Standing with the colonel on the field, Billy Cobb had seen the wheel
drop. He had ordered the recall lights. But he foresaw that they would
do no good. Norris would not be looking back. And as for circling the
field, that was out of all expectation. It would have been suicide to
turn the _XT-6_ with the load she bore under five hundred feet altitude.
She would have laid twenty miles behind her ere that.
And so it turned out. Without a deviation to right or left she bore due
south, floundering through the heat waves, and in five minutes had
passed from view in the thick haze that hung on the burning air.
A picture flashed through Billy’s brain; a picture of a great gray ship
that floated down to Cristobal, circled the sun-bleached hangars,
settled groundward, touched, dropped a wing, somersaulted mightily,
crashed with a roar of rending steel, and lay still, a hideous mass of
riven junk. He saw the broken bodies of two men pinned beneath that
mass.
Norris must be warned. He must. If he knew, he could pancake in, stall,
and save young Crawley and himself, though not the ship, perhaps. A
dropped wheel was deadly if you didn’t know. But if you knew, it could
be dealt with.
He was trying to think. How could Norris be reached? Radio? The _XT-6_
had no radio. Cable Cristobal? Obviously. But something might happen to
the message. It might be delayed, or garbled in transmission. Not
likely. Still, there was that chance and this was a matter of life and
death. And again, if Cristobal got the message, what then? They would
send men out on the field to wave wheels at Norris. That was the classic
signal. Norris would understand, if he saw. But would he see? He might
not circle the field. His gas might be out and he might drive straight
in the moment he picked up the T. Cristobal would be notified by cable,
of course. But that wouldn’t be enough. It wasn’t sure.
Norris must be reached before he lifted Panama. And he could be reached.
Billy knew how. Then, with stunning impact, the conviction struck him.
There was only one way to save Norris, and only one man to do it. He,
Billy Cobb, was the man.
He tried to suppress the thought. Jennie! It would be the final blow to
her. But she might not know. He would warn the colonel. And if all went
well---- It wouldn’t, though. He had the washed-out pilot’s certainty of
that. No flyer in Billy’s condition of air nerves ever believes he can
fly without crashing. That is one of the unchanging symptoms that make
the disease. And Billy’s plan to warn Norris involved flying. It
involved not only flying. It involved landing--landing perhaps hundreds
of miles from an airdrome, perhaps in swamps, perhaps in mountains,
perhaps in the ocean, and almost certainly in the obscurity of night!
He racked his brain desperately for excuses. He found none excepting
Jennie. Could he do it? Could he leave her? Could he so much as straddle
a fuselage without swooning of dread?
Then the questions reversed themselves. Could he possibly escape it?
What would she say if he did--when she found out, when she learned of
John Norris’ death, and young Crawley’s, by the hangar lines of
Cristobal--when she knew who had let them go to that inevitable ending?
Was it possible that he could refuse this summons, that he could even
consider refusal?
Yet consider he did for a split second longer. There were other pilots,
good pilots, pilots without nerves, above all, pilots without the
slender thread of a sweetheart’s tenuous life tangled round their hearts
and bound up in their actions. Why not let them---- But it was begging
the question. Norris was Billy’s friend a hundred times more than
theirs. This was his own show. He could not put it off. And he knew what
Jennie would say if he tried.
He became aware that the colonel was eying him. Then he felt the
colonel’s hand on his arm.
“Are you going to do it, son?” asked the C. O. quietly.
Billy did not stop to wonder how Jennie’s father knew. It seemed to him
that his thoughts must have screamed aloud to every ear on Langstrom.
He gulped, trying to force an answer from his parched throat.
While he hesitated an orderly drew the colonel aside and spoke some
urgent message. The face of Jennie’s father was a gray mask when he
turned back to Billy Cobb.
Billy made his decision.
“I’ll go, sir. I’ve got to. But Jennie mustn’t----”
“I think,” said the colonel gravely, “Jennie will not know.”
“I told her I’d drop in tonight. You’ll fix up some excuse?”
“Yes--if she--asks for you--son.”
“All right, sir.” Billy swallowed hard. “Good-by--until--until----”
“Get going, son. Get going. You’ve lost too much time already. And catch
them, catch them if it takes the last drop of gas! I’m taking other
measures but I’m counting on you.”
It was five o’clock when Hansen cleared the blocks frantically from
Billy’s DH. Other ships had started in pursuit already. But Cobb
discounted them. They would fail one way and another. This was his show.
