Hell's Angel

HELL’S ANGEL

By Raoul F. Whitfield

A Story of American Airmen in the Philippines

In the first place, there was hot blood in Marcosson’s veins. Second son of a Franco-Italian union, he had been born in Morocco and brought up in Africa. He remembered his mother as a lean, wiry creature who flared into rages that were terrible to behold. His older brother quietly slipped away to the diamond fields one night after Marcosson senior had used rawhide fiercely. After that there was swift tragedy. He was young, sensitive—this Dantone Marcosson. For years he remembered the red against the white of his mother’s breast. For years his dark eyes stared, in sleepless nights, at the green hilt of the knife.

Three hours after his father had brought swift tragedy into the house, the native police had come. After that he had not seen Marcosson senior again. He remembered him as a powerful, dark-eyed man who spoke battering French when aroused to temper, precise English when calm. That is, he came to remember his father in this manner, later, in America. A vice-consul and an uncle had got him to America.