The last crash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was standing just outside hangar number three about six-thirty of that simmering August evening when Captain Cobb came in with No. 59 . The pilot had executed his customary landing, a tight spiral directly over the field, followed by a spin and two accurately timed fishtails which brought the ship to ten feet where it leveled off up the wind and hovered swiftly to the ground.

Up to this point nothing unusual. Then the fantastic. A tire burst as the wheels touched. The crew chief heard the sharp report. A wheel crumpled. The right wing lurched sharply up and No. 59 dove into a sudden cart wheel.

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

There followed a significant stirring amid the mass of débris. The crew chief uttered a prayerful ejaculation of relief and stopped running. He saw a man emerge from the wreck of No. 59 . It was Cobb—unrecognizable! His face was black with blood; his goggles⸺ But the rough preliminary transcription—slightly reconstituted—from the sergeant major’s stenographic notes of the investigation tells the amazing incident in the words of the only close-up witness.

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

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

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

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

“The captain he raises up, like I said. An’ he appears to be starin’ at somethin’ just over his head. He hadn’t his eyes any more but he was starin’ just the same, without ’em . He kind o’ rubs his free arm across his eyes—what was his eyes, that is—an’ his sleeve wipes away the blood on his face. Then I seen that he was smilin’, sir. Yes, smilin’! I ain’t never seen no smile like that, an’ I hope I never will!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II.

Three years intervened between Billy Cobb’s first crash and his last. He had three crashes in all—which, as any pilot will tell you, is not a high score for so long a time, particularly when you consider the amount of flying that Cobb packed into those years.

“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!”

“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.

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?”

“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!”

“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.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

“Sure,” said Billy. “Now I get why you’re so—so—dog-goned—well, full out!”

“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⸺”

“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?”

“Why,” exclaimed Jennie in mock astonishment, “I thought you knew Colonel Brent!”

“Don’t you know what daddy does with flying officers who daren’t fly without a nurse?”

“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.”

“I heard you were stationed on this post, and you check with the specifications, sir. You are not without honor among your own people, you know.”

She turned up the cluttered cinder path, annexing a bamboo stool with one capable hand and a teakwood humidor with the other as she went. Billy stood shamelessly and stared after her until she disappeared in the house.

III.

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?”

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

“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.

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?”

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

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.”

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.”

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

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

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

IV.

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

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

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.”

“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.

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.

“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!”

“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!”

“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!

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

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

“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⸺”

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.

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

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.

“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.

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.

“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?”

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

VI.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

“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.”

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⸺

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⸺

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII.

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

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

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

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

“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!”

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!”

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.

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

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⸺”

“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!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

“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⸺”

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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.

“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⸺”

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

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

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

VIII.

The last reporter had asked the last question. The last photographer had snapped the last shutter. And the XT-6 was turning her tail to the farewell group at the hangar and her nose to the line. She crawled painfully across the field, snorting protests from time to time when Norris jabbed the throttles to keep up the headway. A squad of sweating mechanics trotted about her like so many solicitous tugs escorting a liner down the bay.

There was no wind to help her off the ground. The day was passing in a bath of stagnant heat. Stripped though the big gray ship was of everything but the barest necessities—she was not even carrying radio —yet she was so heavily laden with fuel that there was some small doubt if she could clear the field. A little wind to blow her up would have been a welcome circumstance. But the only movement in the air was the dancing of the heat waves.

Norris was confident he could coax her off. There was a fair mile-and-a-quarter stretch available for the take-off, with no obstacles higher than a man’s head for another quarter mile beyond. If the wind-speed gauge played true he could drop the tail when the needle read seventy and trust to the god of aviators to yank her wheels off the grass. Once in the air it would be a question of what the cellars of Panama could provide for a celebration. Norris was not concerned with anything that lay along the two-thousand-odd miles between the boundaries of Langstrom and the hangars of Cristobal.

