Three years intervened between Billy Cobb’s first crash and his last. He
had three crashes in all--which, as any pilot will tell you, is not a
high score for so long a time, particularly when you consider the amount
of flying that Cobb packed into those years.
He was a man who originally took the dangers of his profession
philosophically.
“Sure, there’s always got to be a last crash,” he would say when the
question of hazard came up, “but it won’t be today.” Hence his
sobriquet.
And having satisfied himself that all the cotter pins were clinched in
place and the controls well greased at the bearings he would swing into
the cockpit, buckle his safety belt, and command “Contact!” with the
perfect assurance of the pilot who knows that barring an act of God he
is safe in his own hands.
Some pilots fly on faith, others fly on nerve, but Last Crash Cobb flew
on skill which was consummate and knowledge which was complete. It was
no fault of his that tragedy entered his life by way of the air.
He was an aviator neither by chance nor by interest. He was an aviator
by vocation. And fortunate it was for him that he first saw the light of
day in a flying age for had he been of an earlier generation it is
difficult to imagine what would have become of him. He had gone to
flying at the first opportunity as the steel goes to the magnet.
There was something ascetic about his devotion to his profession. He
wore his wings as a priest wears the cloth--reverently. What the air
might bring him he never questioned. Advancement, power, gain he never
considered excepting as they might be turned back to the profit of the
air.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said one day to an heretical upstart who was
talking about flying pay and trying to prove the candle not worth the
risk; “this is no game for a brainy young business man like you who’s
going to be a major general some day. Clever boys don’t thrive on the
air. What we want here is men with hearts. Go back to the school of the
line, sonny. You’ll be a great man in a few years. But you’ll always be
a bum flyer!”
And again he was sent before a general court and deprived of ten files
for bearding a lieutenant colonel of the technical section with the
following sally:
“The asphalt is all cluttered up with kiwis like you. You ground
grippers are set to make the conquest of the air if it costs the last
flyer. Did you ever fly? No! Why don’t you join the tank corps then?”
That was Last Crash Cobb. He was of the same breed that makes the sea
leaders. Narrowed to his own sphere he was, without a doubt, as the
sailor is; and indifferent to all that lay outside it, impatient
especially of ignorant meddlers who tried to dictate and interfere. He
could abide the man who was frankly not of the air and approached him
without pretense, but the airfaring dilettante, the “expert” whose
vicarious knowledge was always on parade, he could not tolerate, nor
would he. However, that is beside the point excepting as it gives some
vague index to the character of Cobb and his type--a type that will live
some day in tradition as the type that won the sea now lives.
With airplanes he had a way and an understanding that might be likened
to the way and the understanding of certain men with horses. To Billy
Cobb an airplane was a sentient thing, with life and personality. The
sailor has the same feeling about ships. He would appraise a craft at a
glance and in that glance instantly catalogue its faults and its
talents, knowing with a knowledge that is not promulgated in the manuals
of the technical section just what might be expected of that
ship--whether she were sluggish on the level, fast, or very fast;
whether swift on the climb, long on the glide, tricky on the turns,
treacherous on the landings, and all the other points that a pilot must
canvass in his ship before he may invest her with his confidence.
He never asked more of a ship than was built into it, either. And it
outraged him to see anybody else do it.
“Hinky,” he said to his roommate one evening--this was during his first
detail as a tester at McCook--“if you treat that bus of yours the way
you’re doing any longer I’m going to lick you. It’s fiendish cruelty.
She ain’t made to zoom like that. What’s more, she’s got spirit and
she’s going to take it out on you some early morning. You watch. You’ll
try her patience an extra degree too much and we’ll have to pick the
dirt out of your teeth before we plant the daisies on you.”
And the records show that “Hinky” Morse did not live to get his licking.
For he rode in a baggage car the next night, inside a long white box.
Billy Cobb, sitting on the floor beside the casket--he refused the
comfort of a Pullman berth--blew his nose frequently, and to the baggage
man pronounced Hinky’s brutal epitaph, between stations.
“I feel pretty bad about this,” said Billy. “I don’t mind about him so
much,” indicating the pine box; “he asked for it and he got it. But you
should see what he did to the poor little ship. It’s birds like him that
give the service a black eye. Gosh darn it all!”
