Chapter VI
Bad News
The next four weeks at the school opened an entirely new chapter in Linda Carlton's life. Cold weather flying! Figuring on drops in temperature, high winds, sleet and snow! Using instruments as she had never used them before. Practicing landing her plane in small spaces, marked off by the instructor. Learning to repair simple injuries like cuts in the wings and installing new propellers. Never had anything been so fascinating; sometimes, late in the afternoons after regular school hours, she would stay on with Eckers, watching him inspect a motor, or going up in the air with him on a test flight, till she would forget all about supper. By the time the holidays had arrived, he told her he would be willing to have her do some testing herself.
Usually as she sat there, watching him intently, and now and then performing some simple service, she would be absolutely quiet. But sometimes she talked of the future, of her hope of securing a good job in aviation, of her dream of flying the Atlantic.
Home, social life—even family life—at Spring City seemed far away from her now. It was with a start that she suddenly realized it was December twentieth, the first day of vacation, when she and Louise were expected home. And they had not even bought a Christmas card!
Only once in those four weeks had she met with the slightest accident. It happened early in the month, one afternoon when, flying a school plane, a sudden shower, a veritable cloudburst, came up, and one of her cylinders cut out. She happened to be rather low—only a few hundred feet above the ground—so it was necessary for her to land. Cutting the throttle, she came down into a soft muddy swamp. The wheels touched the oozy ground, the plane ran a few feet and nosed over. But nothing serious happened; the propeller was badly cracked, and both Linda and the plane covered with mud, but she stepped out laughing. Minor accidents like that are all in the day's work!
As each succeeding day had passed, she was gaining confidence in her ability to cope with any sort of accident. And now, flying home to Spring City in the clear morning sunlight seemed only like so much play. She suggested that she turn the controls over to Louise, to add to the latter's flying hours.
They came down in the field behind Linda's house, but Louise refused to stop to go inside with her chum.
"I can run home across the back field by the time you'd have the car out of the garage," she said. "Glad I didn't bring a suit-case—I've nothing to carry but this hand-bag.... So you go on in to your aunt. She's probably waiting breathlessly to see how many broken limbs you have!"
Linda laughed: it was true that Miss Carlton expected an injury every time anyone rode in an airplane. So she hurried into the house through the back door, and skipped into the library where she knew her Aunt Emily would be waiting.