The face of his companion, a likely enough youngster but with no considerable experience of record-distance work, was grave and a little drawn. Norris nudged him with his shoulder and grinned a reassurance.

“Buck up, bird!” he shouted above the synchronized beating of the engines. “In five minutes we’ll be over the hump or out of the world.”

But he was taking no chances. Every inch must count. He held on doggedly clear to the extreme corner of the field. Mechanics closed in when he finally shut the throttles down. They set their humid shoulders to the fuselage and swung the tail around.

He drove the throttles home, shoved the wheel forward, nudged the rudder bar, and cocked an eye on the wind-speed gauge.

The XT-6 moved a foot toward the Canal—two—three—ten. Her tail began to rise. She set her nose on the low horizon and charged heavily down the fairway, roaring with the voice of eight hundred horse. The needle on the speed gauge trembled. It began to climb. It made thirty at the quarter mile. At the half it pointed fifty-five and still rising. When it reached sixty it hesitated and Norris stopped breathing. Then it moved on upward—slowly—slowly.

The great gray wings tilted as the tail sank. They bit the air. The first low bush shot beneath the spreader board.

Two minutes later on Langstrom a red-faced mechanic burst from the armament stores with a stubby blue pistol in one hand and a carton of shells in the other. If Norris or his companion, Crawley, had looked back then they would have seen a red Véry light burst, high above the hangars. The mechanic with the stubby pistol was loading rocket shells and firing as fast as his fingers could charge the piece. But the crew of the XT-6 had their eyes on the road to Panama. The recall rockets were unavailing.

And between their eyes and the undercarriage spread broad wings. They did not know and they could not see that the XT-6 was minus a wheel. The rubber-rimmed disk had snapped the retaining cotter pin, spun to the end of the axle, and dropped off as the ship took the air.

Standing with the colonel on the field, Billy Cobb had seen the wheel drop. He had ordered the recall lights. But he foresaw that they would do no good. Norris would not be looking back. And as for circling the field, that was out of all expectation. It would have been suicide to turn the XT-6 with the load she bore under five hundred feet altitude. She would have laid twenty miles behind her ere that.

And so it turned out. Without a deviation to right or left she bore due south, floundering through the heat waves, and in five minutes had passed from view in the thick haze that hung on the burning air.

A picture flashed through Billy’s brain; a picture of a great gray ship that floated down to Cristobal, circled the sun-bleached hangars, settled groundward, touched, dropped a wing, somersaulted mightily, crashed with a roar of rending steel, and lay still, a hideous mass of riven junk. He saw the broken bodies of two men pinned beneath that mass.

Norris must be warned. He must. If he knew, he could pancake in, stall, and save young Crawley and himself, though not the ship, perhaps. A dropped wheel was deadly if you didn’t know. But if you knew, it could be dealt with.

He was trying to think. How could Norris be reached? Radio? The XT-6 had no radio. Cable Cristobal? Obviously. But something might happen to the message. It might be delayed, or garbled in transmission. Not likely. Still, there was that chance and this was a matter of life and death. And again, if Cristobal got the message, what then? They would send men out on the field to wave wheels at Norris. That was the classic signal. Norris would understand, if he saw. But would he see? He might not circle the field. His gas might be out and he might drive straight in the moment he picked up the T. Cristobal would be notified by cable, of course. But that wouldn’t be enough. It wasn’t sure.

Norris must be reached before he lifted Panama. And he could be reached. Billy knew how. Then, with stunning impact, the conviction struck him. There was only one way to save Norris, and only one man to do it. He, Billy Cobb, was the man.

He tried to suppress the thought. Jennie! It would be the final blow to her. But she might not know. He would warn the colonel. And if all went well⸺ It wouldn’t, though. He had the washed-out pilot’s certainty of that. No flyer in Billy’s condition of air nerves ever believes he can fly without crashing. That is one of the unchanging symptoms that make the disease. And Billy’s plan to warn Norris involved flying. It involved not only flying. It involved landing—landing perhaps hundreds of miles from an airdrome, perhaps in swamps, perhaps in mountains, perhaps in the ocean, and almost certainly in the obscurity of night!

