Other pilots began to rush out machines and warm them up, preparatory to rising in the air to carry their warning shouts and pantomime within closer range of the damaged sky ship.
Raynor was one of the first of these. Even as he raced his engine for the take-off, Hal Dane shouted after him, “Wait—I’ll be with you—give me one second!”
With strength that he had hardly known was in him, the boy wrenched off the whole metal-spoked wheel of a bicycle that leaned against a hangar wall. The next instant he had leaped to the cockpit, carrying the wrenched, wracked piece of machinery with him. With that broken wheel he hoped to pantomime, to talk in dumb show, and reach the doomed flyers where shouting failed.
To overtake them was the problem of the next moment.
The great trimotor had risen high in the air, and instead of circling over the various sections of the Rand-Elwin field had zoomed off into a sudden flight at a speed that would soon make it a diminishing speck on the horizon.
Other planes darted after it, striving desperately to hang on to its tail, to keep some glimpse of it in eye. Once lost from view, the plane would be doomed—none to warn it—a crash in some landing field!
But the trimotor had speed, and the start. The diminishing speck became an atom, became nothing—the vast universe of the sky swallowed it up.
Pursuit ships began to turn back. It looked too hopeless. None knew where the big ship was headed. With no track or clew to follow, even a slight deviation now at the beginning of the flight would lead them into a diverging angle miles and miles away from the true course of the damaged plane.
Raynor was among the few that held doggedly on. Because his boat was a fast one, he was leaving the others. He plunged straight ahead in a course he seemed to have set for himself from the beginning.
Once he called through the tube, “Clanton—commercial field—Wiljohn left packet of papers there—must be going back for them—”