His last show, he thought grimly. Strangely, it wasn’t proving so hard,
now that his mind was set to it.
If it weren’t for Jennie---- Even Jennie worried him less than he could
have believed. Gradually, as he checked the DH over minutely, supervised
the fueling, tested the lights on the instrument board, and gave the
engine a brief run on the blocks, a mood of exaltation took possession
of him. Jennie would approve. She would have something to remember him
by--something worth remembering. And he was going to fly again! Going
back to the air! It would never be said of him that he had not stuck to
the last crash!
Hansen broke in on his thoughts.
“Here you are, sir,” panted the mechanic, and handed him a light wheel
filched from his own silver scout--the ship he loved and had not flown
for weeks. Hansen was gasping, dripping wet from the feverish exertion
of getting the deserted DH in flying trim for the long route ahead.
Billy tucked the wheel beside him in the cockpit.
“Engine O. K., sir?” queried Hansen.
“O. K.,” confirmed Billy, his heart beginning to race as the moment for
the take-off loomed.
“Shall I clear away?” said Hansen.
A last violent misgiving assailed Billy. He saw Jennie again, as he had
left her a few hours since, feeble, pale, her face a wistful wraith
against the pillow. He would not see that face again! A paroxysm of
yearning seized him. To leap from the ship, to race to her, to kiss her
once more, to lift her and hold her in his arms!
“Wait!” he gasped to Hansen. “Wait--I----”
What were those things she had said to him? “Back to the air--wrong to
think of yourself--Afterward--After----”
“Let’s go!” cried Billy Cobb. “Clear away!”
No rolling to the line, this time; no dropping of precious minutes in
deference to flying rules. Billy opened out the instant the blocks left
the wheels. He was off the ground and flashing into a turn before Hansen
realized that the ship was gone.
“Gosh!” grunted the amazed mechanic spitting out dust as he watched
Billy flip around a fifty-degree bank and scream off southward. “He’s
full out again, all right!”
Billy was far from full out as yet. But he was driving himself to a
semblance of that attitude which looked very much like the genuine
thing. The line of hangars streaked past as he bore on the stick, then
some trees and a huddle of farm buildings. Swiftly the landscape
flattened beneath him and in three minutes the world had lost its
familiar contour of wood and hill and valley and was changed to a slowly
crawling panorama, a giant painted map that rolled up out of the
haze-dimmed horizon and slipped back into the haze.
At five-forty a blur of smoky white emerged from the veil ahead, and the
glint of orange sunlight on water showed through the whirling disk of
the propeller as Billy stared into the south.
New York and the harbor!
He tore past Manhattan at three thousand feet. The lower city looked as
flat as Harlem, its jagged, towering sky line merged with the cable
slots of Broadway, humbled and erased from that height.
The yellow stubble fields of Jersey began their steady passage far
below. Off to the left a creamy thread of ocean beach slipped past,
flanked by a vast expanse of gray-blue surface that ran out and up into
the mist without a break. Little shreds arranged in parallels, north and
south, were steamers and windjammers in and outbound on the bosom of the
Atlantic.
A gray stain on the giant map appeared. Atlantic City!
Billy looked at his clock and began to calculate. The _XT-6_ had left at
four o’clock or thereabouts. She was rated for a speed of eighty miles.
It was half past six now. She should be two hundred miles along her
course, somewhere south of the Delaware Capes. He was pulling up on her
at a hundred and twenty an hour. Mathematically he should overtake her
two hundred and forty miles out, at seven o’clock. She should be in the
neighborhood of Cape Charles when he sighted her. If happily luck and
his calculations coincided there was an even chance that he could signal
Norris and cut off across Chesapeake Bay in time to make Douglas Field
by the last glimmer of twilight.
But if he missed her, which was something more than likely, for the sky
is an infinite hunting ground----
He wouldn’t miss her! He would prowl her course until she showed up if
it took the last whiff of gas in the tank. He dismissed Douglas Field
from his mind.
The world below was going dim. Off in the west the haze-draped rim of
the day still showed a pale yellow shot through with red and purple
pencilings. Away to the east night already was screening off the edge of
the ocean.
Stars began to show palely in the tenuous blue above as the DH thrust
the capes of the Delaware behind her tail skid. And below there were
more stars set in a gray-blue mosaic of vaguely hinted roads, fields and
homesteads, with here and there a constellation of little luminaries
that told of a shadowy town or hamlet beneath.
