Editing Adventures of Dash Karp and Cat Flynn (section)

== Chapter 1  '''Dash''' ==

 
	'''Dash'''

 

Pa used to like to tell me, and often, "I rode with the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill and found your Momma on the other side like she was waiting for me!" Momma, for her part, would counter with her version of events. "I saw the big dumb Gringo tumble down the hill right to my feet and had to drag him out of the way of his own horse." Everyone would laugh then and Pa, without fail, would kiss Momma on the cheek. Thats the most enduring image I have of Momma. I was seven when she died. 

Pa managed to get transferred to the 10th Cavalry Regiment (Colored), the Buffalo Soldiers, so that he could remain in Santiago with the occupation and not leave his little 'Mexican Beauty'. As it turned out, Momma's parents left Mexico under some duress and Momma's father proudly clung to his Spanish-Mexican heritage and insisted his daughter was Mexican. 

On December 10, 1898 (the same day the Treaty of Paris was signed ending the war) Harold Abner Karp and Maria Juanita Valasquez were married in a small ceremony, in a small Catholic church in Santiago. A year later, Pa was honorably discharged from the Army and the young couple, about to become three, boarded a schooner bound for Miami. That's where I come into the world. 

Because Momma was so far long with child, Pa thought it best to wait out the impending birth right there in Miami before beginning the trek to New Jersey. He managed a few odd jobs to supplement the Army wages he had while they waited for me to arrive. Momma always said I refused to come into the old century, even though she thought I was coming everyday for a week, and no sooner had midnight struck to open the Twentieth Century, I clawed my way out and was smiling from the start. Both my parents loved to embellish the truth. 

Two weeks later, once Pa was satisfied everyone was happy and hail, he put his family on a northbound train and introduced wife and son to Batsto, New Jersey. 

It was a sleepy little village in the Pine Barrens where Pa's family did some cranberry growing and some glass blowing as well. Pa's family took immediately to the adorable 'Mexican Beauty' and my early years knew nothing but happiness. 

But 1907 wasn't quite as idyllic. First Gramma took fever and passed in February. She was a sweet woman who believed the world existed to make happy children. Only two weeks later, and it somehow seemed right, Grampa caught fever as well and coughed until it seemed his lungs gave out. 

Two months later, Cousin Lucy (Uncle Martin's illegitimate daughter) left Batsto for the excitement of New York. She had always been a troubled girl and Uncle Martin was filled with trepidation with her leaving. So was Momma, who had tried to be close to her, but with little success. 

Then came that day in August when Pa and Uncle Martin took me fishing for the first time on Batsto Lake. That day is still very vivid for me. The sun was brillaint on the water and I thrilled every time my line got a tug and there was smallmouth bass on the end of it. The passing of Gramma and Grampa were behind us and Uncle Martin had gotten used to the paucity of letters from Lucy. It was a happy day on the lake and my seven year old self could not concieve of anything that could end the day in sadness. 

I remember it was odd when we got back to the house. A strange sort of quiet as though the place had not been lived in for years and we were somehow trespassing in our own home. I think we all felt it because Pa and Uncle Martin looked at each other oddly a moment. Normally, Momma would be doing something. Anything. She rarely sat still except for a short bit at night if the family gathered in the parlor to tell each other stories. You could see it in her face how she loved such gatherings. But this day, there was no Momma rolling bread in teh kitchen, or hanging laundry outside or sweeping off the porch. I jumped, startled, when Pa dropped his tackle in the foyer and ran for the stairs, calling out, "Maria? Maria!" I wanted to run after him, but Uncle Martin caught my shirt collar and told me to stow Pa's tackle. Then suddenly came a wailing like I have never heard before or since. Pa had found Momma prone on top of the made bed, peaceful as could be as though she had just laid down for a rest. She was holding a photograph of the whole Karp clan in Batsto that had been taken the year before at the Fourth of July picnic by the lake. The doctor said he couldn't be sure what the cause was except it seemed her heart simply stopped. But Pa always insisted she knew before she laid down that she was about to breathe her last. He claimed Momma always knew things, but I could never get him to elaborate. 

For the next five years things went apace, but the glass blowing was bringing less and less business. Eventually, the glassworks was sold and the two brothers just worked on the cranberries. I was never sure how much money they made off of cranberries, but I do know I was never hungry, cold, or shoeless. 