He racked his brain desperately for excuses. He found none excepting Jennie. Could he do it? Could he leave her? Could he so much as straddle a fuselage without swooning of dread?

Then the questions reversed themselves. Could he possibly escape it? What would she say if he did—when she found out, when she learned of John Norris’ death, and young Crawley’s, by the hangar lines of Cristobal—when she knew who had let them go to that inevitable ending? Was it possible that he could refuse this summons, that he could even consider refusal?

Yet consider he did for a split second longer. There were other pilots, good pilots, pilots without nerves, above all, pilots without the slender thread of a sweetheart’s tenuous life tangled round their hearts and bound up in their actions. Why not let them⸺ But it was begging the question. Norris was Billy’s friend a hundred times more than theirs. This was his own show. He could not put it off. And he knew what Jennie would say if he tried.

He became aware that the colonel was eying him. Then he felt the colonel’s hand on his arm.

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.

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.

“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!

“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.

“O. K.,” confirmed Billy, his heart beginning to race as the moment for the take-off loomed.

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!

What were those things she had said to him? “Back to the air—wrong to think of yourself—Afterward—After⸺”

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.

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.

Billy looked at his clock and began to calculate. The XT-6 had left at four o’clock or thereabouts. She was rated for a speed of eighty miles. It was half past six now. She should be two hundred miles along her course, somewhere south of the Delaware Capes. He was pulling up on her at a hundred and twenty an hour. Mathematically he should overtake her two hundred and forty miles out, at seven o’clock. She should be in the neighborhood of Cape Charles when he sighted her. If happily luck and his calculations coincided there was an even chance that he could signal Norris and cut off across Chesapeake Bay in time to make Douglas Field by the last glimmer of twilight.

But if he missed her, which was something more than likely, for the sky is an infinite hunting ground⸺

He wouldn’t miss her! He would prowl her course until she showed up if it took the last whiff of gas in the tank. He dismissed Douglas Field from his mind.

The world below was going dim. Off in the west the haze-draped rim of the day still showed a pale yellow shot through with red and purple pencilings. Away to the east night already was screening off the edge of the ocean.

Stars began to show palely in the tenuous blue above as the DH thrust the capes of the Delaware behind her tail skid. And below there were more stars set in a gray-blue mosaic of vaguely hinted roads, fields and homesteads, with here and there a constellation of little luminaries that told of a shadowy town or hamlet beneath.

Steadily the mobile, twilit map of the East coast slipped northward, marching slowly under the speck that swung suspended between the fleeing day and the creeping night. Billy’s engine sang a full-voiced vesper and the wires, quivering in the back draft, took up the burden on a higher key. Whipping the air behind her, a mile to every thirty seconds, the DH bore down the trail of Norris and the XT-6 with all twelve plugs a-spark and a wake of red streaming spitefully along her flanks from the lips of the glowing manifolds.

Lower Delaware, the coast line of Maryland, and then the dim finger of Cape Charles!

Seven o’clock, the Chesapeake, and night drew on but not John Norris and the XT-6 . Ten miles to the east or ten miles to the west they might be droning now, and still on their course. The highways of the air are something wider than the boulevards below. There is plenty of room to pass without a hail.

Off the tip of the Cape, Billy drew the throttle back. The XT-6 must be somewhere thereabouts and he knew at what altitude he ought to spy her. Two thousand feet, Norris had said the course would be. Billy coasted down to fifteen hundred and circled round a ten-mile radius. If Norris passed above, and within eyeshot, he would catch the silhouette against the sky where some of the brightness of the departed day still lingered. He waited half an hour. But the black outlines of a southing plane that he raked the heavens for did not show.

He shook his head and opened out again, roaring with flaming manifolds head on into the black masses of piled-up cloud that towered now against the south, barring the road to Panama.