He blew his nose eloquently.
“I’ve got a fierce summer cold,” he explained.
“Oh, sure,” said the baggage man tactfully. “This flyin’s a mighty risky
game, anyhow.”
“It’s a damn lie!” exploded Billy Cobb, and put his handkerchief away
until the argument was over.
All of which may seem like a great deal of bootless rambling. And
rambling it is--but not bootless. The only way to illumine a portrait
properly is to light it from various angles.
The important thing to know about Billy Cobb is that he was intensely
earnest about the craft of which he was a master. He loved it and
revered it and lived for it only. If you believe that you may then
understand better how the things that happened to him came about as they
did, and perhaps--perhaps--you may think you perceive why.
It has just been said that Cobb lived only for his profession. That
should be qualified. There was a brief period when he lived only for
Jennie.
Until Jennie appeared Cobb had regarded women with the same indifferent
toleration that bespoke his attitude toward everything else outside the
level frontiers of the airdrome. But Jennie was of the air herself. She
commanded devotion the minute he set eyes on her. He was born to Jennie
just as he had been born to the air.
It was on a bright May morning at Langstrom Field--this was three years
ago, remember--that they discovered each other and for all spiritual
purposes were instantly merged into unity. Billy had just come from
officers’ call at headquarters where he had met the new C. O.--not for
the first time in his life. The old C. O., a man named Weifer, to
Billy’s intense gratification had departed to a staff detail with the D.
M. A. the night before.
“Staff is right!” mused Billy, reflecting on the demerits of the
departed. “But cane or crutch would be more accurate. He needed one to
keep his wings from limping. The big kiwi!”
Now a kiwi, “for the information of all concerned,” as the technical
bulletins put it, is the human counterpart of a certain type of training
plane with reduced wing surface which roars like a lion but never leaves
the ground.
Billy was still thinking anathema on the score of kiwis in general and
Weifer in particular when he reached the hangar and was confronted with
Jennie. His own scout ship was standing just outside the curtains with
the blocks at the wheels and the engine idling gently. The crew chief,
Hansen, was in the seat, holding back the stick. A little cloud of dust
eddied in the mild backwash of the propeller and blew outward across the
green expanse of the field. The little ship was straining at her blocks
and vibrating just a trifle along her stubby fuselage as a whippet
strains at the leash and trembles at the haunches on the scratch line.
She was settled back taut against her stocky tail skid, with her landing
gear gathered in a crouch beneath her stream-lined belly and her nose
lifted eagerly toward a perky white cloud that drifted temptingly across
the blue of a tender spring sky. Her four varnished wings--she was a
biplane--stretched out, it seemed to Cobb as he came up, in a pathetic
gesture of appeal to be off.
Jennie was standing just by the right wing tip, a caressing hand curled
lightly about the leading strut. She was drinking in the picture of the
eager little craft with a wistful eye. Billy appraised her at a glance,
much as he appraised airplanes. And it struck him suddenly that he
wanted to know this girl--wanted to know her right away, and intensely.
She was small--like a scout ship he thought. And her nose turned up, not
arrogantly but eagerly--also like a scout. And she was lithe and taut
and alert. A queer comparison flashed through Billy’s mind.
“By golly,” he exclaimed, half aloud, “she’s stream-lined!”
Ordinarily Cobb would have resented the presence of a woman on an
airdrome. In the first place he sensed an incongruity between most women
and airplanes--a lack of understanding and sympathy. In the second place
he was shy and uncomfortable in the presence of women anywhere.
But now without any of his usual gaucherie and diffidence with womankind
he went straight to Jennie, slipping off his oil-stained helmet and
exposing a shock of crumpled light hair that matched appropriately the
viking blue of deep-set steady eyes.
Jennie, watching him advance, saw that he was not tall, but heavy for
all that, a solid four-square pattern of a man, thick through and wide
across, with stocky legs that had a suspicion of a bow. She guessed that
he had ridden horses before airplanes, which was true.
Their meeting was singularly devoid of either form or reticence. They
might have been childhood companions. Yet neither had set eyes on the
other until that moment.
Jennie was the first to speak, forestalling the casual greeting and
introduction that had risen easily to Billy’s lips.
