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Title: The last crash

Author: Kenneth Latour

Release date: August 1, 2023 [eBook #71313]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Street & Smith Corporation, 1923

Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAST CRASH ***


[Illustration]




                             THE LAST CRASH

                           By Kenneth Latour

       Author of “The Sky Call,” “The Vindication of Smith,” Etc.


    Most aviation stories are just good stories with aviation in
    them. We have no objection to yarns of that sort. Those that
    we have published have been decidedly good reading. This
    aviation story is different--just how different you will
    realize as you read it. “The Last Crash” is something new in
    fiction--a real air story. Its author is a man who knows not
    only the technique of the airman’s trade but also its
    spirit. --The Editor

John Norris, whom you will remember as the man who flew the first
straightaway from Langstrom Field to Cristobal, had a touch of the
mystic in him, for all he was the sort of a man that good men favor. And
in this, it may interest you to know, Norris wasn’t different from most
men of his calling. He was different, however, in this respect, that he
was outspoken with his ideas about unearthly matters whereas most airmen
keep their mysticism to themselves.

If Norris knew you and liked you he would tell you stories--stories to
prove his conviction that “things do not _happen_; they are _arranged_.”
He was a fatalist, you see.

Being a fatalist is one of the characteristic peculiarities of the flyer
which he shares, perforce, in common with other men whose professions
keep their spiritual elbows raw with constant rubbing against the harsh
specter of sudden and violent death.

“There must be an explanation for the things that happen in the air,”
Norris once affirmed. “The papers call them ‘accidents’ but don’t you
believe it. They aren’t accidents. They are consummations.

“I think this: A man is given a course to run; he runs it; and then he
is wiped out. The manner, the time and the place of each man’s last
crash is already marked up on somebody’s office tickler at Cosmic
headquarters.

“Otherwise--why? Why should men like Hawker and Alcock, with all their
biggest risks behind them, wash out on puny little expeditions that they
undertook with no more thought than they would have given to drinking a
cup of tea? Why should a ship running free and smooth catch fire in the
air, for no good reason that is earthly?

“There is a reason, of course, but it has nothing to do with physical or
mechanical flaws, if you ask me. The flaw is not the cause. You’ve got
to look for the cause in something behind the flaw. Did you ever hear of
‘Last Crash’ Cobb?”

The story of Billy Cobb, and how he came to his last crash, was one of
Norris’ classics. There is no denying that it points a moral if you want
to look at it that way.

                   *       *       *       *       *

This is what Halliday, the old crew chief, told the
accident-investigating officer.

He was standing just outside hangar number three about six-thirty of
that simmering August evening when Captain Cobb came in with _No. 59_.
The pilot had executed his customary landing, a tight spiral directly
over the field, followed by a spin and two accurately timed fishtails
which brought the ship to ten feet where it leveled off up the wind and
hovered swiftly to the ground.

Up to this point nothing unusual. Then the fantastic. A tire burst as
the wheels touched. The crew chief heard the sharp report. A wheel
crumpled. The right wing lurched sharply up and _No. 59_ dove into a
sudden cart wheel.

The crew chief was heading across the field, calling “Ambulance!” as he
went, before the tangle of ripped canvas, splintered spars and tortured
wires came to rest on its back, quivering.

There followed a significant stirring amid the mass of débris. The crew
chief uttered a prayerful ejaculation of relief and stopped running. He
saw a man emerge from the wreck of _No. 59_. It was
Cobb--unrecognizable! His face was black with blood; his goggles---- But
the rough preliminary transcription--slightly reconstituted--from the
sergeant major’s stenographic notes of the investigation tells the
amazing incident in the words of the only close-up witness.

“Well, sir,” the crew chief deposed, “like I said, I stopped when I seen
the captain was starting to crawl out. I thought he was all right. I
seen officers crawl out o’ lots worse’n that, in my time, an’ start
cussin’ as healthy as you please.

“But the minute I got a good look at Captain Cobb I knew different. You
couldn’t see his face for blood, an’ by the way he put out his hands,
kind o’ feelin’ ahead of him, I knew he was blind. His goggles, like you
seen, was all crushed into his eyes.

“Well, sir, he staggered a step, or maybe two. Me, I was sort o’
paralyzed. I just stood an’ watched. The captain was a good friend o’
mine an’ it was my ship done it. I seen him stiffen up all of a sudden.
Then he laid himself down careful, just like he was easin’ into bed, you
might say. He didn’t fall, sir; he just laid down like he meant to be
comfortable.

“Well, then he raised up a little on one elbow, an’--an’---- Now, sir,
you says I got to tell you what I seen an’ I’m tellin’ you. You don’t
have to believe it, sir. But I wasn’t more’n twenty feet away, sir, an’
I _seen_ this, an’ heard it, too. Maybe it didn’t happen that way, but I
_seen_ it that way!

“The captain he raises up, like I said. An’ he appears to be starin’ at
somethin’ just over his head. He hadn’t his eyes any more but he was
starin’ just the same, _without ’em_. He kind o’ rubs his free arm
across his eyes--what was his eyes, that is--an’ his sleeve wipes away
the blood on his face. Then I seen that he was smilin’, sir. Yes,
smilin’! I ain’t never seen no smile like that, an’ I hope I never will!

“Well, sir, it might ’a’ been a second an’ it might ’a’ been ten minutes
the captain stays that way, propped up, starin’ at nothin’ my eyes could
see, an’ smilin’. Then he speaks. I could hear him plain. His voice was
as strong as mine right now and I could tell by it he was awful glad
about somethin’.

“This is what I hear him say: ‘Hello, Jennie, sweetheart. It’s the last
crash and you kept your promise. Let’s go!’

“He said that. You won’t believe it. Nobody believes it. But he did. An’
when it’s said he lays down again, flat on his back an’--an’--reaches up
with both hands. He seems to find somethin’ to take hold of there in the
air. For a minute I can’t make out what he’s doin’. Then I get it. He is
holdin’ somebody’s head close to his face--at least he thinks he is--an’
he is--he is--well, he is kissing somebody!

“After that, sir, his hands drop an’ he lays there an’ never moves
again. When I get to him he is dead as far as I can see. He’d got the
machine-gun butts in the head, the way they all do.

“I don’t know nothin’ more, sir, except that a little ways back from
where the ship crashed I found a bit of wood with a big nail in it.
Which might explain how that tire come to bust.”

How much of the old crew chief’s deposition actually found credence with
the members of the crash board and the personnel generally of Langstrom
Field, all of whom, of course, came into possession of more or less
elaborated versions of the story, cannot be definitely determined.
Publicly the old mechanic was scoffed out of court. The C. O., who was
worried for the state of his pilots’ nerves, took occasion to call the
talkative witness into private session and threaten certain unspeakable
consequences if he let his tongue grow any longer.

So that the affair was a three-week sensation, with everybody talking
about it and everybody proclaiming intrepidly that it was all
damfoolishness and very bad medicine for a flying field. There are
certain things that flying men always affect to disdain--and always take
more seriously than anybody else.

There was one particular discussion of the case, on the night of the
crash, in the lounge at the officers’ club. But to appreciate what
passed between the three, Norris, Weyman, and Crawley, who held that
quiet conference you must know many things that went before.




                                  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.




                                  III.


It is told of Billy Cobb that he never had to woo the air.

The first instructor to take him up reported back to the pilotage office
an hour later in a semihysterical condition.

“Say,” he demanded of the senior instructor who had assigned him to
introduce Cadet Cobb to the opening chapter of the flying primer,
“what’re you trying to do--kid me?”

“Kid you! How come?”

“This What’s-his-name cadet--this Cobb! If he’s a cadet I’m an ostrich!”

“What’s the trouble with Cobb?”

“Trouble with Cobb? Trouble with me, you mean! He’s been showing me how
to fly for the last half hour. Come out to the line. You’ve got to see
this!”

Of course it was weeks before Billy was officially turned loose and
rated for his wings. The office of the D. M. A. is a stickler for
preservation of the forms and appearances. But actually the marvel
spread through hangar, shop, and barrack that day. Cobb was “over the
hump!”

It was the first day, mind you, he had ever warped a wing or kicked a
rudder bar. He had laid his hand on the airplane and the airplane in
that instant had become his to do with as he willed. And this was so, of
course, precisely because some occult well of sympathy within him taught
the man exactly what he must will to do--and what must not be willed.

