“Of course you can.”
The getting ready did not take long, and exactly half an hour later, Nike lighted about a mile from the Flying Field where the girl Sky-Pilot found her passenger had just arrived. The woman came in a taxicab, nodded a greeting, paid the driver, then came briskly to the waiting plane. Her throat was wrapped in a scarf.
“I am glad that you could come,” she said, but the words were stilted, not especially cordial, and again that inexplicable feeling of uneasiness swept over Roberta.
“It was good of you to think of me,” she responded, although she very much wanted to open the throttle and go sailing off, leaving her passenger to seek another pilot to take her on her mysterious mission. However, she suppressed the desire and opened the door of the cockpit instead. Mrs. Pollzoff took her place and quickly adjusted herself, but it wasn’t until Nike had them high in the air a few moments later that Roberta noticed the woman had a bit of gauze and a long strip of courtplaster on her lower jaw. They were sailing over the eastern corner of the Lurtiss Field and a pang of sadness made Roberta blink hard as she glanced down at the familiar scene.
There near the end was the long hangar with the pilots’ quarters close by. The middle of the ground was marked off for landing, runways, lights and signals. Further along, to one side were the special houses for special planes; Nike used to occupy one of them, and beyond them was the huge factory building, nearly all glass, with the executive and other offices facing the road. If she closed her eyes for a moment, Roberta could picture every inch of the whole plant. Here and there were animated-looking objects which she knew were men or women workers; the bus and one of the company’s cars were racing along like a couple of toys. Resolutely she turned her face away and applied herself with determination to the task at hand. Once she noticed that Mrs. Pollzoff was looking at her in the mirror, but she smiled behind her goggles. She wasn’t going to let her passenger know how she felt about being separated from her former work, its varied interests, and happy companionships.
“Straight west,” Mrs. Pollzoff directed with apparent indifference.
They had been flying but a short time when Roberta became conscious that a second plane had risen from the take-off grounds she knew so well, and although she longed to look back, or give her wings the three-waggle-signal, she held Nike at a respectful angle. The machine came racing swiftly and once she caught a glimpse of it as it flashed into her mirror. The pilot was zooming higher than Nike and although the distance was too great for her to tell who was flying it did look like Larry’s plane. The sight of it gave her another pang of loneliness, then, for companionship’s sake, she glanced at the woman beside her and again noticed the bit of white adhesive which protruded above the chinstrap of her helmet.
“Wonder what happened to her face,” was her mental question, but the answer was doubtless any one of a dozen possibilities and she didn’t waste time in surmises. Mrs. Pollzoff took up the speaking tube and Roberta attached the end so she could hear what was to be said.
“You have an exceptionally fine plane,” Mrs. Pollzoff remarked.
“I think so,” Roberta answered with a smile.