And then he saw it, the thing his weary eyes strained to catch! A
scuttling black shadow it was that slipped out of a dusky channel, rode
swiftly across the bright expanse of a fleecy headland, and disappeared
back into the dusk again. That was it; the moon-cast silhouette of the
_XT-6_ snoring through the night to Panama!
Billy looked up and saw her, a great gray-winged ghost shouldering down
the meridians with the dim stars in the moon-bright sky winking off and
on as she passed them.
The DH woke with a roar. Streamers of flame broke from the trailing
manifolds. She set her nose to the moon and spurned five hundred feet
beneath her in one leap.
Perhaps a minute passed. Perhaps two. Then she rolled in like a nuzzling
whale calf alongside the _XT-6_ and dropped to the dogged pace of the
larger ship.
Billy could see two pale spots peering out at him from the black cockpit
in her snout, ten feet below. He guessed the amazement those faces must
wear. And indeed, so bright was the light of the moon, intensified as it
was by the reflected radiance from the clouds below, that he could
almost make out the features of Norris and Crawley as they raised their
eyes to question the import of his coming.
Floating along precariously with no more than bare flying speed Billy
took the spare wheel tucked beside him and waved it overside. The
moonlight drenched the form of a man who rose in the nose of the _XT-6_
and flung a gesture of understanding back at him.
Then the DH coughed and spat. And Billy slipped her off with engine
stalled. The gas was out. There was none in the emergency tank for the
very good reason that he had been flying on that for the past twenty
minutes.
Wheeling slowly the DH spiraled down the night. With the voice of the
engine stilled the wind whispered forebodingly around her tilted struts.
The wires sang a high-keyed dirge.
“It’s the last crash now,” said Billy Cobb. And then he thought of
Jennie and his throat went dry.
Into the mottled light and shadow, under the isles and headlands of the
breaking clouds, Billy and the DH coasted reluctantly. Below where the
moonbeams struck he could make out in patches the silver blue of fields
and the argent thread of a meandering stream. Far away down there a
single ruddy star marked the lighted window of a farmhouse. A
chalk-white road ran east and west. The road was straight. That meant
level country.
There were fields, anyhow. They weren’t swamps, he judged. But they
would be none too wide. At a thousand feet he circled one that promised
some degree of safety. It looked a smooth clear surface. If there were
no great amount of wind, there was an even chance. The black and white
of light and shadow showed the run of the furrows which gave him his
landing direction.
Once he would have made this landing with scarcely a qualm. But now,
after all he had been through, with his nerve weakened and his muscles
taut with fear, his judgment warped by overanxiety, could he do it? He
held his breath as he made the last flanking leg along the ends of the
furrows and turned in fearfully for the landing.
Roadside trees barred the way, and a string of bare poles with wires
swayed between. He must clear them to a nicety, perhaps a yard to spare,
no more, for the field was short in all conscience and at the far end he
could see what looked like a stone wall--a barrier of some sort, in any
case.
The trees reached up to clutch him down and barely missed their grip. He
had done this before. It was still with him, then, the cunning he had
thought was gone. Bare crosstrees strung with copper strands flashed by
at either wing tip. Whispering gratulatingly the DH settled groundward,
her tail dropping inch by inch as the furrows rose to brush the wheels.
She touched smoothly. And then Billy saw that fate was set against him.
A crazy gray form lay dead ahead, a weather-beaten plow, waiting like a
grim skeleton. He kicked the rudder bar violently. But too late. The
ship ground into the obstacle with a snarl. Her undercarriage crumpled.
She plunged her heavy nose into the rain-soaked earth, stopped with a
crash of snapping spars, and quivered her upflung tail helplessly at the
moon.
Billy felt his belt snap with the shock. Then he knew nothing more until
he saw Jennie coming toward him, sweet and luminous, along the moonlit
field.
She came to him slowly, picking her way across the furrows. He stepped
from the shattered wreck of the DH and went to meet her. She held out
her hands to him. He put his arms about her and kissed the smile that
met his lips.
He heard her whisper something.
“Only for a little while, Billy, my dear. Just to say good night. But I
shall be waiting--waiting dear, again--when the air is done with you--at
the last crash.”
She was gone. His arms were empty and aching. He raised his head and saw
that he was not standing in the furrowed field at all. He was slumped on
the flooring of the cockpit still, with a shoulder braced against a
spar. Blood was trickling down his face from a cut on his forehead.
He pulled himself up unsteadily, clambered to the ground, got a
handkerchief from the pocket of his leather coat, slipped off his helmet
and bound up the flesh wound as best he could. Then he stumbled out to
the road and staggered away toward a white building with one lighted
window that gleamed comfortingly through the green haze of the ground
mist in the moon’s rays.
He knew now what the colonel might have told him--but mercifully
withheld--five hours ago at Langstrom. Jennie had gone on to wait for
him in the place she called the Afterward. And strangely enough he was
not grief burdened. Rather happy instead. Happier than he had been
through many anguished weeks.
He had returned to the air. And in the end the air would bring him back
to Jennie.