There was that same sympathy in him where Jennie was concerned. And he
won her, as he won the air, instantly--without wooing. His spirit laid
its spell upon her heart just as his hand had set its cunning on the
airplane. The air and Jennie. Both became his in the hour of meeting. He
was not then aware of it but when Jennie Brent had slipped the strap
through the buckle of his helmet at that first encounter she already
belonged to him. The gesture was the first signal between them of
dedication on her part and consecration on his. Once again Bill Cobb was
“over the hump.”

In all their brief life together the analogy between Jennie and the air
with respect to Billy Cobb holds true. Thus, it was nothing but the idle
matter of appearances that kept Cobb waiting those weeks succeeding his
conquest of the airplane before his pilot’s rating was bestowed. And it
was the same matter of appearances that withheld for a space the open
avowal of Jennie’s surrender. A woman has need to be at least as jealous
of the forms as the D. M. A.

Eight weeks to a day after Billy’s first encounter with the air--in
’seventeen things happened faster in the service than they do now--his
rating had come through. Was it blind coincidence, or was it a cunningly
fitted fragment in that symbolic mosaic of analogy which made their
relationship so remarkable, that Jennie’s overt surrender should
likewise have chanced exactly eight weeks after their first meeting?

June was passing in the farewell blaze of an incomparable sunset. A
little wind wandered curiously into the airdrome bringing a breath of
grassy freshness from the tablelands beyond the coastal hills to mingle
with the acrid bouquet of fresh-burned castor oil and gas. It rippled
the canvas curtains of the Bessoneau hangars where they stood in a
massive row, shoulder to shoulder, silent, placid, like elephants
chained and sleeping, long shadows stretched behind them. It quivered
the flaccid form of the landing sock, hanging nerveless against its
staff by the door of the pilotage hut at the end of the hangar line. But
most of all it stirred the heart of Jennie, standing near an open
Bessoneau, peering steadfastly into the gold and glory of the west, and
waiting. For at the same time that it kissed and cooled her cheek it
murmured in her ear a faintly intoned chantey--the song of a distant
homing motor.

Billy was coming at last! He was an hour overdue, the longest hour
Jennie could recall. But it was all right now. She could hear the
singsong shouting of the full-out engine clearly.

“Billy is coming!” That was the burden of the engine’s song that reached
her down the wind. Jennie marveled at the sweetness of that music.

Her eyes confirmed the message of the wind. High above the purple summit
of a rose-framed thunder head she made him out, a buoyant purple speck
in a dazzling flood of wine-clear gold. She watched the speck until it
grew to a flake, the flake until it became an airplane, the airplane
until it roared above her head, crossed to the downwind limit of the
field, spun about with a flash of upflung wing and flirting tail, and
shot for the landing with a sudden hushing of the deep-voiced engine.

The silver ship rolled up with friendly little snorts and chuckles and
stopped beside her. Billy took her upstretched hand and jumped down.
They left the plane to Hansen and his crew and walked away together in
the twilight down the row of brooding hangars.

“Oh,” Jennie sighed happily, “I am glad, Billy!”

“Glad? Why, particularly, Jennie?”

“I--I don’t know. How was the ship today?”

“Better than ever, Jennie.”

He paused, hesitating to voice the thought that followed, groping, too,
for words to give it form. Then:

“Do you know,” he said, “there’s something about that ship and you,
Jennie, that---- Well, what I mean is that when I am with that ship and
when I am with you I sort of feel--the same way. Kind of comfortable
and--and, well, happy, Jennie. Do you know what I mean?”

He felt her sway toward him. He felt her hand on his arm.

“Perhaps”--she answered, a little breathlessly, “perhaps I do,
Billy--tonight!”

“Why ‘tonight,’ Jennie?”

“Because--because----”

They walked on with no more speech until they reached the pilotage hut
beyond the hangars. It was dim and silent. They sat down, side by side,
on the low step before the door. Excepting where Hansen and his crew
were tucking the silver ship to bed by the flitting light of a
trouble-shooter’s lamp, two hundred yards away, no life appeared
anywhere on the glooming expanse of the quiet field.

“Jennie,” said Billy Cobb, “I know why that little ship reminds me of
you.”

“Why, Billy?”

“Because I love it, too.”

There was just enough of the blue-gray twilight left for Billy to see
the widening of her eyes at that and the accentuation of the wistful
curve at either corner of her mouth.

She sat considering his face intently. Then she turned away, leaned a
little forward, clasped her hands about her knees, and stared off at
something he could not see--something in the remote distance, beyond the
faintly outlined crests of the western hills.

“You are sure,” she asked at length, very softly, “that it is true--what
you have said about the ship and me, Billy?”

“I am sure,” he said. “It is true now, it will always be true,
Jennie--till--till the last crash.”

He thought she shuddered just a little. Then:

“Why do you always say that--that--about the last crash, Billy?”

“Why--why, I don’t know. Just a habit--means something a long ways off,
I guess.”

“Oh!” said Jennie, a faint tremor in her voice. “I--I hope so, Billy.”

“Why, Jennie----”

“Nothing, Billy--nothing at all. A foolish idea. It’s gone.”

She paused, looked away, then turned her face to his again.

“And just what,” she questioned, a little timidly, a little eagerly,
“did you mean, Billy, about--about the ship--and--and me?”

Billy Cobb drew a deep breath.

“I will show you--dear,” he said.

At ten o’clock a single figure moved through the moon-cast shadow of the
pilotage hut. At the edge of the shadow the figure paused. There was a
little noise--such a noise as tokens the parting of close-pressed lips.
The single figure became twain. Billy Cobb and Jennie Brent emerged
reluctantly into the argent flood that bathed the airdrome and passed
again along the row of canvas stables where the airplanes slept, under
the silver benediction of the moon.




                                  IV.


The wedding was set for late October. Jennie had sounded out the
attitude of authority toward an earlier consummation.

“Any time you say, youngster,” agreed the C. O. “But the service needs
your bridegroom pretty badly this summer. Wouldn’t October do?”

“Daddy! Over three months!”

Old “Full-out” Brent, tall and lean, keen-eyed, straight-nosed,
straight-browed, square-chinned, and square-souled, looked down at his
daughter. A whimsical smile twitched his short mustache.

“I remember a similar occasion,” he reminisced slowly, “when a girl
waited three years for me, because the service asked it.”

Jennie studied her father’s boots.

“I forgot,” she pleaded. “I belong to the service, too.”

Billy took it philosophically.

“Come to think of it,” he acquiesced, “there is a lot to do around here
this summer. And it takes at least six weeks to be decently married.
October’s a bully month, too.”

During July Billy worked prodigiously. It was unreasonably hot, and the
engineering section, which Billy directed, got the reaction in the shape
of an endless procession of stricken motors.

The post was overrun, too, with visiting officers of every clan and
nation of the army--officers of the line, officers of the staff,
officers of the quartermaster and ordnance and signal corps, officers of
the reserve, shavetails of the National Guard, and even a detachment of
cadets from the Academy--most of them detailed to look on and grow wise,
some of them detailed for technical work, but all of them crowding,
elbowing and clamoring for a taste of the air.

And Billy did his bit with the rest of the post to satisfy them--so much
so that five hours of grueling work with the stick, in heavy DH’s, with
the air a bedlam of cross-chopping heat bumps to make it more
interesting, was an average component of his routine day. This, you
understand, “in addition to his other duties” with the engineering
section.

His working day started on the flying line an hour before reveille and
ended, as a rule, in the repair shop, any number of hours after tattoo.
He might have side-stepped the flying, in his capacity of engineer, but
he would not. He knew that the ground lubber who has once made a flight
talks about it with expansive enthusiasm for the rest of his life. And
he made it his job to see that no ground lubber left Langstrom Field
without a mouthful of nice things to say about the air. Smooth ladylike
flights he gave them, ironing out the heat bumps to the limit of his
ability with deft twitches of the stick, wheeling ponderously around the
turns, emphasizing the ease and simplicity of flight, minimizing the
intricacy and hazard.

“Propaganda hopping,” he called it.

In one sense he welcomed the heavy program. It kept him too busy and too
tired to dwell on the tantalizing weeks that stretched drearily ahead
between him and the dazzling goal of October. But the grind told on him
heavily. Only his burning enthusiasm for the advancement of the flying
idea kept him at it. No other pilot on the field--and there were other
enthusiasts at Langstrom that summer--could have equaled the pace he
set. The groundsman has no conception of what air fatigue can do in a
few hours. Cobb grew lean and gray. The change was gradual but by August
it had become distinctly noticeable.

