dutchman shook his head.

       "I am avraid of the river," he said, putting a hand on the valve-string. But he sighed and left the valve alone.

       "I vould mooch like to try," he said. "But — I haf but one sand-bag. If ve go near the river von time, I can trow it out and go up, but if ve go near the river two times ve cannot lift her and — ve must swim."

       He put his hand on the valve again and added, sharply: "You vill not get out of this palloon!"

       "Eh?" I gasped.

       "I say you vill not get out of this palloon!"

"HE ADDED, SHARPLY, 'YOU VILL NOT GET OUT OF THIS PALLOON.'"

       There was a queer sensation down my spine. Did he mean that we were both going to die, or only one of us, and that one I? My friends had hinted that this man might prove dangerous. But his next words reassured me.

       "Ve are von hundred yards from dot Hoodson," he said. "If ve go down slow der vind will plow us to der river. If ve go down ve must go quick — so! — straight! You must hold on till I say you get out."

       He hesitated once more, his hand still on the valve-cord, while I looked anxiously at the beautiful scene three thousand feet below.

       "Ach!" cried the Flying Dutchman. "It vould be cold in dot river."

       Then he pulled the valve. There was a hiss of escaping gas and a whistle of rushing air. The earth suddenly sprang up toward us, as if to take its truant children back and punish them.

       The Dutchman let go the valve-string, but, to our mutual horror, the disused, rusty valve remained stuck wide open. The downward speed became terrific as the gas rushed out. The skipper climbed on the edge of the basket and clutched the rigging. I followed his example like a panic-stricken child who runs with the crowd.

       Our danger in the thirty seconds which timed our descent to earth seemed more terrible to me than any I had ever been in. My entire nervous system seemed to creep and tie itself in knots. The earth rose like a demon. The balloon swirled madly as it fell. The Flying Dutchman cried out something and climbed higher. I followed, and clutched among the ropes as a drowning man would grab straws.

"I FOLLOWED, AND CLUTCHED AMONG THE ROPES AS A DROWNING MAN WOULD GRAB STRAWS."

       "Now!" yelled the Flying Dutchman.

       There was a great crashing of tree branches and a rending of the balloon envelope. The basket struck earth and rebounded many feet. The balloon heaved again and again, then subsided, the gas still escaping, and the great bag shrinking and settling.

       Then there was a great pause, made more significant by the washing of the river and the rushing of the wind in the dark wood around us. Slowly I realized that I was still alive and uninjured, and that the Flying Dutchman was somewhere in the wreckage above me in the tree. At that moment a grumbling came out of the night. It increased to a roar; then there dashed past close to us a great monster with a single, flaring eye.

       It was a train; we had descended quite near the track. The Dutchman laughed nervously, I thought.

       "You can get out now — qvick!" said he.

       "Why did you risk it?" I gasped. "Why didn't you cross the Hudson?"

       "I lofe your life," he replied, simply.

       We had alighted, we discovered, in a private estate above Ardsley-on-Hudson and within a few yards of the track of the New York Central Railroad.

       As I put my foot on Mother Earth again lights appeared among the trees. They were borne by members of the Ardsley Club. One of them advanced and, addressing me, said:—

       "Charmed to meet you, Dr. Thomas. Glad you landed safely. We have been watching you on the river all eve—–"

       I corrected him instantly, telling him that I was merely a reporter assigned to "cover" the ascent — and, I supposed, descent — of the Nirvana, and any information which he could give would be appreciated.

       I learned after a little telephoning that Dr. Thomas had landed safely at Peekskill shortly before and that all was well. Then I used a long-distance wire, reporting to my office that my news was ready and my chase through the clouds successfully ended. It was then midnight.

(THE END)