A year slipped by. Then another. Billy Cobb was shunted from post to
post and detail to detail wherever his talents were most needed. The
third year saw him back at Langstrom again for the summer activities.
And chance and the D. M. A. brought Norris and Crawley and Weyman there
to meet him once more.
During those years since he had met Jennie that last time in the
moonlight of a Carolina night Billy had flown early and late, in season
and out, every trace of the old fear gone. And never a scratch to show
for his pains. He had run chances that woke the headlines of a continent
into vociferous black. He had flown ships that no one else would, or
could; strange outlandish maunderings of the engineer’s intemperate
brain. He had been lost in the Black Hills of the Dakotas; he had landed
with a stalled engine in the peaks of the high Sierras; he had drifted
through a night of tempest in the Caribbean. But he had never spent a
day in the infirmary to pay for his venturing. Death had stacked the
deck against him many times--and he had won regardless. The air that
needed men like Billy Cobb was clinging to him.
This summer he and Norris were wearing two bars on their shoulders and
rooming together again. Billy was at his old grind of propaganda hopping
mixed with engineering, up at dawn and to bed just ahead of the first
cock crow. He was gaunt again, but not haggard; weary, but not worried.
Norris was worried, though.
“Listen here, Bill,” he said, one early August night with the crickets
singing a sultry chorus outside the windows, “you’ve got to let up,
bird. You may not know what I know, but you’re killing yourself. That
high-altitude work you did last summer with the Kite weakened your heart
plenty. Weyman told me so. He had to stretch a point to let you by when
he gave you your last 609 in February, down at Douglas.”
“So?” said Billy, thoughtfully. “He kept that from me. Just mentioned
something about going easy, that was all. But I can’t go easy, John.
When I slow up I think too much about Jennie.”
“Well, you face another 609 in three weeks. It’d be worse than going
easy if you were thrown out entirely, I guess. Better think of that and
lay off. Give yourself a chance.”
Billy smiled a queer haunting smile and peered at Norris.
“John,” he said, “if I were a praying man I would pray morning, noon and
night that Weyman might throw me out the next time.”
“The hell, Billy! You----”
“Listen, John. Do you remember what I told you about seeing Jennie? And
what she said? She’ll be waiting. I haven’t a doubt about that. And all
I’ve been asking for in the last three years is a crash. Not deliberate,
you know. A real one. The sooner it comes the better. But I know it
won’t come until the air is done with me. If I disqualify when Weyman
gets at me it’ll be the end. I haven’t an idea how it will happen, but I
know it will. What was that you told me once--about things being
arranged? Well, that’s all arranged. Jennie promised me. At least, I
believe she did. ‘When the air is done with you,’ she said--‘at the last
crash.’”
“And you think that means----” mused Norris.
“Just what it appears to mean. When something happens to take me away
from the air I’ll go to Jennie. Maybe I’ll crash with somebody else, as
a passenger. Maybe I’ll contract whooping cough and die. But I’ll crash
off, somehow.”
“Well, Bill, perhaps. But that’s getting pretty literal. I wouldn’t be
so sure.”
“You would if you loved Jennie,” said Cobb.
Norris gave over his exhortations to moderation and sat smoking
silently. Billy rolled into his cot and fell off to sleep, in defiance
of the drop lamp on the table and the heat.
His roommate put his pipe aside at length and rose to douse the light.
Looking down he saw that Billy was smiling faintly in his sleep.
“You sure deserve to smile, old boy,” said Norris, and snapped off the
switch. “I wonder, now,” he grunted as he stretched himself on the
torrid sheets.
* * * * *
On August 20th Norris took a five-day leave. On August 25th he returned.
Coming by the guard at the gate he headed straight for the club with a
vision of sandwiches and coffee in his mind. He had missed his dinner in
order to make train connections. As chance provided, Norris had met
nobody from Langstrom on his way out to the post. What had happened on
the field that day was still the secret of the field as far as Norris
was concerned.
Weyman and young Crawley were sitting on the club veranda as Norris came
up the steps and through the screen door. He nodded to them and went
inside, dropping his suit case in the hall.
He had his sandwiches and his coffee and smoked a cigarette to top off
with, letting his thoughts meander idly, glad to rest comfortably after
the heat and the grime of the trains. Weyman sitting with Crawley
crossed his mind. Weyman recalled something to him. Oh, yes. Billy’s
609. It had been due that day. He must ask the surgeon how it turned
out. He went out to the veranda and drew a chair beside the two who sat
there.
“Where’s Bill tonight?” he asked.
He heard the surgeon’s chair scrape suddenly. Then he saw that Crawley
was eying him with consternation written all over his smooth face.
“Hell!” exclaimed Norris, sitting bolt upright. “What’s the matter with
you two?”
Weyman cleared his throat.
“Haven’t you heard, John?” he said huskily.
“Heard? Heard what? What should I hear?”
“Billy crashed, late this afternoon. He’s dead, John.”
“Good God! How---”
“Nobody knows,” put in Crawley. “It was pretty late. There was only that
old crew chief of Bill’s, Halliday, who saw it. Everybody else had gone
home or was back in the hangars or somewhere. He just floated in,
Halliday said, and made a regular landing. Then a tire blew and a wheel
buckled and it was all over. His head got the gun butts. Belt broke,
they say.”
“But that isn’t all,” Weyman took up the thread. “I think Halliday’s
brain is softening. He tells a yarn about Billy climbing out of the
wreck and babbling to somebody who wasn’t there and making weird
gestures----”
“Wait a minute,” Norris interrupted. “Somebody who wasn’t there, you
say? How do you know there wasn’t anybody there?”