And Jennie, watching him jealously, protested at last.

“Billy,” she chided one steaming evening when, for a miracle, he had
escaped the slavery of the shop--or rather repudiated it out of sheer
weariness--“you are a wreck! I suppose you’ve got to keep the Liberties
turning up but you might let down a little on the propaganda hops. Are
they necessary, so many of them?”

“I think they are. Aviation is in a bad way, Jennie. You know that. It’s
crash, crash, crash, the way these barnstormers at the summer resorts
and half-winged kiwis on some of the army posts handle ships. We don’t
crash on this field. Not since the colonel came and weeded out the duds,
God bless him. We don’t joy hop. We really do aviate. And the more of it
we do, the better for the general average, don’t you see? Why, we’ve
scored a hundred hours a day with only thirty ships active since July
first. And not a shock absorber sprained yet, excepting by some of these
outside birds from the reserve and the guard. That’s something to shout
about. That’s what makes the ground grippers take heart. It’s the sort
of thing we’re doing here this summer that makes the good name of
aviation, in the long run--not speed records and cross-continent
flights. It’s the good work, Jennie, and we’ve got to keep it up--keep
it up till the last crash!”

Jennie drew a quick breath.

“But must you wear yourself out to do it, dear? Is it--is it quite safe
for you to go on when you’re so tired? Can’t you ease off, just a
little?”

“Really, I don’t mind. I’m tired, maybe, but aside from that I feel
great. And winter’s coming. Lots of rest then. In the meantime, every
outsider I take up top, Jennie, is going to head straight away from this
post and ‘tell the world.’ Fly ’em sweet and often and land ’em safe.
They never forget it! Keep at it everlastingly. That’s the only way.
Till the last crash!”

“Billy! You’ve said that twice tonight. Please--please don’t!”

“Don’t what, Jennie?”

“That gruesome phrase about the last crash! Please--I don’t like it,
Billy. It--it makes me think!” She shuddered.

Cobb was startled. He peered at her. They were sitting on the
screen-inclosed veranda. Inside the house, where Colonel Brent was
reading, a table lamp stood by a window and its shaded light, shining
through ruffled chintz curtains, illumined Jennie’s profile with a soft
glow. The subdued radiance was just sufficient for Billy to apprehend
the fleeting contraction that swept her wistful features like a black
gust. Just sufficient, but more than enough to show him the thing which
then and there unsettled and reversed the entire philosophy he had lived
by until that moment.

For the thing he had seen on Jennie’s face in that swift flash of
revelation was more than distaste, concern, or anxiety. It was stark
fear!

“Jennie!” he cried. “What----”

She bit her lip and looked away. The secret was out; the secret she had
been trying to hide even from herself. She was afraid--terribly
afraid--of the air. And she had spent her short life disdaining folk who
were guilty of that same weakness!

But that was before she had met Billy. Then the air and the folk and the
things of the air had been her chief interest. It had seemed to her
natural and right that the air should be served with tribute of limb and
of life, if need be. For that was the creed in which she had lived,
under the tutelage of her father. Now she had a new creed, a new
religion. The air had become a secondary faith. Billy Cobb was all that
really mattered to her. He obscured all the old horizons she had known.

Yet, even as she realized this, she knew there was no alternative for
what must lie ahead. It was Billy Cobb, the man of the air, that she
loved, after all. As anything else, in any other rôle, she would not
have loved him at the first. As anything else she could not think she
might love him to the last. There could be no turning off or backing
out. She must take him and the air of which he was an integral part
together. She must either master her fear or live with and endure it.

Miserably she sat, with averted face, and stared into the dark, until
she found the answer. She felt his troubled eyes seeking and questioning
and turned at last to face him--and the issue.

“Billy, dear,” she said, “I am sorry--oh, so sorry--that I couldn’t
spare you this. I scarcely knew it was there, myself, you see; and it
popped out tonight, and you saw it, before I had learned to handle it.
But sooner or later it must have come out. I couldn’t have locked it up
inside me forever. So perhaps it is just as well we should have it out
now, and over with.”

“You mean you really worry--about my flying, Jennie?”

“You have seen it, Billy. A lie about it now would do no good--only
tantalize you.”

“But, Jennie, you never----”

“I know, dear. I never did, before.”

“Then why now?”

“Because--because--oh, it’s hard to talk of this, Billy dear! Because I
never had anything quite--quite so--so precious at stake!”

“Oh, my gosh!” groaned Billy Cobb.

He hitched his armchair closer and took her hand in both of his.

“Listen, Jennie,” he pleaded; “this isn’t so. It can’t be so, it simply
can’t! It’s the--the heat. And this--well, this waiting--for October,
you know. Your nerves---- Look here! If I thought this would last
I’d--yes, by gosh--I’d chuck----”

“No!”

The word was scarcely more than whispered but it carried the intensity
and arresting power of an outcry.

“Billy! That was just what I was afraid you’d try to say. Don’t you see?
You mustn’t--you can’t! Why, I wouldn’t marry you if you did. I’d hate
myself too much. And--yes, it seems impossible but I know it’s true--I
shouldn’t love you, either, as I do now. It’s so strange, so
contradictory! I don’t try to understand it but I feel it and know it. I
am afraid for you when you fly yet I couldn’t care for you, not wholly,
if you didn’t. There is a part of you that belongs to the air. And that
is the part that I love best. With that gone----” She dared not go on to
the completion of the thought.

Billy Cobb drew a deep breath. He leaned far forward and kissed her. And
when he took his face from hers there were tears on his cheek. But his
own eyes were dry. He kissed her again and she clung to him forlornly.

At length they drew apart. Billy took her hand again and patted it.

“I understand,” he comforted. “It’s the same part of you that I love.
The part that makes me think of airplanes way up top, and clouds, and
the way an engine sounds, far off, when the wind is blowing. It may be
hard on us to stick it out. Hard on you, because you worry, and hard on
me because of you. But it would be a lot harder the other way. We
couldn’t stick that out--not together--could we, Jennie?”

“We never could, dear. We’d be ashamed to look each other in the face.”

“It’s settled then. We’ll stay with it.”

“We’ll stay with it--with the air, dear--until--until the--the last
crash!”

He gathered her up and folded her in his arms.




                                   V.


As Jennie had said, her emotions, touching Billy Cobb and the air, were
conflicting and contradictory. Yet they were not difficult to render
into logic.

This girl who had breathed the atmosphere of the airdrome all her life
must inevitably have done one of two things; either grown to hate and
fear the element that exacted mortal toll of its servants or grown to
worship it. And she had done the latter. For she had the intellectual
stability to perceive that if men were killed by the air it was because
of their own unworthiness, the imperfections of themselves and of their
implements of flight, not because of any inherent malignity in the air.
And she foresaw with clear conviction the coming of a day when toll
would no longer be exacted, when man’s mastery of the air would be at
least as secure and complete as his domination of the sea and the land.
So she did not hate the air. For she knew it a reluctant and involuntary
killer, asking nothing better than to abandon its rôle of murderous
tyrant and assume the benevolent part of the willing and faithful jinni.

Instead of hating the air she regarded it, therefore, as a deity more
sinned against than sinning. And it was natural that, in Jennie’s eyes,
the early airfarers, the men who offered their lives to the cause of air
conquest, should be glorified. She invested them with the romantic
glamour that is the meed of the pioneer in every fresh field of hardship
and hazard. She set them above other men. In fact, she considered the
existence of other men scarcely at all. And when they did cross her
thoughts she saw them simply as an alien race of animated lay figures
that did not live on airdromes. She could not conceive of a complete,
satisfactory and thoroughly real man who should be anything but a flyer.

It was inevitable, therefore, that her choice for the man of men should
fall on a flyer. And it was impossible that the man who won her favor
should hold the precious gift unless he kept faith with the air--as
Billy Cobb would have phrased it--to the last crash. For she could
respect none but the men of the air, the only men she knew and
understood. And there is more depends upon respect in love than many
folk suppose.

On the other hand, Jennie was a woman. She was a very complete and
thoroughgoing woman. And she had her full share of the woman’s primitive
maternal instinct, which is the protecting and sheltering instinct. The
primitive-woman part of Jennie was a quite distinct part. It was not a
reasoning component. It was emotional solely and concerned with the
fundamental realities, not with intellectual ideals.

