Chapter VIII

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.

It would be candles, not cocktails, at Cristobal, unless----

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.

How much longer would the gas----

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.