The storm closed in on him suddenly. It came with a stunning burst of blue-white light and a blast that drowned the shouting of the manifolds and the screaming of the wires. A giant hand reached down out of the gray cloud bluff ahead, clutched the DH in invisible tentacles and swept it irresistibly into the smother. The hand was the first cloud current. And there were more waiting. Billy knew them. The clouds are full of currents. They grapple with a ship. They hurl it back and forth from one to another. They thrust it up. They stamp it down. They fling it crazily from wing to wing. But there is no harm in them if you are not afraid. And Billy was no longer afraid. He let them have their frolic, fighting back with sweeping stick and swinging rudder bar.

Rain began to bite his face. It spewed back from the wind shield in a hissing sheet. He switched on the dash light and laid his course through the blackness of the clouds and the blinding of the lightning by compass and the bubble of the inclinometer. The engine yelled defiance through the turmoil as the DH tossed the spray of mist and raindrops over its heaving shoulders.

His head buried in the cockpit, Billy watched the inclinometer go mad. Between gusts he edged back on the stick, gaining fifty feet here, dropping twenty there when some spiteful gust thrust him down again. But the altimeter showed a steady average gain. And suddenly, on the crest of a mighty leaping spout of air, the DH shot dizzily up into the calm of the clear night and rode easily in the starlight above the roof of the storm, a sea of gray-white billows stretched about her, beyond the span of eye.

He circled the two-thousand-foot level, peering along the sea of clouds and up into the star-sprinkled bowl of deepening blue. Nothing! Clouds below, stars above, and somewhere between a shadowy monster forging toward the equator with two men in its maw—and in Cristobal a pair of yawning graves!

Eight-thirty! An hour, perhaps a little more, to go. Above the roof of the storm a waxing moon rode up and turned the gray expanse of cloud to gleaming silver. Higher it drew. And looking down Billy saw the moon-cast shadow of his own ship skimming along the bright cloud sea.

That gave him an idea. He began to peer restlessly from side to side and downward. The thing he sought would be plain to see now if it crossed his course. But was his course the right one? There was no way of knowing to within fifty miles. The world lay veiled beneath. There was not a beacon or landmark visible this side of the North Star. He could only hope.

This much was certain, at least. He must be miles ahead of the XT-6 . He could stop the southward rush, now, and cruise the course at right angles. Norris must pass him somewhere. And if he passed near enough⸺

Nine-thirty! The engine sang a soft lullaby of twelve hundred r. p. m. Billy was hoarding fuel as he tacked above the silver sea.

Twenty miles east—twenty miles west, and the moonbeams flashed on the burnished wings as the DH swung the turns with a lazy dip.

The moon rode high and the silver sea began to break into islands and headlands, with rifts of dusk between.

And then he saw it, the thing his weary eyes strained to catch! A scuttling black shadow it was that slipped out of a dusky channel, rode swiftly across the bright expanse of a fleecy headland, and disappeared back into the dusk again. That was it; the moon-cast silhouette of the XT-6 snoring through the night to Panama!

Billy looked up and saw her, a great gray-winged ghost shouldering down the meridians with the dim stars in the moon-bright sky winking off and on as she passed them.

The DH woke with a roar. Streamers of flame broke from the trailing manifolds. She set her nose to the moon and spurned five hundred feet beneath her in one leap.

Perhaps a minute passed. Perhaps two. Then she rolled in like a nuzzling whale calf alongside the XT-6 and dropped to the dogged pace of the larger ship.

Billy could see two pale spots peering out at him from the black cockpit in her snout, ten feet below. He guessed the amazement those faces must wear. And indeed, so bright was the light of the moon, intensified as it was by the reflected radiance from the clouds below, that he could almost make out the features of Norris and Crawley as they raised their eyes to question the import of his coming.