The intellectual, idealistic part of Jennie Brent loved Billy Cobb the
flyer, the pioneer, the potential martyr for a cause. But the
instinctive-woman part loved Billy Cobb the man. And the maternal urge,
the sheltering element in Jennie the primal woman demanded the
protection of Billy the man regardless of ideals and abstract
traditions. It revolted violently at the grisly vision of his crushed
and battered body lying some day in a crazy pyramid of wreckage.

Which explains convincingly enough why Jennie Brent was at the same time
afraid to trust her lover to the air and fearful of winning him from it.
But this much, as she told Billy, was evident to her. Whether he flew or
not the woman of her would always love him. While, if he turned traitor
to the air, shed the romance of his calling, and became one with the
animated lay figures who lived outside the airdrome, the intellectual
ideal-worshiping part of her could no longer love him--even though his
renunciation of the air were for her sake only.

And so, with rare understanding and insight, she made her decision. The
protective urge which had come with love and bred fear must be dominated
and stilled--or, failing that, the anguish borne patiently. The
alternative was even worse than the vision of Billy in the wreckage.

Out on the screened veranda Billy held her close and long. Off in the
dark, where the squat little huts of the post lay along in orderly,
shadowy rows, lights in windows began winking out, one by one. Then a
tremulous cry floated over hut and hangar.

Taps!

Billy released her. They crossed to the door. She put a hand on his arm.

“It will be all right, dear. I have been foolish. Don’t mind me. I feel
so much better already, now that I have told you! But you mustn’t think
of it any more--never. I can beat it. I am sure I can. And of course you
will be safe! The air won’t hurt two people who love it as much as you
and I do. Now, mind! Forget all about this. I promise you I shall. Good
night, Billy dear. And dream about--about October.”

But Billy did not dream about October. He dreamed of crashes. That was
something he had never done before. The horrible thing about the crashes
he dreamed of was that they didn’t hurt him--they hurt Jennie. She
seemed always to be there watching when they came, looking on in frozen
helplessness, speechless, anguished, mortally stricken, while shadowy
figures dashed toward the wreckage to drag him out, dead.

Once his ship caught fire. And then he saw Jennie go white, sway, and
sink to the ground, to lie there pitifully at peace until some fool
revived her and brought back her hopelessness.

Cobb was not aware in these dreams of the absurdity of dying and
watching himself die at the same time. It seemed quite natural and
horribly real and vivid.

Some time before morning the dreaming stopped. And all that remained to
Billy of that night of horrors when he opened his eyes in the gray light
of the oncoming day was an oppressive sense of foreboding.

“What’s the matter with me?” he muttered sitting up in his Q. M. cot and
blinking questioningly at the recumbent form of his roommate, Norris,
who was snoring comfortably in another cot. Norris did not answer.

Out on the airdrome some one opened a throttle. The sudden roar of an
engine struck on Billy’s ears with ominous impact. That gave him the
answer. An icy current coursed his spine and he was instantly aware of a
panicky urge to duck under the bedclothing and shut out the hideous
turmoil. Instead he swung his bare feet to the floor and sat there,
gripping the cold frame of the iron cot and shivering.

He had heard of this thing before, this pilot’s sickness, this miserable
cringing and shrinking at the voice of an airplane. He remembered that
Norris once----

But he refused to think of it. He got up hastily, shook himself, and
hurried into his clothes. He went out into the chill of the pink dawn
and headed resolutely toward the hangars.

His morning’s allotment of propaganda hoppers were waiting for him,
punctual with the punctuality of eagerness. They stood in an animated
group discussing the mysteries of the lumbering two-passenger DH that
squatted in readiness for Billy’s coming, the engine idling patiently.
It seemed to Billy that the bubbling of the exhaust manifolds had
changed character overnight. Usually the engine greeted him in the
morning with a warm welcoming pur. Now the pur held a sinister note. It
sounded cunningly gratified instead of frankly glad, and there was a
siren quality of oily venom, and a leering chortle in the voice of the
engine.

Billy waved a passenger into the rear cockpit and made his accustomed
round of inspection while the man was fussing with his helmet and
goggles and fumbling with the safety belt. But he might just as well
have foregone the tour for he did not consciously see a single cotter
pin or turnbuckle. His vision was all of the inward-looking variety. He
was acutely aware of Jennie. He saw her sitting as she sat the night
before in the dim aura of the colonel’s reading lamp on the screened
veranda. He saw her humid eyes turned on him, pleading. He sensed the
faint chill of her tears on his cheek. He felt the clinging warmth of
her beseeching arms about his shoulders.

Those arms! They were the arms of Jennie the woman--protecting, maternal
arms. He could feel them poignantly now, drawing him back, back from
this treacherous monster of wood and wire and fabric with the voice of
flame; back from the brooding hangars; back from the waiting air!

And he wanted to go. How he wanted to go! His feet itched to be off, to
run with him to Jennie. If he could only do it--go to her now, without
delay--and tell her he had renounced every service but hers. He knew how
it would be with her this morning. She would be lying abed wide-eyed and
fearful, listening to the hum of his engine, straining for the first
sound of disaster, the little deprecatory cough, the sudden silence that
would follow, and then, perhaps, the rending explosion of--the last
crash! Not until he had come in from his final hop and given the ship
over to Hansen would she relax and turn to her pillow to sleep
again--perhaps. And if----

Billy stopped his pacing round the waiting ship. He realized that Hansen
was eying him queerly.

“Hell!” he grunted to himself and swung up the fuselage and into his
seat.

In the ship he felt better. The touch of the controls steadied him. The
familiar dials, staring at him like great round eyes from the instrument
board, reassured him somewhat. He tested the engine. The needle on the
tachometer jumped obediently to fifteen-fifty. The engine didn’t sound
so badly now.

He fancied the attack was passing. “Must be something I ate last night,”
he told himself as he settled his goggles and waved to Hansen to clear
away the blocks. Then he tried to swallow and it hurt. His throat was
like parchment. He ran his tongue over his lips. They felt like crinkled
cardboard.

He swore hoarsely under his breath and headed the ship for the starting
line, allowing himself twice as much run for the take-off as even his
conservative principles habitually dictated. In the air he was painfully
conscious of being careful. He had always been careful but never
consciously so. Now, on the turns, he found himself constantly twitching
the stick to get the feel of the ailerons and make sure of his flying
speed. DH’s are not healthy in a spin, it is true. He had never spun a
DH. But he had never been afraid of spinning one. Now he was afraid. If
he should lose speed on a turn and she should drop into that eccentric
corkscrew descent--and shed a wing----

He had a picture of Jennie sitting bolt upright in bed, paralyzed with
horror as the echoes of the thud and crash reverberated through the
post. Of the crash itself, what it would do to him, he never thought. It
was Jennie alone, her tragedy, that fixed his troubled attention.

He circled the field and measured off the distance for his landing. He
gave the matter of landing many seconds of intense calculation. Not even
in his cadet days had he ever concentrated deliberately on the problem
of bringing a ship safely to the ground. He had done it without thought,
automatically, and always just right. Now he reasoned about it. Moderate
speed, settling gradually with a swift rush, tail skid and wheels
brushing the ground simultaneously--that was the best way, for the ship.
And the danger of a blowing tire was so remote that it wasn’t worth
consideration. But Billy considered it. With the ship running free a
blown tire might mean a crumpled wheel, a fast nose over, and--fire or a
broken neck! Better to lumber in slowly, level off high, and drop to the
ground with most of the headway lost before she touched. A tire was more
likely to burst, but then there wouldn’t be enough speed to hurt
anything but the ship. Plenty of time as her nose went down and the
propeller snapped to cut the switch and nip the fire in the bud. And a
hand braced against the cowl would take up the shock. Yes, that was the
best way to land--not for the ship but for Jennie. Clumsy, inelegant,
unprofessional perhaps, but--safe, eminently safe!

And that was the way he landed. A turtle jumping from a table would have
been equally graceful--and not half as secure. The big DH floated
ponderously into the airdrome under Billy’s restraining guidance,
dropped its tail three feet over the grass tops, yawed along hesitantly
for a hundred-odd feet, and then literally sprawled onto the turf with a
thump and a bounce and a creaking and straining of struts and wires and
longerons. She all but stopped in her tracks. It was a scandalous
performance and Hansen, the crew chief, groaned with reprobation when he
thought of the ship. He had been with Cobb for a year and had seen
nothing to approach this for clumsiness in all that time.

