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!”
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 theXT-6in 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 theXT-6Billy 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 theXT’shangar.
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 theXT-6was 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 theXT-6was 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. TheXTlumbered 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 theXT-6gingerly 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 isshethis 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!”
The last reporter had asked the last question. The last photographer had snapped the last shutter. And theXT-6was 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.
TheXT-6moved 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 theXT-6had 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 theXT-6was 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 theXT-6with 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? TheXT-6had 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. TheXT-6had 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 theXT-6with 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 theXT-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. TheXT-6must 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 theXT-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 theXT-6snoring 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 theXT-6and 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 theXT-6and 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.
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.