Pa gave me a puppy for my eighth birthday. A retriever which I named Shilo. he was a good dog and a constant companion in a village where there happened to be no other boys my age. But in the fall of 1911 that happiness too was snuffed out. Batsto had suffered from a series of attacks on the small bit of livestock we maintained there. Over the course of four weeks from October into November, three cows from the Price's dairy farm were discovered mutilated and half eaten. A number of chickens, turkeys, goats and dogs had gone missing entierly, or found in the same condition as those cows. The Jersey Devil was blamed by some folks who believed in such things, as there had been sightings for the past several months all throughout South Jersey, but County Sheriif maintained it was a bear or perhaps even a rare cougar. 

It was just a few days later that Uncle Martin didn't show for breakfast and Pa found his brother belly down in the mud not far from where I had found Shilo. Unlike Shiloh and the other attacks, Uncle Martin wasn't bloodied and chewed. But his head was turned completely around and staring wide eyed to the sky, despite the rest of his body being belly down. This shook Pa in a fierce way. He had been fair well stricken with grief for a time with Momma's passing, but this was different. This was fear.

It was only a month later that Pa sold everything - lock, stock and barrel - to the Girard Trust Company (who would later take the whole Village of Batsto into receivership) and we moved to Atlantic City.

Seemed I hardly had a moment to collect my twelve year old wits when I found myself working as a stockboy in the Karp General Store on Ventnor Avenue in Atlantic City. It was quite the transition from sleepy village and lots of land to run around in, to the many blocks of buildings on a gridwork of streets. Hotels and taverns bigger than I ever imagined and filled with folks of an entirely different nature than Pa and me. In Batsto, no one stood high enough to look down at anyone else. But in Atlantic City there were plenty of blue bloods who had homes in Camden, or Philadelphia, or Haddonfield and only came to Atlantic City for fun. Imagine that! Folks who could spend time away from home just to frolic in the ocean and eat at fancy hotels. My young mind started to imagine what it might be like to be among them, though I didn't like how some of them treated Pa like he was too far beneath them.

But Pa remained unbothered by that and eventually the events in Batsto were behind us. Atlantic City also meant better schooling for me and Pa was incessantly checking on my studies. When the Great War broke out, I became an avid reader of newspapers, though usually they were issues that had been discarded by one of them blue bloods and already days old. Sometimes I even got a New York Times when I would make a delivery to one of the hotels. But read them all voraciously, along with the occasional adventure magazine if it happened to be discarded as well.

I was mesmerized by the stories of war. The personalities of the leaders. They might as well have been Gods to me. The Kaiser, the Czar, the King! The yellow journalism of the time permeated my young mind - now a teenaged mind - and before long I was loathing the Germans and Austrian and Turks with an irrantional hatred that certainly worried Pa. He tried to explain to me not to believe everything I read and that there were good men fighting - and dying - on both sides. I really did try to heed him, because Pa was all that was left in my life and he never lied to me before. But I was becoming a young man with a mind of my own and suddenly Pa seemed like maybe he wasn't so smart. How could he not hate the Central Powers! I showed him the political cartoons of German soldiers with dead babies on the end of their bayonets. I refused to believe the Amercian press would lie about such things!

And such wonders of warfare! Aeroplanes with guns mounted on them. Giant Dreadnought battleships that could level cities with their guns. Sneaky vessels that could sail beneath the waves and send deadly torpedoes to destroy their prey. It sure had me wide-eyed with wonder, and Pa noticed that look in my eyes. When the United States finally entered the war, I was seventeen and hell bent to go enlist and save the world for Democracy! But Pa had already made other arrangements for this strapping young man. Through the auspices of some of Pa's old army buddies, (including Teddy Roosevelt himself!) I was admitted to the Virginia Military Institute and spent my days in classrooms and drills while other men experienced the horrors of trench warfare. But some men became aviators, who were the new knights of warfare. Glamorous, dashing, brave men who captured the imaginations of the newspapers and the people. I was determined to be one of them.

I graduated in 1921 and Pa was there wearing his old cavalry uniform from the day he met Momma. It was small, and a bit threadbare just from age, but I never saw him look more proud. I was given a lieutenant's commission in the army, and worked my way in to the Army Air Service where I learned how to fly, and I learned just how much I loved it! I also learned I didn't much love army regulations. Discipline was agreeable enough. The army needed to have discipline. I made a number of friends both at VMI and in the Army Air Service, and distinguished myself as quite the capable aviator. Nonetheless, I was starting to feel boxed in and when Pa passed in 1923, I decided to let my commission lapse and returned to civilian life.