“Holy smoke!” the mechanic snorted. “A major general couldn’t have done
it worse!”

But Billy was satisfied. He wasn’t thinking of his reputation as a
technician with the stick. He wasn’t thinking of the DH. He was thinking
of the girl who lay with straining ears in a chintz-curtained bedroom
somewhere to the rear of a one-story hut fronted by a wide screened
veranda. When the bumping and the creaking were over and he knew he was
safe--for that time--he experienced a shameless sense of prayerful
relief.

But what about the next time? He wished there were never another
passenger on any airdrome in all the world. But there were nine more on
this very one, all waiting for him, all ignorant of the girl who lay and
listened. He cursed them all, severally and collectively. Then he
gritted his teeth and taxied around to pick up another.

When that morning’s propaganda hopping was over Hansen was ready to
burst into tears. He spent the rest of the forenoon and part of the
afternoon with plumb lines and a level straightening out the kinks in
Billy’s abused ship. But it did little good, for the same thing happened
the next day, and the next, and the next, until Hansen was beside
himself and almost ready to desert.

He thought his pilot had lost his eye. But he was wrong. Billy’s eye was
as good as ever. His hand was as cunning, his brain as quick. Physically
there was nothing wrong with him. But he was in a bad way none the less.
And two persons at Langstrom Field knew what the trouble really was. One
of these was Norris, his roommate--who was also his confidant. The
other, of course, was Jennie.

Billy Cobb, they knew, was becoming a very sick man, not in body but in
spirit. Billy Cobb had “the wind up.” Jennie knew this because she was
Jennie. Norris knew because, watching Billy grow gaunter and more
morose, day by day, and observing that he tossed about in bed at night
and often lay for hours on end smoking cigarettes in a chain, he had
asked him bluntly what the matter was. And Billy had told him. He
trusted Norris.

“John,” confessed Billy, “I’ve got what you had once, I guess.”

“I thought so, Bill,” said Norris. “Well, I beat it--more or less.
You’ll beat it too. But it’s certainly hell, ain’t it?”

“It’s hell,” groaned Billy. “And I won’t beat it, John.”

“Shucks! ’Course you will, Bill. Don’t tell me anything I could do you
can’t!”

“I won’t beat it, John. I’ve simply got to live with it till the last
crash. There’s no way out for me.”

“Don’t be a fool, Bill. You’ve just got nerves. Workin’ too hard. Twice
as hard as anybody on the post. And since you’ve had the wind up you’ve
worked harder still to ease your conscience. Let up, old-timer. Let
‘George’ do some of the work.”

“John, I tell you I’ll never hear an engine again as long as I live
without getting the hoo-haws. And I’ll tell you why. Jennie worries!”

“What? Not Jennie Brent?”

“John, she’s worrying herself sick. You watch her eyes the next time you
see her. And she’s losing weight. Think I can beat a thing like that,
John?”

“My God, Bill!” said Norris, “I don’t know. But it’s bad--bad! To think
that Jennie Brent, of all----”

“And she won’t let me quit, either. I’ve promised her to stay with it,
whatever.”

“Well, that sounds like Jennie, anyhow. All grit. Always thought so.”

“But it’s killing her slowly!” wailed Billy. “I can see it.”

“Bill,” said Norris, “damned if I know what to say. You’re in an awful
fix now, all right. And so is Jennie. But perhaps,” he added
brightening, “she’ll get over it after a while--after you’re married.”

Billy shook his head.

“She won’t,” he denied. “It’s getting the best of her by the minute,
John.”

Norris considered, puffing at the black brier clenched in his teeth.

“I give it up,” he conceded at last. “But I’ll tell you what I think,
Bill. This is a funny game we’re in. Queer things are always happening
as if--as if they were made to order. You know what I mean. Take me. I
had the wind up for six months--you remember? And nobody suspected a
thing--only you. Then just when I was walking in on the C. O. to tell
him I was through the adjutant stopped me and handed me my orders to fly
the _XT-1_ from Aberdeen to San Diego. I said I couldn’t. But the C. O.
and the D. M. A. insisted that I not only could but I would. Well, when
I finished that hop to California alive I figured nothing was going to
happen to me until it happened. I was cured. Something always turns up
in this game, Bill. Something’ll turn up for you. And remember this,
Bill. Things don’t _happen_ in this world. It is my belief that they’re
_arranged_.”

“If I could catch the bird who does my arranging for me, then,” exploded
Billy, “by golly, I’d----”

“Bill,” warned Norris, “that’s sacrilegious!”




                                  VI.


August dragged along its procession of heat-smitten ’teens and twenties.
Billy Cobb grew thinner and more miserable. A ray of hope appeared to
him, however. There was the “609.”

The 609, in the parlance of the air service, is the rigid physical test
that every army flyer must survive twice yearly. A man who can triumph
over the 609 is verging on bodily perfection. There is no other
examination so searching.

And Billy judged that he was a long way from physical impeccability. He
prayed that he might not pass the test. It was the only honorable avenue
of escape from the incubus of fear that was slowly breaking Jennie and,
through Jennie, breaking him, too.

Of course he could have failed to qualify by deliberate deceit. It would
be the easiest matter in the world to claim that his eyes were weakening
and to prove his claim by false readings of the testing charts. And
there were other possibilities. But deceit was a world away from Billy’s
code. He had to keep faith and a clean conscience for Jennie. He would
do his honest best to qualify--and hope to fail honestly.

Late in the month he reported to the flight surgeon. He was feeling
particularly rocky that morning. Which--paradoxically--made him almost
cheerful.

“I’ll flunk it sure,” he told himself.

He watched the face of the orderly who took his pulse, blood pressure
and temperature anxiously. But the man was an automaton. He was not
interested in anything he might discover about Billy’s condition. His
face betrayed nothing but boredom.

The junior surgeon who put Billy through the nauseating gates of the
revolving chair was professionally discreet.

On the eye charts Billy read a perfect “twenty-twenty” with either eye
and then essayed a discouragingly successful “twenty-fifteen.” But he
had expected this.

“Not so bad--not so bad,” commented the junior surgeon. “I’ll hand you
over to Captain Weyman. He wants to look at you before we turn you
loose.”

Billy undressed in the examining room. The dismal conviction was growing
on him that he would qualify after all. Nobody had batted an eye or
shaken a head. Still, hope was not entirely dead. Weyman might find
something. Weyman was thorough.

The surgeon came in and set to work. He waived the minor preliminaries.

“You’re thin,” he said, “but that’s nothing this kind of weather. I hear
you’ve been overdoing the flying a bit. I’ll look into that.”

He went over Billy with a stethoscope. Billy could not believe that the
excited pounding of his heart would escape comment. Finally Weyman put
the stethoscope away. He misread the anxious light in Billy’s eyes.

“Oh,” he said, “you needn’t worry this time. You’ll do. But you’ve got
to ease up. I’ve been looking over the reports on the other tests. Blood
pressure pretty high. And your heart doesn’t sound as good as the last
time. But you’ll do. Get more sleep. Cut down the flying by half. A rest
will fix you up like new. You’re taking a spell off in October. You’ll
be a new man after that. Well, come back here in February. See you at
the club tonight.”

He clattered out and Billy sat down suddenly. He felt very faint.

Then he remembered that he was to lunch with Jennie. He struggled into
his clothes. He had been picturing to himself how he would break the
good news of his disqualification. He had visioned the little play of
dismay she would make when he told her. He had painted on his mind’s eye
the flush of happiness that would relieve the pallor of her cheeks,
betraying her gladness in spite of pretended concern.

Now it would not happen. There would be the same mummery of pretense
that had been going on for the past month between them, the same
transparent mask of unconcern that covered up but did not hide. By tacit
consent they would talk of casual things casually. They would smile
brightly for each other’s benefit. They would discuss some new phase of
the plans for October with the colonel. But neither would be deceived.
In the depths of Jennie’s wistful eyes Billy would see the lurking
specter of fear. In the deepening lines of Billy’s haggard face Jennie
would read the story of his yearning to ease her trouble. And in the
back of their minds, while they mouthed inconsequentialities, would be
the relentless query of their common obsession: “The last crash--when?”

Billy decided that he couldn’t face Jennie now. It would be turning the
knife. He would beg off, have a bite at the club, and bury himself in
work. In the evening he would call. By then the edge of his
disappointment would have worn off. He could dissemble better then. In
the evening----

But would there be any evening?