Floating along precariously with no more than bare flying speed Billy took the spare wheel tucked beside him and waved it overside. The moonlight drenched the form of a man who rose in the nose of the XT-6 and flung a gesture of understanding back at him.

Then the DH coughed and spat. And Billy slipped her off with engine stalled. The gas was out. There was none in the emergency tank for the very good reason that he had been flying on that for the past twenty minutes.

Wheeling slowly the DH spiraled down the night. With the voice of the engine stilled the wind whispered forebodingly around her tilted struts. The wires sang a high-keyed dirge.

“It’s the last crash now,” said Billy Cobb. And then he thought of Jennie and his throat went dry.

Into the mottled light and shadow, under the isles and headlands of the breaking clouds, Billy and the DH coasted reluctantly. Below where the moonbeams struck he could make out in patches the silver blue of fields and the argent thread of a meandering stream. Far away down there a single ruddy star marked the lighted window of a farmhouse. A chalk-white road ran east and west. The road was straight. That meant level country.

There were fields, anyhow. They weren’t swamps, he judged. But they would be none too wide. At a thousand feet he circled one that promised some degree of safety. It looked a smooth clear surface. If there were no great amount of wind, there was an even chance. The black and white of light and shadow showed the run of the furrows which gave him his landing direction.

Once he would have made this landing with scarcely a qualm. But now, after all he had been through, with his nerve weakened and his muscles taut with fear, his judgment warped by overanxiety, could he do it? He held his breath as he made the last flanking leg along the ends of the furrows and turned in fearfully for the landing.

Roadside trees barred the way, and a string of bare poles with wires swayed between. He must clear them to a nicety, perhaps a yard to spare, no more, for the field was short in all conscience and at the far end he could see what looked like a stone wall—a barrier of some sort, in any case.

The trees reached up to clutch him down and barely missed their grip. He had done this before. It was still with him, then, the cunning he had thought was gone. Bare crosstrees strung with copper strands flashed by at either wing tip. Whispering gratulatingly the DH settled groundward, her tail dropping inch by inch as the furrows rose to brush the wheels.

She touched smoothly. And then Billy saw that fate was set against him. A crazy gray form lay dead ahead, a weather-beaten plow, waiting like a grim skeleton. He kicked the rudder bar violently. But too late. The ship ground into the obstacle with a snarl. Her undercarriage crumpled. She plunged her heavy nose into the rain-soaked earth, stopped with a crash of snapping spars, and quivered her upflung tail helplessly at the moon.

Billy felt his belt snap with the shock. Then he knew nothing more until he saw Jennie coming toward him, sweet and luminous, along the moonlit field.

She came to him slowly, picking her way across the furrows. He stepped from the shattered wreck of the DH and went to meet her. She held out her hands to him. He put his arms about her and kissed the smile that met his lips.

“Only for a little while, Billy, my dear. Just to say good night. But I shall be waiting—waiting dear, again—when the air is done with you—at the last crash.”

She was gone. His arms were empty and aching. He raised his head and saw that he was not standing in the furrowed field at all. He was slumped on the flooring of the cockpit still, with a shoulder braced against a spar. Blood was trickling down his face from a cut on his forehead.

He pulled himself up unsteadily, clambered to the ground, got a handkerchief from the pocket of his leather coat, slipped off his helmet and bound up the flesh wound as best he could. Then he stumbled out to the road and staggered away toward a white building with one lighted window that gleamed comfortingly through the green haze of the ground mist in the moon’s rays.

He knew now what the colonel might have told him—but mercifully withheld—five hours ago at Langstrom. Jennie had gone on to wait for him in the place she called the Afterward. And strangely enough he was not grief burdened. Rather happy instead. Happier than he had been through many anguished weeks.

He had returned to the air. And in the end the air would bring him back to Jennie.

IX.

A year slipped by. Then another. Billy Cobb was shunted from post to post and detail to detail wherever his talents were most needed. The third year saw him back at Langstrom again for the summer activities. And chance and the D. M. A. brought Norris and Crawley and Weyman there to meet him once more.

