His intuition told him he could do no more. And it was enough. With a long, gliding, downward sweep the car sped on and at last began to move forward on an even keel. His eyes yet fixed on the lever only, he gradually drew it vertically toward him, and, when the check in the forward speed told him he was ascending again, looked below. He was not over three hundred feet from the almost waveless sea, and he had dashed downward seven hundred feet.
“I understand now what they mean when they kick about long flights,” said the boy to himself. “It ain’t the nerves—it’s the muscles. You’ve just kind o’ got to hold this thing on its course—anyway she ain’t goin’ to run herself.”
When he figured himself to be about a thousand feet in the air, once more Andy looked at his watch. It was 1:30 o’clock. He had been gone twenty-two minutes. He almost groaned. Osborne had estimated the maximum speed of the Pelican at forty-two miles an hour. He was surely going at his best; he was already tired, and since he had not covered quite fifteen miles, he had the hardest part of his voyage before him.
Since there was no relief, he must stand it, and he did. He now kept the aeroplane at the thousand-foot level, as nearly as he could estimate it. The engine never wavered, and finally he was able to ignore it. The boy’s eyes grew hot and began to pain him, and he was no longer conscious of power to move his right hand, when—and the slowly-creeping minutes seemed endless—at 2:51 o’clock he caught sight of a thin white line on the horizon.
The boy knew at once that this must be land. Whether or not it was the land he had started for—the Grande Banks—made no difference. Confidence returned with the knowledge that he had a goal to aim for, and in that assurance he took his first moments to reason. He had done a foolhardy thing, and now he meant to bring his perilous flight to an end as soon as possible.
What the place might be he neither knew nor cared; his wind-swept eyes burning and his spent muscles rigid, he was conscious only of the line of white. As it rose and widened, he hardly knew how or when he altered the course of the plane. But at last, with an effort that he was fearful he could not make—when the white rolled out beneath him—he shut off the engine. At 3:35 P.M., the rubber landing wheels were bounding over the glaring white of a shell-strewn beach.
The exhausted boy still sat in his seat, motionless, his head on his breast and his fingers yet grasping the idle lever. He had carried out his great idea, reached the Bahamas in an aeroplane, but with nothing to spare.
Until Andy was able to get the numbness out of his limbs, he gave no thought to his surroundings. At last, creeping stiffly from the machine, he found that he had achieved his ambition: the smooth, wide beach, chalk-white from minute shells, the softly surging sea shaded into all colors of blue by shallow bars and outlying keys, the distant ridge of green through which, here and there, palms rose and spread their umbrella-like foliage, all told him that he was at last in the tropics. But where?
When he could, he made his way to the water’s edge. A star-fish lay at his feet. He grasped it as another boy might have caught up a nugget of gold. Then another object rolled in on the swell. At the first sight of it, the boy smiled. Then the smile disappeared, and he sprang forward and secured the floating object. It was an opened tin that had contained English orange marmalade.