There it was again! The obsession! He hurled the thought from him. But
it would come back! In a moment it would be there dogging him again!

He thought bleakly of the years ahead that he must live with that
leering, tantalizing demon mocking him from the back of his brain.

And then it was back, confronting him again! Years ahead? Perhaps only
hours! He was scheduled to fly at five o’clock! He decided he would
lunch with Jennie after all. It might be the last----

“God!” he choked, tugging at a boot.

She was waiting for him behind the screens on the veranda. She sat
listlessly, staring off at distant things. She wondered if Billy
suspected a tithe of the whole truth--that she had not slept seven hours
in the past week; that she could no longer eat excepting under the
compulsion of her father’s watchful eye, or Billy’s; that it was
increasingly difficult for her to muster the strength to rise from a
chair; that the sound of an engine made her faint and giddy.

She wondered how long it would be before she must give up, must go to
bed, must stay there. It wouldn’t be until the sheer impossibility of
physical resistance forced it--but that might be any day. She dreaded
the revelation the day would bring. She was afraid of its effect on
Billy. But she held to her resolution. It was the air or nothing for
them.

The crunching of Billy’s boots on the path roused her.

She was standing at the door, holding it ajar, as he came up the two
short steps. She was smiling--a pathetic, lying smile.

He led her back to her chair. It occurred to her that if he hadn’t done
that she must have sunk to the floor and been carried. She thought she
would have liked that. Yet she had the courage to sit erect and smile at
him.

“Did you pass all right, dear?” she questioned.

“Yes,” he said dully; “I passed.”

“Oh, Billy, that’s good. I was afraid you might have been overdoing. I
wondered. I’m awfully glad, dear.” It was a supreme show of pathetic
courage.

He revolted.

“Jennie,” he exclaimed, “I wish to Heaven I’d failed! You’re going out
on your feet. I can see it. I confess, I never in my life hoped for
anything as I hoped today that Weyman would turn me down! I’ve told
Norris about this--he’s the only one that knows. And he said one night
that something always turned up. I thought it might be true. I thought
the 609 would be the thing. It only proves that Norris----”

“No, Billy dear. It only proves what I have told you--the air needs you,
even more than I.”

“It isn’t so Jennie! I know it isn’t so. I’m going to quit. You come
first!”

“You are not, Billy Cobb!! That was settled a month ago. You know you’re
not. I understand, dear--how you feel. But it can’t be. I won’t permit
it. Now come in to lunch and don’t let’s discuss anything gloomier than
October. You promise?”

There was nothing else he could do. They went in silently. The colonel
was already at table.

                   *       *       *       *       *

The red rim of the sun was just dipping out of sight behind the western
hills that evening when Jennie, dressed in white of a crispness that
belied the drooping state of her spirits, slipped away from the screened
veranda and made painfully off toward the hangars. All afternoon the
sultry air had screamed and reverberated with the voices of engines. But
now only one ship remained aloft, doggedly circling the field in the
falling twilight with throttled motor droning sullenly. The ship was
Billy’s. Soon he would make the field and taxi in to the hangar. Jennie
meant to be there to meet him. She wanted to let him know in this
fashion that she approved and that her strength was equal to the ordeal
even of watching him fly.

It was hard going. She stumbled innumerable times. Once she all but
fell. But she reached the hangar at length and pulled herself together
for the benefit of Hansen, who was waiting with his crew.

Billy’s ship was still circling. Hansen brought Jennie a folding camp
stool to sit on while she watched. He never suspected how grateful she
was for that small piece of hesitant courtesy.

The mechanic dug a heavy watch from the breast pocket of his oil-stained
coveralls and consulted it.

“Been up twenty-five minutes on this hop, Miss Brent,” he said. “He’ll
be coming in any minute now.”

As he spoke Billy commenced a sedate spiral at the northern extremity of
the field. He was coming in. Not a breath of air stirred. He might have
landed equally well from the east, the west, or the south. But the “T”
in the white circle clearly pointed the only right way. Billy never
disregarded flying regulations. He would have landed the way the T
pointed if there hadn’t been another plane to cut his right of way
within a million miles.

As a matter of fact there was another plane, but Billy didn’t know it. A
strange, battered affair it was, with patched and tattered wings, that
came coughing along, low down, out of the west; a disreputable gypsy of
the air, a mangy sky pariah, seeking lodging for the night. Just above
the treetops it scuttled, driving heedlessly for shelter, its pilot
intent only on reaching a safe field before his gas was spent. Without a
thought for other traffic or regulations it cleared the last obstacle by
a scant yard and shot for the landing dead across the monitory T, coming
fast from west to east.

It was then that Billy first saw it. And he saw it as soon as anybody
else, for it had slunk into port wholly unobserved under cover of the
landscape, the sound of its puny engine muffled in the full-voiced note
of Billy’s Liberty.

“Hell and all!”

Hansen’s fervid exclamation drew Jennie’s eyes from their anxious vigil
over Billy’s landing. She saw the furtive gypsy shooting in at dead
right angles to the course of the oncoming DH. And a rapid glance from
ship to ship told her that the thing she had spent the last month
dreading was at hand. There was going to be a crash. The gypsy and the
DH had leveled off together. Both were losing flying speed. Neither
could open out and pick up fast enough to gain the air and clear the
other. They were going to meet--going to meet hard! And Billy was in the
DH!

What Jennie saw, Billy saw in the same instant. And the next instant he
acted. He could not possibly get over or around the stranger. He must
stop or collide. And he stopped. The maneuver was simple and instantly
effective. Billy did nothing more than snap the stick back and to the
left the full length of its course.

Have you ever seen a curveting stallion rear wildly, slip, and fall
heavily on his side? The DH did just that. Its nose lifted ponderously,
its wheels pawed the air, its left wing dropped sharply, it faltered and
hung, and just as it swayed and slipped groundward Billy cut the switch.
It struck with an indescribably sickening sound, a combination of thud,
crackle and crash all rolled together in a terrifying, explosive snarl.

But there was no danger to speak of. Billy’s cunning had provided
against that. All the speed had been absorbed by the lift as the ship
reared. She had stopped before she struck the ground. And Billy and his
passenger were scrambling out when the gypsy slipped with a guilty swish
across the shattered bow of the quivering wreck and ran out its
momentum--safe with twenty feet to spare.

Jennie stood in frozen anguish until it was over. She saw the rearing
ship. She heard the hideous outburst as it crashed. But she did not see
Billy emerge from the heap of rumpled fabric, kindling wood, and junk.
For by the time that happened she lay a pathetic heap of white on the
oil-soaked ground beside the camp stool.

Billy made straight for the gypsy ship with murder in each knotted fist.
But he never reached it. He was intercepted by a breathless crew man.

“Sir,” panted the mechanic, “Miss Brent--is at--the hangar. She
fainted!”




                                  VII.


Billy dropped to his knees beside the silent heap of white. Jennie was
breathing rapidly--short gasping breaths. Her eyes were closed. She did
not answer when he spoke. She did not hear his forlorn ejaculation of
grief. She was past all hearing, for the time. But even unconsciousness
had not wiped out the set lines that the sight and the sound of the
crash had drawn about her pale lips.

Hansen, seeing Billy’s distraction, ventured a suggestion.

“I’ve sent a man for Captain Weyman and the ambulance, sir. They’ll be
here in a minute.”

Billy shook off his daze and got to his feet.

“Never mind the ambulance,” he said. “Ask the surgeon to come to Colonel
Brent’s quarters. We’ll be there.”

He lifted Jennie’s limp body and made off with her in his arms.

He reached the house unobserved. The inhabitants of the post were still
idling over late dinners. Dinner is always late on an active flying
field in summer. Billy was aware of a mournful gratitude that he had
been spared the sympathetic importunities that an encounter must have
evoked. He struggled through the screen door, found Jennie’s room, and
laid her on her bed. He wondered where the colonel was. Then he
remembered that Jennie’s father had left that morning in answer to a
hurried summons from Washington. He would be away overnight.

A hasty search of kitchen and bath provided a basin of water, a chunk of
ice and a sponge. Billy assembled these at the bedside. But there was no
need. He was dipping the sponge when Jennie’s eyes opened slowly.

They turned on him blankly at first, then widened with glad incredulity.
Jennie lay quite still, scanning the haggard face looking fearfully into
hers.

Billy stooped and kissed her lips. She sighed gratefully.

“Billy dear,” she whispered, “you’re sure it’s you?”

“Of course, sweetheart.”