Steadily the mobile, twilit map of the East coast slipped northward,
marching slowly under the speck that swung suspended between the fleeing
day and the creeping night. Billy’s engine sang a full-voiced vesper and
the wires, quivering in the back draft, took up the burden on a higher
key. Whipping the air behind her, a mile to every thirty seconds, the DH
bore down the trail of Norris and the _XT-6_ with all twelve plugs
a-spark and a wake of red streaming spitefully along her flanks from the
lips of the glowing manifolds.
Lower Delaware, the coast line of Maryland, and then the dim finger of
Cape Charles!
Seven o’clock, the Chesapeake, and night drew on but not John Norris and
the _XT-6_. Ten miles to the east or ten miles to the west they might be
droning now, and still on their course. The highways of the air are
something wider than the boulevards below. There is plenty of room to
pass without a hail.
Off the tip of the Cape, Billy drew the throttle back. The _XT-6_ must
be somewhere thereabouts and he knew at what altitude he ought to spy
her. Two thousand feet, Norris had said the course would be. Billy
coasted down to fifteen hundred and circled round a ten-mile radius. If
Norris passed above, and within eyeshot, he would catch the silhouette
against the sky where some of the brightness of the departed day still
lingered. He waited half an hour. But the black outlines of a southing
plane that he raked the heavens for did not show.
He shook his head and opened out again, roaring with flaming manifolds
head on into the black masses of piled-up cloud that towered now against
the south, barring the road to Panama.
The storm closed in on him suddenly. It came with a stunning burst of
blue-white light and a blast that drowned the shouting of the manifolds
and the screaming of the wires. A giant hand reached down out of the
gray cloud bluff ahead, clutched the DH in invisible tentacles and swept
it irresistibly into the smother. The hand was the first cloud current.
And there were more waiting. Billy knew them. The clouds are full of
currents. They grapple with a ship. They hurl it back and forth from one
to another. They thrust it up. They stamp it down. They fling it crazily
from wing to wing. But there is no harm in them if you are not afraid.
And Billy was no longer afraid. He let them have their frolic, fighting
back with sweeping stick and swinging rudder bar.
Rain began to bite his face. It spewed back from the wind shield in a
hissing sheet. He switched on the dash light and laid his course through
the blackness of the clouds and the blinding of the lightning by compass
and the bubble of the inclinometer. The engine yelled defiance through
the turmoil as the DH tossed the spray of mist and raindrops over its
heaving shoulders.
His head buried in the cockpit, Billy watched the inclinometer go mad.
Between gusts he edged back on the stick, gaining fifty feet here,
dropping twenty there when some spiteful gust thrust him down again. But
the altimeter showed a steady average gain. And suddenly, on the crest
of a mighty leaping spout of air, the DH shot dizzily up into the calm
of the clear night and rode easily in the starlight above the roof of
the storm, a sea of gray-white billows stretched about her, beyond the
span of eye.
“Now where am I?” muttered Billy. “And where is John?”
He circled the two-thousand-foot level, peering along the sea of clouds
and up into the star-sprinkled bowl of deepening blue. Nothing! Clouds
below, stars above, and somewhere between a shadowy monster forging
toward the equator with two men in its maw--and in Cristobal a pair of
yawning graves!
Eight-thirty! An hour, perhaps a little more, to go. Above the roof of
the storm a waxing moon rode up and turned the gray expanse of cloud to
gleaming silver. Higher it drew. And looking down Billy saw the
moon-cast shadow of his own ship skimming along the bright cloud sea.
That gave him an idea. He began to peer restlessly from side to side and
downward. The thing he sought would be plain to see now if it crossed
his course. But was his course the right one? There was no way of
knowing to within fifty miles. The world lay veiled beneath. There was
not a beacon or landmark visible this side of the North Star. He could
only hope.
This much was certain, at least. He must be miles ahead of the _XT-6_.
He could stop the southward rush, now, and cruise the course at right
angles. Norris must pass him somewhere. And if he passed near enough----
Nine-thirty! The engine sang a soft lullaby of twelve hundred r. p. m.
Billy was hoarding fuel as he tacked above the silver sea.
Twenty miles east--twenty miles west, and the moonbeams flashed on the
burnished wings as the DH swung the turns with a lazy dip.
Ten o’clock!
Twenty miles east--twenty miles west.
The moon rode high and the silver sea began to break into islands and
headlands, with rifts of dusk between.