BIGGLES - CHARTER PILOT

by Captain W. E. Johns

X THE ADVENTURE OF THE SUSPICIOUS VOLCANO (Pages 90 - 99)

“Lunch was over. Biggles’s Squadron was at “alert”, and the officers were enjoying a lull in operations by sunning themselves on the forms outside the mess door. They were in flying kit, ready to take the air within a minute of the alarm being sounded”. When Flight-Lieutenant Angus Mackail complains of the heat, Ginger tells him he should try Mexico. “I think it was hotter in Mexico than I’ve ever been anywhere”. They had gone there with Dr. Duck to look at a volcano, which was giving all the signs of being active. Invited to tell them about it, Ginger says there won’t be time as the alarm may go at any moment. He is invited to make a start and if they have to break off, he can tell the rest later. “Okay,” agreed Ginger, and proceeded with the narrative:

“We had just finished a job in South America when Donald, referring to his book of words, discovered that he had a note, a recent note, of a volcano which had given the usual indications that it was about to throw a fit. That is to say, it was spitting sparks and blowing sulphur fumes, as these things do when they get tired of doing nothing”. The volcano, by the name of Xactapetl was on the western, Pacific side of the country. “In the valleys there are a few scattered villages, inhabited, as far as I could make out, by a lot of lazy loafers, with big black moustaches and highly coloured bandanas. When they’re not asleep they sit around and eat tortillas”. Ginger says he ate one and it was made of dynamite and pepper mixed. The volcano is about nine thousand feet high and had been extinct for as long as the inhabitants could remember. There is a cloud of smoke over the summit and the smell of sulphur. Biggles and his companions make an initial survey flight over the volcano but only see rocks and cacti. Donald suggests they come back when the volcano is more active but Biggles wants to stay and have another look. On a second day of reconnaissance, they again fly over the volcano but it is so hot and the air so bumpy, that Ginger is nearly air-sick for the first time in his life. Suddenly something hits the machine. When they land Biggles finds a bullet in the engine cowling. Later that evening a message is thrown at Biggles wrapped around a stone and Biggles captures the man throwing it. The message contains the message "Vamoose, gringo or die". (‘Vamoose’ being slang for depart hurriedly and ‘Gringo’ being slang for a person who is not Hispanic or Latino). “Biggles laughed. I don’t know if you fellows have noticed it, but the most certain way of getting a Britisher to do a thing is to threaten him with dire consequence if he does it”. Holding the man's own knife to his throat, Biggles threatens him. “Amigo,” he says in Spanish, “you need a shave. Unfortunately, I’m not barber, so if my hand slips you’re likely to get your throat cut. What about it?” Biggles then asks him who sent him. “There is one advantage of dealing with a fellow who is accustomed to slinging a knife about. It’s this. When you hold the knife, it doesn’t occur to him that you may be bluffing. Thus it was with this big stiff”. (Gentle persuasion – is the illustration on page 95). The man falls to to his knees and asks Biggles to remember his wife and children. The man says he was sent by a Mexican bandit called "El Cuchillo". “We all knew who El Cuchillo was, because the village was plastered with notices offering five thousand pesos reward for his body, dead or alive. He was, it appeared, a tame Indian gone wild – if you get my meaning; and at that time he was Mexico’s public enemy number one, making a comfortable living out of holding up trains and robbing farms. He also had a playful habit of waylaying lonely policemen, cutting off their feet and making them walk on the stumps. That’s the old Indian idea of fun”. Biggles asks what he has done to offend the bandit chief but he can get no more information out of the prisoner. Biggles does a deal with the Captain-Commandant of the local garrison and the prisoner is allowed to escape just before dawn the next day. Biggles suspects he will go to the volcano. “I’ll wager my goggles that the mountain is no more likely to blow up than this desert. My guess is that El Cuchillo is the volcano. A few sticks of dynamite and a few handfuls of sulphur would be enough to make the farmers evacuate the district in a hurry”. He would then have a safe hiding place and find food at the abandoned farms for his gang. The next day they fly to ten thousand feet and cut the engine, gliding back, taking care to keep the machine between the sun and the mountain. “It’s almost impossible to look at a desert sun when it’s low in the sky, so the chances of our being seen, particularly as we made no noise, were remote. On the other hand, as the sun was shining on the mountain we could see everything clearly”. Using the aircraft to follow the escaping prisoner, he is seen to return to a canyon in the flank of the mountain, just below the crater. Biggles drops a message to the rapidly approaching Capitan's men and then drops a signal flare right outside “the bandit’s front-door”. The gang put up a brief fight but soon surrender to the soldiers. The local farmers hold a fiesta in the village at which our heroes are guests of honour. The Capitan insists that Biggles is given half the reward money for El Cuchillo's capture, which Biggles then hands over to the local hospital. Biggles promises Donald he will find him another volcano another day. “That’s all there was to it – hello! There goes the hooter”. Ginger sprang to his feet as the alarm sounded, and ran towards his machine. “I’ll tell you –” he shouted to Henry Harcourt, but the rest was lost in the roar of his engine as it came to life.