“Then--then it wasn’t the----”

“The last crash? Yes, it was, Jennie. The first and the last!”

She understood and rolled her head feebly from side to side in brave
protest.

“Billy! Don’t, dear! You mustn’t now. I can’t--” Her eyes closed
wearily.

But he persisted grimly.

“Never again, Jennie! Not as long as you live!”

She opened her eyes and smiled mournfully at that.

“Perhaps,” she said, “that won’t be very long, Billy.”

He threw out a hand to steady himself.

“Jennie!” he cried. “Hush!”

She only smiled at him and went on gently.

“No, Billy. You may as well know now. My heart--I didn’t tell you. I’m
afraid, dear, this has been the last crash for me. Perhaps--perhaps it
is--better that way. Perhaps it was--meant to be--that way--from the
first.”

“Jennie! Don’t--don’t give up this way. It can’t be true. Just one
little crash couldn’t---- You must try--try----”

“I won’t give up, Billy. I’ll try--as hard--as I can. But oh, Billy
dear--I’m so--tired!”

The screen door slammed lightly. Weyman came down the hallway.

Billy met him outside Jennie’s door.

“How is she?” the surgeon asked. “Her heart, you know----”

“I didn’t know!” groaned Billy. “If I only had!”

“I’ll see what’s to do,” said Weyman, and left Billy in the hall.

Out on the veranda, Cobb fumbled for a cigarette and matches. The
surgeon found him there a moment later, smoking furiously.

“Not so good,” said Weyman gravely. “It isn’t so much her heart as a
general breaking down. Heart makes it doubly bad, of course. Looks like
pernicious---- But never mind. Make yourself useful, Bill. Step over to
Cahill’s quarters and see if Mrs. Cahill can come in for the night. If
she’s not there get somebody else. Pull yourself together, man! And
hurry up!”

He disappeared in the house and Billy stumbled off on his errand.

                   *       *       *       *       *

News of Jennie the next day was equivocal. The colonel returned at noon.
When Billy collared him after lunch he pursed his lips and shook his
head.

“Not too good, son,” he said. “So far, no better and no worse. Weyman
won’t commit himself one way or the other.”

He swung away toward headquarters, and Billy falling into step alongside
followed into his office.

From his desk the colonel looked up.

“What else, son?”

“This,” said Billy. He drew a white envelope from the pocket of his
tunic and laid it on the desk.

“I imagine,” said the colonel, “I can guess the contents.”

Billy nodded.

“Will you approve it, sir?”

Colonel Brent leaned back and interrogated the ceiling with his eyes.
Then he leaned forward and brought his gaze to bear on Billy.

“Boy,” he said, “you’ve been having a hell of a time, haven’t you? Now
listen to me. I’ve been through all this, too. Perhaps I wasn’t hit so
badly, perhaps I was. But never mind. It was bad. Anyway, the thing
that’s worrying you killed my wife, Jennie’s mother, by inches. At
least, that’s what I think. Perhaps it is killing Jennie now. We may as
well face the possibility. If Jennie lives we’ll let her decide whether
I approve your resignation or not. There’s time enough for that. But
supposing----”

He paused and gulped painfully. Then he went on.

“Well, let that be. Put it this way. Without somebody like Jennie, where
would you be if you left the service? Would you have anything remaining
to live for? Flying was all your life until you and Jennie came to--an
understanding. If--just for instance, mind--you had to do without
Jennie, flying would be all your life once more. Isn’t that about the
way of it?”

“No, sir. I’ll never touch a stick again. Not after yesterday. When I
think of Jennie’s face--brrr-r-r!”

The colonel considered at length.

“Very well, son,” he decided. “I’ll approve this. Maybe your case is
worse than I thought.”

He drew the inclosure from the envelope. Billy had already typed the
indorsement of approval for his signature. The colonel read it over
slowly, shook his head dubiously, and signed.

“There you are,” he said and tossed the document in the outgoing-mail
basket. “No more engines, no more ships, no more chasing clouds.”

“And no more crashes!” said Billy fervently. “Amen, and thank you, sir.
I’m not happy about it. It’s a hard thing to do. It’ll take me a long
time to get used to being a kiwi. But I’ll have Jennie--if she’ll have
me now. And if she won’t, well, it’s for her good, anyway.”

“I hope so,” said the colonel, with little conviction. “By the way, what
will you do when you get out? Jennie will have to eat when she gets
well, you know.”

“I can manage. I know something about gas engines. The automobile
business----”

“Of course. And that reminds me. You’ve got to keep busy until your
discharge. I have a job that will hold your mind off things you won’t
want to think of. Washington is sending the _XT-6_ in tomorrow from
Dayton--McCook Field, you know. You’ll take charge of her final
conditioning for a nonstop hop to Panama. Norris will fly her down about
the tenth if she’s ready. I recommended him and his orders are out. He
doesn’t know this yet. You might tell him. Ask him to see me this
afternoon.”

The colonel was the C. O. again. He would be the C. O. until he left his
office. Then he would be Jennie’s father until another day.

Cobb pulled himself together, saluted, and went out to find Norris.

As the door closed behind him the colonel retrieved his resignation from
the mail basket, slipped it into a folder marked “Hold” and put the
folder away in a private drawer.

“He’s too good to lose,” muttered the colonel. “We’ll wait and see. I
almost did that once.”

Into the work of conditioning the _XT-6_ Billy Cobb threw himself with
the fervor of desperation. There really wasn’t much to be done, but he
made things to do. Every nut and bolt, every cotter pin, turnbuckle,
wire, pulley and bearing that wasn’t spanking brand-new he took out and
replaced. He pulled the motor, took it to pieces, and literally rebuilt
it. He relined the entire ship with micrometric accuracy. He discovered
a way that the McCook engineers had overlooked to enlarge the gas tank
and add an extra two hundred miles’ worth of fuel. The massive metal
monoplane had been a new ship when she left McCook. She was new-plus
before Billy pronounced her ready for the twenty-five-hundred-mile
straightaway from Langstrom to the Canal.

Most of the things he did to her were gratuitous. She didn’t need them,
for at McCook, her home station, they are thorough before everything
else. He did them to have something to do. Driving himself like a fury,
driving his team of mechanics, up at dawn and in at midnight or after,
he found that there were periods during the day, some of them as long as
five minutes, when he ceased to think of the tragedy in the hushed
bedroom at the rear of the colonel’s quarters.

Jennie was failing steadily. He had been confident, at first, that his
final renunciation of the air would revive her. But it hadn’t. She had
chided him as vigorously as her failing strength allowed and then
relapsed into pitiable acceptance.

“I mustn’t blame you, Billy,” she had whispered at last; “it’s because I
was so selfish. I wanted you all for myself. It’s my fault, dear. But,
oh, I am sorry. And you will suffer for it more than I, I know. I should
think you’d hate me.”

He had turned away and brushed a sleeve across his eyes at that.

Weyman allowed him a scant half hour with her each day, and he had
chosen the time just before sundown, between five and six, when his crew
of mechanics were at evening mess and there was a lull in the work at
the _XT’s_ hangar.

He would tiptoe into the room, in the failing light. She would smile her
wistful greeting. He would sit beside the bed and lift her hand--which
she could no longer raise herself--and hold it tight. Every day that
hand grew more woefully thin, lighter, more transparent. And thinking of
it at night, as he lay wide-eyed, Billy would grit his teeth in agony
and groan softly, so as not to waken Norris, until the brief respite of
sleep, which did not always come, stilled his misery.

During these days the voice of an airplane was sheer torture. It would
break on his ears, a poignant reminder of the only two things he had
cared for in life, the air and Jennie. And now he feared and had
renounced the first; and the second was being swept away from him, under
his eyes.

Once he had tried to vision what the world would be like with Jennie
gone and the air denied him by his fear--for he scarcely doubted now
that Jennie was doomed, and his present terror was too great to admit
the supposition of a return to the air. He had revolted with a shudder
from the bleakness of the prospect. He had a feeling that existence
could not persist in the empty void of the barren future his brain
conjured. His world must end with the passing of Jennie. He could
perceive nothing beyond but interminable reaches of hopelessness.

