“Now,” Jack went on to say—after bringing his story down to where he and Perk had received their orders from Washington, took off, butted against a most tenacious fog belt, and finally brought up at the Canyon, where they made her acquaintance—“Tell me please, when and how you first heard that Buddy was missing, if it would not be too painful a recital.”
“Oh! that will not keep me from speaking,” she hastened to say, trying bravely to keep the tears from dimming her eyes: “nothing could be too painful for me to endure if only it works to his good in the end. We read the dreadful news in the daily paper that comes to Ma Warner’s home every morning, it being mailed in the big city not a hundred miles away. She always hunts up the aviation column the very first thing. Why not, when she has an only son who is known as an experienced and reliable air-mail pilot and also knows that she is going to have a second ambitious flyer in the family soon, if all goes well, and I find Buddy.
“Of course we were very apprehensive, what with the neighbors running in to sympathize, and cheer us up. Later on that same day a reporter from the very paper in which we read the first news about Buddy, turned up, having motored over across country, eager to pick up enough interesting facts at the humble home of Buddy’s anxious mother to make a thrilling story for his editor.
“They have been saying some very kind things about our Buddy since he disappeared so suddenly and mysteriously. He was one of the best liked air-pilots in the whole corps, I read again and again; and oh! what a thrill it gave us both to realize how he was even being compared to Lindbergh himself. Could anything be said to make a mother’s heart thrill more with joy—or that of Buddy’s best girl also?
“To be sure,” she went on, with a winsome little smile, “he had never done anything great, to make him famous, in the way of wonderful stunts, or long perilous flights over wide oceans, and such, but every one seemed to know how his heart has always been wrapped up in the cause of aviation, and that he would be willing to lay down his very life if by doing so he could advance the day when flying will be much safer than going by train or boat.”
Jack soon realized that there was no hope of learning anything from this source capable of opening up a promising line of thought. Suzanne was only too eager to tell everything she knew, but after all it amounted only to an exhibition of her affection. How she conceived the madcap idea of herself starting out, “only a half-baked pilot” she called herself in humiliation, just hoping that something—she knew not what, for it would have to be in the nature of a near miracle, as Jack very well knew—would have to come along to draw her to where her Buddy must be lying, waiting and praying for needful aid.
Jack knew very well, although not for worlds would he have hinted at such a thing in her hearing, that since three full days had by this time gone by, poor Buddy must long since have passed on. Unless of course some Good Samaritan had found him where he lay injured and perhaps starving, and taken him in charge. A happy accident like this was one chance in a thousand because of the uninhabited wilderness.
She had pictured the old mother striving to believe God would surely keep her boy safe in the hollow of His omnipotent hand, so that Jack had to wink pretty fast in order not to let her see the tears in his own eyes—such confidence and assurance was really beautiful; and for one thing it caused Jack to resolve more than ever to let no ordinary obstacle daunt him—for the sake of that fond mother and this courageous if ill-advised young lady who just refused to yield to despondency even when the skies looked most gloomy, and hope hung by just a slender shred.
“Depend upon it, Miss Cramer,” he told her, gently, after he realized that nothing was to be gained by pressing her with further questioning; “both Perk and myself are booked in this game, and we mean to leave no stone unturned in trying to find Buddy. Others who are engaged in the search will make all manner of sacrifices too. So great is the warmth of feeling for that faithful mother who is forced to stay at home, and leave the sacred task to strangers. If concerted effort is able to accomplish anything we’ll succeed; if all our efforts fail us, you must try and believe it is for some wise purpose which we cannot see with the weak human eyes.”
She looked at him with an expression that made Jack realize how much of her confident spirit was make believe—that deep down in her sensible heart she knew very well what terrific chances there were against success coming to reward their efforts—that much of this had been assumed in the hope of buoying up the falling hopes of that poor mother, left bereft of her only boy, the stay and pride of her aging years.