Chapter II

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.