Another thing added to the maze of troubles and questionings that
enmeshed him. It was paradoxical, unbelievable, but he had discovered,
now that the air was put from him definitely and for all time, that he
wanted to fly again! Explain this as you will, it was so. And Cobb was
by no means the first nerve-broken pilot to know that strange
contradiction of desire for the thing feared. Not a few of the men but
all of the men whom the air has broken have carried, or are carrying,
that same fierce longing for the blue remotenesses on with them to their
graves. In some the longing has waxed, at length, even greater than
their fear and they have returned. They are the happy ones. For in those
whose fear has proven the stronger urge the suffering bred of conflict
between their fear and their desire has been intense. It was so with
Billy Cobb. He suffered intensely.

So, haggard and drawn, dead for lack of sleep, worked to exhaustion, a
prey to grief and to this strange mingling of fear and desire, he wore
along hopelessly, watching Jennie burning lower and lower, through the
heat of early September.

On the ninth the _XT-6_ was ready to the last safety wire. He told
Norris, who was expecting it.

“Check!” agreed his friend. “God willing, I shall open a bottle of
forbidden nectar at Cristobal, or vicinity on the eleventh. We hop
tomorrow at four o’clock. Have the valet pack my toothbrush in the
morning, Bill.”

Billy shuddered at the prospect of what lay ahead of Norris. Once he
would have leaped at the chance to lay such a course, himself. But no
longer. He was amazed that his friend could face the undertaking at this
eleventh hour with cheerful banter on his lips. He, Billy, dared not
make one circuit of the airdrome off the ground. Yet Norris was talking
carelessly about flying to Panama for a drink! It seemed impossible that
he himself had been as Norris so short a time ago. Less than two months
since, it was! Two months that were a lifetime long.

On the morning of the tenth a thin stream of civilians began trickling
into the post and out onto the airdrome where the _XT-6_ was drawn up
before her hangar with heat waves squirming and flickering along the
upper surfaces of her tapered metal wings. She was an unlovely,
sullen-appearing brute, with a surly upturned snout projecting eight
feet above and beyond the main spars of her thick-cambered gray pinions.
She had wheels like millstones for size, and the V-struts of her
undercarriage suggested the trusswork of a railway bridge. A banquet for
ten might have been served on the ample stream-lined spreader board that
hid her heavy axles. There was nothing birdlike about her. Rather she
was reptilian, hideous, like the imagined flying monsters of the
Mesozoic swamps.

Norris went up her ladder and into the pilot’s cabin at the tip of the
snout. Behind him, on either side of the fuselage, the twin propeller
blades projecting from the motor housings on the wings whirled idly with
a vicious whisper. He taxied out to the line and took off for a final
air test. The steel-winged monster moved with no effect of speed
whatever. She left the ground reluctantly. She climbed reluctantly,
although her load was not yet aboard. She turned reluctantly. There was
no spontaneity in anything she did. Decidedly she was a flying machine
and no airplane.

Other ships were in the air, a small host of them; eager, nervous little
scouts, steady DH’s, a pair of wide-winged Cardinals. The _XT_ lumbered
past them disdainfully like a dowager at a garden party.

“My Aunt Maria, what a tub!” commented a reporter, addressing Billy Cobb
who stood toying listlessly with a spanner. “Can that thing fly to
Panama?”

“I guess so,” said Billy, without interest.

Norris eased the _XT-6_ gingerly into the home stretch and floated her
down smoothly for a perfect three-point contact.

“Cunning little mastodon, isn’t she?” he grinned to Billy when he had
coaxed her in and turned her over to the crew. “But she’s going to make
Cristobal for tea tomorrow--with rum in the tea, too. You’ve groomed her
to the pink, Billy.”

“Grin if you want to, John,” said Cobb. “I don’t envy you this hop.”

Norris sobered.

“I suppose not, Bill. I wish to God you did! How is _she_ this morning?”

“I haven’t heard yet,” groaned Billy.

At noon mess, Billy struggled to consume a cracker and a glass of milk.
He left Norris attacking a second portion of sirloin and baked potatoes,
the last real food he would get until the next day’s tea time at the
equator.

On the club veranda, stretched wearily in a canvas chair, Billy lit a
cigarette. He was vaguely disturbed. Something was wrong. Jennie wanted
him. She was calling. A tightness at the throat, a clutching at the
heart, a whispering in the ears, told him to go, to go now, not to wait.
He ground out the smoldering stub of his cigarette with an impatient
heel and left the club.

Jennie stirred a little and brightened when he tapped on her half-open
door and tiptoed in. He drew a chair to the bedside and bent over her.
Her wistful eyes seemed to him clearer today. There was a little of
their old starriness back again he thought. His pulse quickened
hopefully.

“I had a hunch you were lonely,” he explained, “so I came early.”

She smiled, almost happily.

“I was going to ask daddy to send for you,” she confessed.

“It’s funny,” he said. “I had a feeling just now that I ought to come. I
can’t make it out. It was like----”

“Never mind what, dear. I wanted you and you are here. I wanted----”

She paused to consider how she should say what was in her mind. It would
be difficult. But it must be said before--before it was too late.

“Billy, dear,” she began, “lying here and trying to think things out an
idea has come to me. I think I know why this trouble has visited us.
Have you ever thought why?”

“I have thought of only one thing, Jennie, for so long that it seems
like years.”

“I know, dear, I know. And that is just it. It’s wrong, wrong for people
who belong to a--a--well, a cause--like the air, to think only of
themselves, as we have done. And this is the punishment. It is, Billy. I
am sure. We loved the air, we were dedicated to it, and then we turned
our coats and were ready to desert it for each other. And we deserve to
be punished! Perhaps I am light-headed from being sick. Perhaps this
sounds very foolish. But I feel it so strongly, dear. I think it must be
true.”

Cobb sat silent, twisting his stubby fingers miserably.

“Does this hurt you--very much--Billy?” she questioned anxiously.

“Go on, Jennie. Never mind if it does,” he said with an effort.

“Then I’ll finish,” she said. “It all seems to have moved along so
inevitably. The air needed you. Then I won you away--even if I tried not
to. And the air must have you back. So--so I am being--being put--out of
the way.”

“No, Jennie! No!” he cried.

“Perhaps not, dear. Perhaps not. But wouldn’t it be almost better so?
Have you thought what our life will be--if I do--get well? Either way,
whether you live for me or for the air--suffering for both of us, Billy!
I never knew my mother well. But daddy has told me. They suffered
terribly. And in the end it came to--to this that has come to us.”

“I don’t care, Jennie--I don’t care! I couldn’t go on if you----”

“Yes, you could, Billy. You could. You would have the air again. It
would comfort you after a time. You think not now, but it would, dear.
And--and--Billy, do you believe in the--the Afterward?”

“I don’t know. I only know----”

“I think,” said Jennie slowly, “there must be an Afterward. I almost
know it now. I used to doubt and wonder. But now I am sure. Because,
Billy, the air won’t need you always. There will be others, sooner or
later, to take your place. But I shall need you, always--and there can
be no others, ever. You will come to me--Afterward. It is only fair. It
would be so-so cruelly futile and incomplete, otherwise. I have a
certainty--something I can’t explain--but a certainty, that when the air
is done with you we shall find each other--somewhere--somehow! If I
weren’t sure of that I couldn’t, I know I couldn’t, go away, even for a
little while. And if I do have to go, dear, you will remember--remember
what I tell you now. It will only be for a little while. Try to believe.
Try--try! And go back to the air, Billy. I shall be waiting--waiting for
you--until--the last crash--Billy, dear!”

She stopped speaking. Billy saw that her eyes were closed and that she
was panting with the effort of what she had said. She looked unutterably
weary and yet, somehow, indescribably happy.

In a little while her eyes opened and her lips moved feebly again, more
feebly than before.

“Isn’t--isn’t John hopping off this afternoon, Billy?” she asked.

“About four o’clock,” said Billy.

“Daddy said something about it. You are helping him, aren’t you?”

“I’m supposed to be.”

“I am keeping you from what you should be doing again. John may need
you. You mustn’t humor me any longer. Come back--this evening--if----”

Billy’s heart leaped violently and he started up.

“‘If!’” he cried. “‘If!’ If what? Jennie!”

“If the doctor will let you, dear,” she concluded. But that was not what
had trembled on her tongue. She had caught herself just in time. What
she had barely missed saying was: “If I am still here.”

His alarm passed. The merciful deceit worked. He bent and kissed her and
went out to join Norris. He promised himself confidently to look in
again that evening, if only to say good night.

He had not heard her yearning whisper as he passed the threshold:
“Good-by, Billy. Good-by--oh, my dear!”




                                 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.




                                  IX.


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.]




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