"I've got to stop it!" he whispered.
He tried to rise. Only one leg held. The other twisted awrily with a rasp of broken bones. A spearing pain tore through him. Useless! His fall had broken it. He could not rise, could not walk, much less run. He was no more than a cripple.
"Oh, God!" he groaned, "How can I, how can I?"
Then his eyes fell on the plane resting above him.
"I've got one leg," he muttered, "and two hands and two eyes.... They're left me. Yes!"
He rolled over. He shoved with his right leg and clawed at the bank of the sand-trap. Inch by inch he wormed up, slipping, scraping. The sand grated into his battered face and seeped through onto his tongue; he coughed and spluttered, groaning from the effort and his feebleness. Spots of blood showed black against the crazy course he left behind him; ages seemed to pass before he thrust his head over the top of the bank, dug his chin into it and pulled onto level ground. Ages, but in reality only seconds, and the whole Canal—America—lying at the mercy of what each one of those seconds might unloose!
But the plane was near now, and it almost seemed that some unseen force mightier than the strength of men hauled Chris's broken body to it and up the stretch of its fuselage-side into the cockpit.
Ordinarily, he should have been delirious from the pain of jaw and leg, but the controls of the plane were before him and he saw nothing else. Wings and propeller were better than legs! He was in his element: by the sixth sense of born airmen, he knew and could handle any flying machine, no matter how foreign.
In a second, his fingers had fumbled onto the starting button. The choke of the motor and then its full-throated roar were sweet to his ears.