During those years since he had met Jennie that last time in the moonlight of a Carolina night Billy had flown early and late, in season and out, every trace of the old fear gone. And never a scratch to show for his pains. He had run chances that woke the headlines of a continent into vociferous black. He had flown ships that no one else would, or could; strange outlandish maunderings of the engineer’s intemperate brain. He had been lost in the Black Hills of the Dakotas; he had landed with a stalled engine in the peaks of the high Sierras; he had drifted through a night of tempest in the Caribbean. But he had never spent a day in the infirmary to pay for his venturing. Death had stacked the deck against him many times—and he had won regardless. The air that needed men like Billy Cobb was clinging to him.

This summer he and Norris were wearing two bars on their shoulders and rooming together again. Billy was at his old grind of propaganda hopping mixed with engineering, up at dawn and to bed just ahead of the first cock crow. He was gaunt again, but not haggard; weary, but not worried.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.’”

“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.”

Norris gave over his exhortations to moderation and sat smoking silently. Billy rolled into his cot and fell off to sleep, in defiance of the drop lamp on the table and the heat.

His roommate put his pipe aside at length and rose to douse the light. Looking down he saw that Billy was smiling faintly in his sleep.

“You sure deserve to smile, old boy,” said Norris, and snapped off the switch. “I wonder, now,” he grunted as he stretched himself on the torrid sheets.

On August 20th Norris took a five-day leave. On August 25th he returned. Coming by the guard at the gate he headed straight for the club with a vision of sandwiches and coffee in his mind. He had missed his dinner in order to make train connections. As chance provided, Norris had met nobody from Langstrom on his way out to the post. What had happened on the field that day was still the secret of the field as far as Norris was concerned.

Weyman and young Crawley were sitting on the club veranda as Norris came up the steps and through the screen door. He nodded to them and went inside, dropping his suit case in the hall.

He had his sandwiches and his coffee and smoked a cigarette to top off with, letting his thoughts meander idly, glad to rest comfortably after the heat and the grime of the trains. Weyman sitting with Crawley crossed his mind. Weyman recalled something to him. Oh, yes. Billy’s 609. It had been due that day. He must ask the surgeon how it turned out. He went out to the veranda and drew a chair beside the two who sat there.

He heard the surgeon’s chair scrape suddenly. Then he saw that Crawley was eying him with consternation written all over his smooth face.

“Hell!” exclaimed Norris, sitting bolt upright. “What’s the matter with you two?”

“Nobody knows,” put in Crawley. “It was pretty late. There was only that old crew chief of Bill’s, Halliday, who saw it. Everybody else had gone home or was back in the hangars or somewhere. He just floated in, Halliday said, and made a regular landing. Then a tire blew and a wheel buckled and it was all over. His head got the gun butts. Belt broke, they say.”

“But that isn’t all,” Weyman took up the thread. “I think Halliday’s brain is softening. He tells a yarn about Billy climbing out of the wreck and babbling to somebody who wasn’t there and making weird gestures⸺”

“Wait a minute,” Norris interrupted. “Somebody who wasn’t there, you say? How do you know there wasn’t anybody there?”

“You think it strange, then—Billy’s babbling and gesturing before he died?”

“Well, I’ll tell you something else that may sound strange, coming from me who haven’t been near this post in five days. Doctor, isn’t it true that when Billy went up for his 609 this afternoon you disqualified him irrevocably, unconditionally, for good and all?”

“If I told you how I knew you’d disqualify me , you’d say I was crazy. I’ll tell you some time—perhaps. But not tonight. I feel too low to brawl with a skeptic. But just to show you that I’m not simply a good guesser I’ll tell you something else.”

“Billy didn’t know you’d disqualified him when he went out to fly. Something had interfered. You hadn’t told him.”

