Fuz let out the yellow cut-down, speeding by stumps, dodging boulders. From the car behind him he could hear Raynor’s voice urging on the driver.
These two cars were by far and away the lead of practically the entire population of Hillton that surged running, walking, riding down the valley.
Mary Dane, and Raynor not far behind her were the first to reach that tree with its flaunting ragged streamers of the wrecked windcraft. Hal was not lying at its foot, battered and crashed. Instead, with blood on his face, and his clothes half torn off, he was gingerly lowering himself from branch to branch. He shinned on down the trunk, dropped beside his mother, and fair picked her up in a great boyish bear hug.
Above him, half of the wind bird hung in streaming tatters from a couple of tree branches. The other half had already descended and lay like a vast white splotch on the ground.
“Reckon I’d better go get the truck and haul this in,” said Hal, using his fist to mop blood out of his eye from a cut on the forehead. “I’m sort of used to hauling in the remains and patching up things after every flight. I—”
As man to man, Raynor clapped him on the shoulder and thrust out a hand. “Put her there!” he said.
“I—er—had the luck to land in the soft part of a tree. I—I got down anyway,” said Hal gruffly to hide the emotion that was stirring him.
“You got down—but you did more! Man, man! Without any engine, on some sheets strung on sticks, you flew to the clouds, banked, dipped, soared with the best of them, till that whirlwind caught you. Prettiest thing I’ve seen in years.”
“If only that wrong wind hadn’t got me,” moaned Hal.
“If!” said Raynor, narrowing his eyes. “Aviation’s full of ifs, boy—don’t let ’em—”