“Why, good Lord, man, there simply wasn’t! Halliday saw nobody.”
“You think it strange, then--Billy’s babbling and gesturing before he
died?”
“Strange, certainly. Unless old Halliday----”
“Well, I’ll tell you something else that may sound strange, coming from
me who haven’t been near this post in five days. Doctor, isn’t it true
that when Billy went up for his 609 this afternoon you disqualified him
irrevocably, unconditionally, for good and all?”
The surgeon gaped his astonishment.
“Good night!” he gasped. “How did you know that? It’s a fact!”
“If I told you how I knew you’d disqualify _me_, you’d say I was crazy.
I’ll tell you some time--perhaps. But not tonight. I feel too low to
brawl with a skeptic. But just to show you that I’m not simply a good
guesser I’ll tell you something else.”
Norris paused impressively, then affirmed:
“Billy didn’t know you’d disqualified him when he went out to fly.
Something had interfered. You hadn’t told him.”
Weyman gaped again.
“John, you’ve got me going! It’s so. I was trying to think up some way
to break the bad news gently to Bill when a hurry call came in over the
phone. An enlisted man’s wife had convulsions. I told Bill I’d be right
back. But I was kept away for an hour and he must have thought
everything was all right, because he wasn’t in the infirmary when I got
back there. I sent an orderly to call him in but he was just taking off
when the man reached the field. See here, John, how in hell did you
guess that?”
“I didn’t guess it,” protested Norris. “It’s simple enough. Bill
wouldn’t have hopped if he’d known officially he was disqualified. He
never deliberately broke a flying regulation in his life.”
“Yes, he did,” recalled the surgeon. “I saw him do it. The day he went
after you with the wheel he crossed the T on the take-off.”
“Poor old Bill,” said Norris. “That was like him. Somebody else’s show
was at stake then.”
“Well,” said the surgeon, “you’ve explained your second guess, anyhow.
But I’m damned if I see how you figured so surely that Bill had been
disqualified. Nobody knows that yet excepting the three of us here.”
“Never mind how I figured it, doctor. I’ll try to make it clear another
time. But while you and Crawley are waiting for the explanation you
might ask yourselves if the way events shaped themselves this afternoon
wasn’t a little--a little--awesome. In a minute more, doctor, you would
have told Bill he couldn’t fly--that the air was through with him. But
something intervened at the critical moment. You were prevented. Then
you sent an orderly. The orderly reached Billy just in time to miss him.
_He_ was prevented. That’s twice running. Do you think those things were
accidents, or were they _deliberately arranged_?”
“Don’t be an idiot, John!” grunted the surgeon, who was careful to keep
both his mental and physical feet on the ground all the time.
But young Crawley, who belonged to the air, stared wide-eyed at Norris.
“Gosh!” he exclaimed. “Gosh, it certainly looks----” Then catching the
skeptical eye of the man of science frowning on him he held his peace.
* * * * *
Norris lay on his cot, staring into the dark. He was thinking of the
things Weyman and Crawley had just said, of their divergent reactions to
the things he had said to them, and of Billy. He couldn’t sleep. Whether
it was the heat or grief at the loss of his friend he did not know. He
rather thought it must be the heat, because he had lost many friends in
his time, and grieved, and slept for all his grieving. It would be
cooler on the open airdrome. He decided to go out and have a smoke. He
slipped into a soft white shirt, a pair of khaki slacks, and tennis
slippers, and left the hut.
A great moon silvered the silent hangars and the sweep of the
close-cropped grass across the broad field as Norris strolled with a
cigarette in his lips. He was glad he had come out. It _was_ cooler.
A sentry stopped on his beat and challenged sharply.
“Officer of the post,” said Norris and continued his stroll.
He came to the end of the hangar line. Beyond was the pilotage hut with
the flaccid landing sock drooping at its staff by the door. Outside the
last hangar stood an empty gasoline drum beside a girder. Norris sat
down on the drum and leaned against the girder.
He had not thought it would be so cool out here. Decidedly this was
pleasanter than the clammy sheets inside the torrid hut. He closed his
eyes contentedly. His cigarette dropped to the ground and went out.
A little noise startled him. He must have been dozing. He opened his
eyes to situate the noise. Somehow it sounded like a kiss. Then in
wonderment he stared toward the near-by hut where the sock was stirring
just a little in a vagrant draft.
Somebody was standing there in the moon-cast shadow. Somebody was
moving. Not a sentry. A sentry would not move like that. Then Norris saw
that there were two people in the shadow, not one. They walked together.
At the edge of the shadow they paused. And he heard that little noise
again, the noise that had startled him. It was such a noise as tokens
the parting of close-pressed lips.
The two at the edge of the shadow stepped a little apart. They emerged
reluctantly into the silver light beyond. Then, so close they passed
that Norris might have reached a hand and touched them, Billy Cobb and
Jennie Brent walked for the last time along the row of hangars and
disappeared together, vanishing into the moon mist as a silver ship
might fade into a cloud.
The moon, looking down, saw a sentry pacing the hangar line. The only
other life in sight from end to end of Langstrom Field was a man in
khaki slacks, a white shirt, and tennis slippers, perched on a gas drum,
his head thrown back against a girder, who slept with a smile on his
face.
[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the December 7, 1923 issue
of The Popular Magazine.]