“Is she yours?” asked Jennie, patting the polished wing of the silver
scout.
“Mine and the government’s,” grinned Billy. “But she minds me best. Like
her, eh?”
“Don’t you?”
“You bet!”
“Then for goodness’ sake hurry and take her up top before she gets
hysterics waiting. Her plugs will be all foul with impatience if she has
to idle much longer!”
Billy shot a startled glance at the girl.
“Gosh,” he said, “you know ships, don’t you?”
“I love them,” said Jennie.
“Well,” said Cobb, “this little bus will stand a lot of affection,
sure.”
He slipped on his helmet and was fumbling with the chin strap as he
turned to circle the ship’s wing. Jennie laid a restraining hand on his
arm.
“Let me fix that for you,” she offered.
The gesture had the untaught spontaneity of twenty years of innocence.
There was no art in it, nor coquetry. It was the purest act of
friendliness. Which is probably why it was so deadly. Billy Cobb,
submitting, looked down at Jennie’s earnest face, her tightly pursed
lips, the little wrinkle of concentration between her slender brows; he
felt the small fingers working strap and buckle at his throat; and a new
religion reared its altar in his heart.
He waved the mechanic from the cockpit and swung under the top plane and
into the seat--but not until he had circled the ship twice with an eye
to details like cotter pins and turnbuckles, and a hand to the tension
of flying wires and fabric. Jennie could just see the top of his
leather-sheathed head turning slowly from right to left as he ran his
eyes over the cluster of dials on the instrument board. She heard the
engine drop and pick up as he tested first one magneto and then the
other. She saw the ailerons and tail surfaces fan the air tentatively as
he swung the stick and rudder bar.
Hansen, the mechanic, fell back to the tail and propped himself on the
empennage.
“All fast, sir,” he bawled. “Let her out when you’re ready.”
Notch by notch the throttle moved forward. The engine speeded in a
crescendo roar until it was screaming off a clear sixteen hundred r. p.
m., and mechanic, airdrome, and the hills of the distant landscape
disappeared from Jennie’s view behind the choking veil of dust that
billowed back whirling in the cyclone of the propeller stream. She did
not flinch nor stop her ears.
Gradually the uproar subsided, the dust cloud thinned, mechanic and
landscape reappeared, and the motor resumed its drowsy, chuckling drone,
like water bubbling in a giant boiling pot.
Jennie nodded a judicial nod of approval to herself. Nothing overlooked.
Nothing hurried. Here was a pilot who gave a ship a chance, a pilot
after her own heart! Billy had declared that the girl knew ships. She
did--and pilots too. The colonel, her father, had swung in the baskets
of the early army spheroids when the Wrights were still bicycle tinkers
with absurd dreams. She had entered life in the shadow of the hangars.
She had played dolls in the cockpits of old JN’s. The song of the
propeller and the blast of the exhaust had been her reveille and her
lullaby since days she could no longer recall. She knew the ships of the
air and the men that rode them, for they were her life and her people.
She did not know Billy’s name yet, but she knew Billy. He belonged, at
sight, to the elect of the upper levels.
He was waving a brown hand from side to side above the cockpit now, the
signal to clear away. The mechanic jerked the blocks from the wheels and
hung back against a wing while Billy eased the tail and swung the ship
around with gentle prods of the throttle, heading out for the field. His
upflung arm saluted Jennie as he taxied away toward the line.
She watched the take-off. Nose down, tail flaunting high, Cobb drove the
ship up the wind till it took the air cleanly without sag or falter. A
line of blue showed between the far-off hilltops and the hull of the
craft before he altered course or angle. Then the nose dropped sharply,
just a hair but just enough, the left wing flipped up, wheels and
undercarriage flashed into view against the silver of the ship’s belly,
and she was around in a vertical turn and heading full out along the
back track and up in a thirty-degree climb with the needle on the
altimeter registering, as Jennie guessed, a thousand feet a minute.
Back and forth above the field Billy shuttled the ship, his turns at the
end of each soaring leg crackling with precision. At five thousand he
caught the cloud, drove up under it, passed it, spun around on a wing
tip, and shot downward. The wisp of drifting vapor engulfed the airplane
for an instant. Then with gun cut and wires screaming the silver scout
emerged, whooping groundward with flaunting tail waving the astonished
cloud an impertinent Godspeed.