Not quite the average civilian life mind you. Pa, unbeknownst to me, had purchased small amounts of stock in some young companies after Momma passed. He never touched them and they grew into quite the inheritance for me. Not that I was suddenly some J.P. Morgan or anything, but the company that made the Model-T rewarded its strock holders very well. As did a certain bottling comoany that claimed to have the freshest taste on the market. Finances would not be a worry for a while.

I purchased a Curtiss Jenny and went into the air courier business in 1924 and even took the Oath of Mail Messengers so I could secure contracts with the U.S. Post Office. For some extra fun, I would sometimes perform at air shows doing stunts that drove the crowd wild. And the dames! Oh they loved the flyboys, all right. Didn't even matter if you took them up or not. Sometimes I think they just liked the goggles and the scarf and the flight jacket. We were a new breed of cowboy, some folks said, and I never stopped to consider or argue the point. I just enjoyed myself.

It was a life that suited me just fine. I didn't much care to let any grass grow under my feet, and not one of the dozens of women I had across the country were going to clip my wings. Occasionally I might take a passenger, but mostly it was sacks of mail in the beginning, but soon grew into a more special delivery service. It seemed blue bloods were always ready to splurge on specialized service just so they could brag to their friends how they had that box of cigars "specially" shipped from Cuba, and flown from Miami, or some such extravagance.

I got to meet all sorts of notable blue bloods in my travels and actually got to like a few of them. They came from the vast spectrum of American personalities and included actors and actresses, secretive industrialists, the eccentric wealthy and furtive politicians. The cargo was usually documents that had to be somewhere fast, but more and more it grew into items of value that the client believed was more secure by air than by ground. Museums made up some of my business and eventually this earned me some notice by the Explorers Club in New York City.

Landing at Roosevelt Field one day in 1926 with a package destined for the Explorers Club, I was met by two men who intended to rob me of my cargo. I always carried a sidearm when I flew and it came in handy that day. One of the robbers was killed, but the other I allowed to live so he could talk to the police. It was a little sticky with the police since the men were only armed with blackjacks and brass knuckles, but certain key members of the Club smoothed things out on my behalf. The incident made the New York Times and I even had my picture in the paper! After that, I worked almost exclusively for members of the Explorers Club and was even admitted myself.

The Exploreres Club proved a fertile pasture of opportunity and adventure, as well as being fairly lucrative. Before long, I was more than just a courier and delivery boy. Some clients came to trust me enough that they would send me ahead to some location to gather some preliminary information, or examine a possible purchase. One person with whom I began to develope a close bond was Horace Applewhite. He was a stockbroker who had done well for himself and had a keen interest in the genealogy of the many royal houses of Europe.

Indeed it was Applewhite who discovered that I had my own sampling of blue blood in me. I was rather shocked that my father never told me that my paternal grandmother had been born into the royal family of the former kingdom of Lutha. Today, Lutha was part of Yugoslavia, a patchwork of slavic countries knitted together by the League of Nations after the Great War. Most fascinating was the very idea that I was, if all proper peerage was followed, four hundred-and-twenty-second in line for the throne of King Alxeander I. Mind you I doubt anyone there even knew I existed, but what a conversation starter at the speak easy!

Applewhite's interest were purely intellectual and not financial. If something was missing, he wanted it found. If something was unexplained, he wanted it explained. Through the Explorers Club, he financed, or obtained the funding for, many research expeditions to all corners of the globe. If some priceless, historic artifact was found, he saw to it that it found its way to the institution he felt best deserved it. Occasionally, that institution was his personal collection. But more often than not it was donated to a national museum from the country of origin.

Because I was not among the 'learned fellows' in the archeological community, I was only a part of the smaller expeditions that were of less scientific value, but far more interesting to the press for the sensational or even salacious aspects of the story. Such as the White Queen of the Congo, the Devil Women of Madagascar, the Giant Rats of Sumatra, the Book of the Necronomicon, and many others. Few of them ever turned out to be exactly what was initially reported, though sometimes there was enough for a fantastic photo to be sent to the newspapers and magazines. In between these adventures, I sometimes tested new aircraft designs for the amateur inventors that populated the Explorers Club. 

In 1929 came the Crash. Although Applewhite had managed to secure a decent savings for himself, his funding for expeditions nearly dried. Now he was only interested in items of real value that could pay for the expedition, and hopefully return a small profit for himself. Applewhite became obsessed with certain legendary or missing treasures and was still capable of hiring agents around the world to do research. Usually, I was called in after the research to do the 'acquisition.' In the years after the Crash, the acquisitions were often less legal and more dangerous. So long as my own personal ethics weren't violated, I was happy to do the work.