The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe last crashThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The last crashAuthor: Kenneth LatourRelease date: August 1, 2023 [eBook #71313]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: New York: Street & Smith Corporation, 1923Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAST CRASH ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The last crashAuthor: Kenneth LatourRelease date: August 1, 2023 [eBook #71313]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: New York: Street & Smith Corporation, 1923Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark
Title: The last crash
Author: Kenneth Latour
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 ***
frontispiece
By Kenneth LatourAuthor of “The Sky Call,” “The Vindication of Smith,” Etc.
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
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 nothappen; they arearranged.” 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 withNo. 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 andNo. 59dove 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 ofNo. 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’ Iseenthis, an’ heard it, too. Maybe it didn’t happen that way, but Iseenit 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 theXT-1from 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’thappenin this world. It is my belief that they’rearranged.”
“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!”