Billy’s landing was a classic. At three thousand over the downwind limit
of the airdrome Jennie saw him start his left-hand spiral. It began with
a steady, majestic sweep. Twice around the spacious rim of an invisible
half-mile funnel the silver airplane moved, her engine purring at an
easy twelve hundred. Then the inverted cone of its course grew tighter.
Higher and higher the flashing wings tipped as Billy inched back on the
tilted stick. Faster and faster the shortening circuit ran until ship
and pilot were whirling down the air like a chip in a racing vortex.
They reached a point where the diameter of the spiral was scarce two
airplane lengths. That was the spout of the funnel. And through the
spout they spun vertically, wings whirling in a silver disk about the
eccentric axis of the flashing fuselage.
At five hundred Billy set the stick at neutral and nudged the rudder
bar. The spinning stopped with calculated precision. Gently he drew back
on the stick. The tail dropped. She sailed along on level keel. The
grass came up to kiss her wheels. A procession of hangars shot past. She
hovered, caressing the grass blades with tire and skid. A faint
whispering answered as she touched the sod.
Another hundred feet she ran, the soil showing black in the torn wake of
the guttering skid. She stopped.
Jennie, reaching out a hand, touched her polished wing, incredulous.
“I never saw anything so perfect,” she breathed. “You brought her to my
feet!”
Perhaps already Jennie dimly perceived something symbolic in the landing
of Billy Cobb--at her feet.
She gave him her small firm hand to steady him when he heaved himself up
from the cockpit and leaped to the ground. They walked off the field
together and down the gaunt post street between bare rows of flimsy
frame huts.
Jennie stopped before one of them larger than the rest that boasted a
screen-inclosed veranda. Odd lots of weird furniture--the potpourri of
outlandish home equipment that bespeaks the officer of many “fogies” who
has gathered his store of household gods in all the ports of the seven
seas--littered the minute grass plots on either side of the cinder path
to the door. Sweating men in dingy overalls and campaign hats were
bearing it in, table by table, chair by chair, trophy by trophy, to a
running fire of humorous comment.
“I live here,” said Jennie.
“Oh,” said Billy, “you’re the new C. O.’s family, aren’t you?” It was
the first time he had considered who she might be or where she had come
from, so completely had he accepted her on sight.
“I’m Jennie Brent, yes.”
“Sure,” said Billy. “Now I get why you’re so--so--dog-goned--well, full
out!”
She colored very pleasantly.
“Oh,” she smiled--and in her smile there was a combination of pleasure
and wistfulness hard to picture and harder to interpret--“you think
that?” She turned wholly serious and wholly wistful. “Why?”
“Gosh!” he temporized, “I--I don’t know. But anyway, Colonel Brent’s
daughter----”
She flushed with pleasure and interrupted:
“You know daddy, then?”
“You bet!”
“Then you’ve got to come in for tea this afternoon. We’ll be all settled
by then. I’ll tell daddy you’re coming. Oh, and I almost forgot--how
shall I describe you to him?”
“But--but I was going to take a flying kiwi up for his pay hops.”
“Why,” exclaimed Jennie in mock astonishment, “I thought you knew
Colonel Brent!”
It was Billy’s turn to be astonished.
“What’s that got to do----” he began.
“Don’t you know what daddy does with flying officers who daren’t fly
without a nurse?”
“I--I’m afraid I don’t.”
“He lets them live on base pay until they’re transferred to the
infantry, where they belong. Daddy sees that they’re transferred, too.
So, you see, you’re not going to fly a kiwi this afternoon after all.”
“Hallelujah! What time’s tea?”
“Five o’clock. Who’s coming, please?”
“Bill Cobb.”
“I thought so,” declared Jennie.
“Hunh?” he grunted, taken aback. “How come?”
“I heard you were stationed on this post, and you check with the
specifications, sir. You are not without honor among your own people,
you know.”
She turned up the cluttered cinder path, annexing a bamboo stool with
one capable hand and a teakwood humidor with the other as she went.
Billy stood shamelessly and stared after her until she disappeared in
the house.