The last reporter had asked the last question. The last photographer had
snapped the last shutter. And the _XT-6_ was turning her tail to the
farewell group at the hangar and her nose to the line. She crawled
painfully across the field, snorting protests from time to time when
Norris jabbed the throttles to keep up the headway. A squad of sweating
mechanics trotted about her like so many solicitous tugs escorting a
liner down the bay.
There was no wind to help her off the ground. The day was passing in a
bath of stagnant heat. Stripped though the big gray ship was of
everything but the barest necessities--she was not even carrying radio
--yet she was so heavily laden with fuel that there was some small doubt
if she could clear the field. A little wind to blow her up would have
been a welcome circumstance. But the only movement in the air was the
dancing of the heat waves.
Norris was confident he could coax her off. There was a fair
mile-and-a-quarter stretch available for the take-off, with no obstacles
higher than a man’s head for another quarter mile beyond. If the
wind-speed gauge played true he could drop the tail when the needle read
seventy and trust to the god of aviators to yank her wheels off the
grass. Once in the air it would be a question of what the cellars of
Panama could provide for a celebration. Norris was not concerned with
anything that lay along the two-thousand-odd miles between the
boundaries of Langstrom and the hangars of Cristobal.
The face of his companion, a likely enough youngster but with no
considerable experience of record-distance work, was grave and a little
drawn. Norris nudged him with his shoulder and grinned a reassurance.
“Buck up, bird!” he shouted above the synchronized beating of the
engines. “In five minutes we’ll be over the hump or out of the world.”
But he was taking no chances. Every inch must count. He held on doggedly
clear to the extreme corner of the field. Mechanics closed in when he
finally shut the throttles down. They set their humid shoulders to the
fuselage and swung the tail around.
Norris waved a hand.
“All clear?”
“All clear, sir,” came the answer.
He drove the throttles home, shoved the wheel forward, nudged the rudder
bar, and cocked an eye on the wind-speed gauge.
“It’s cocktails in Panama or candles at Langstrom!” he yelled.
The _XT-6_ moved a foot toward the Canal--two--three--ten. Her tail
began to rise. She set her nose on the low horizon and charged heavily
down the fairway, roaring with the voice of eight hundred horse. The
needle on the speed gauge trembled. It began to climb. It made thirty at
the quarter mile. At the half it pointed fifty-five and still rising.
When it reached sixty it hesitated and Norris stopped breathing. Then it
moved on upward--slowly--slowly.
A quarter mile more of grace.
“Cocktails or candles!” grunted Norris, and inched the wheel forward.
The last inch did it.
“Seventy!” proclaimed the needle.
“Cocktails!” answered Norris. He drew the wheel back lovingly.
The great gray wings tilted as the tail sank. They bit the air. The
first low bush shot beneath the spreader board.
“I like Martinis best,” said John Norris.
“Thank the Lord!” prayed the youngster on his left.
Two minutes later on Langstrom a red-faced mechanic burst from the
armament stores with a stubby blue pistol in one hand and a carton of
shells in the other. If Norris or his companion, Crawley, had looked
back then they would have seen a red Véry light burst, high above the
hangars. The mechanic with the stubby pistol was loading rocket shells
and firing as fast as his fingers could charge the piece. But the crew
of the _XT-6_ had their eyes on the road to Panama. The recall rockets
were unavailing.
And between their eyes and the undercarriage spread broad wings. They
did not know and they could not see that the _XT-6_ was minus a wheel.
The rubber-rimmed disk had snapped the retaining cotter pin, spun to the
end of the axle, and dropped off as the ship took the air.