“He’s past sixty?” I asked.
“Past sixty! He’s past seventy, but nobody’d guess it.”
And I accepted John Brown as passenger. No one else offered as likely. I notified him to be ready. We hopped off in the morning.
The iron rails crushed the romance of plains travel. With the airplane also the crossing of the West, like the crossing of the East, is business. In the long overland stretches the aviator pays scant attention to the dead epics that he violates with the drumming blast of his propeller when he bores through the atmosphere above those plains where the spirits still dance in little dust whirls that pivot and career with no breath of wind. But I’ve often wandered what imploring shades we dislocate when we ride in that half-world ether which is neither heaven nor earth.
My passenger and I made our first leg without event. Out of Cheyenne the motor began to buck, and a rudder control jammed annoyingly. There was only one thing to do. Spiraling and slanting like a wing-tipped bird we sought a landing place.
The country below, as revealed, was rugged, inhospitable desert—a bad-lands desert with deeply graven face upturned immutable. Plunging from high covert as we did, and bursting into full earth-view, we should have appeared like a prodigy from the nethermost. But no buffalo rocked in flight, no antelope scoured flashily, no red warriors hammered their ponies for refuge. I saw, however, far, far away toward the horizon, the smoke thread of a train, and I read in the signal a message of derision.
We skimmed above a flattish uplift. Fissures and canyons yawned for us. My passenger’s voice dinned hollowly into my ear, through our ’phone.
“A country God forgot. And there’s nothing here. Useless, useless! We must go on.”
But I had to do it. Passing with a great rush we turned into the wind, and breasting, fluttering, managed to strike just at the edge of a flat-top butte or mesa. We bounded, rolled, checked, halted, and there we were.