“John, you’ve got me going! It’s so. I was trying to think up some way to break the bad news gently to Bill when a hurry call came in over the phone. An enlisted man’s wife had convulsions. I told Bill I’d be right back. But I was kept away for an hour and he must have thought everything was all right, because he wasn’t in the infirmary when I got back there. I sent an orderly to call him in but he was just taking off when the man reached the field. See here, John, how in hell did you guess that?”

“I didn’t guess it,” protested Norris. “It’s simple enough. Bill wouldn’t have hopped if he’d known officially he was disqualified. He never deliberately broke a flying regulation in his life.”

“Yes, he did,” recalled the surgeon. “I saw him do it. The day he went after you with the wheel he crossed the T on the take-off.”

“Poor old Bill,” said Norris. “That was like him. Somebody else’s show was at stake then.”

“Well,” said the surgeon, “you’ve explained your second guess, anyhow. But I’m damned if I see how you figured so surely that Bill had been disqualified. Nobody knows that yet excepting the three of us here.”

“Never mind how I figured it, doctor. I’ll try to make it clear another time. But while you and Crawley are waiting for the explanation you might ask yourselves if the way events shaped themselves this afternoon wasn’t a little—a little—awesome. In a minute more, doctor, you would have told Bill he couldn’t fly—that the air was through with him. But something intervened at the critical moment. You were prevented. Then you sent an orderly. The orderly reached Billy just in time to miss him. He was prevented. That’s twice running. Do you think those things were accidents, or were they deliberately arranged ?”

“Don’t be an idiot, John!” grunted the surgeon, who was careful to keep both his mental and physical feet on the ground all the time.

“Gosh!” he exclaimed. “Gosh, it certainly looks⸺” Then catching the skeptical eye of the man of science frowning on him he held his peace.

Norris lay on his cot, staring into the dark. He was thinking of the things Weyman and Crawley had just said, of their divergent reactions to the things he had said to them, and of Billy. He couldn’t sleep. Whether it was the heat or grief at the loss of his friend he did not know. He rather thought it must be the heat, because he had lost many friends in his time, and grieved, and slept for all his grieving. It would be cooler on the open airdrome. He decided to go out and have a smoke. He slipped into a soft white shirt, a pair of khaki slacks, and tennis slippers, and left the hut.

A great moon silvered the silent hangars and the sweep of the close-cropped grass across the broad field as Norris strolled with a cigarette in his lips. He was glad he had come out. It was cooler.

He came to the end of the hangar line. Beyond was the pilotage hut with the flaccid landing sock drooping at its staff by the door. Outside the last hangar stood an empty gasoline drum beside a girder. Norris sat down on the drum and leaned against the girder.

He had not thought it would be so cool out here. Decidedly this was pleasanter than the clammy sheets inside the torrid hut. He closed his eyes contentedly. His cigarette dropped to the ground and went out.

A little noise startled him. He must have been dozing. He opened his eyes to situate the noise. Somehow it sounded like a kiss. Then in wonderment he stared toward the near-by hut where the sock was stirring just a little in a vagrant draft.

Somebody was standing there in the moon-cast shadow. Somebody was moving. Not a sentry. A sentry would not move like that. Then Norris saw that there were two people in the shadow, not one. They walked together. At the edge of the shadow they paused. And he heard that little noise again, the noise that had startled him. It was such a noise as tokens the parting of close-pressed lips.

The two at the edge of the shadow stepped a little apart. They emerged reluctantly into the silver light beyond. Then, so close they passed that Norris might have reached a hand and touched them, Billy Cobb and Jennie Brent walked for the last time along the row of hangars and disappeared together, vanishing into the moon mist as a silver ship might fade into a cloud.

The moon, looking down, saw a sentry pacing the hangar line. The only other life in sight from end to end of Langstrom Field was a man in khaki slacks, a white shirt, and tennis slippers, perched on a gas drum, his head thrown back against a girder, who slept with a smile on his face.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The last crash

THE LAST CRASH

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