He had raced and choked and pounded his engine till smoke fumes discharged gassily from it. The next sputter might stall a filthy motor to a “conk” in mid-air, might back-fire flame into the carburetor. Yet the message must still go on. Three lives depended on that one hairbreadth chance.
“Danger—keep flying!”
But the trimotor was going down. It swooped to five hundred—three hundred—began to flatten at two hundred feet for the last lap of the down glide.
“Danger! Danger! Danger!” shrieked the tortured staccato of the higher plane. “Danger! Danger! Keep flying!”
Even as the great plane below swooped to strike earth, its pilot lifted wings in a mighty upward dart. Higher and higher he rose. Behind him trailed his own call in aerial telegraphy. “Danger—where—what?” roared the staccato bellow of the trimotor.
In their brief code, Hal Dane tapped back the answer on his engine, and urged return flight to the school aviation field before attempting the landing.
As Raynor and Hal circled near, they could see McGinnis turn the control over to Colonel Wiljohn. Then the boy climbed out over the side of the plane and swung head downward to see if he could reach the broken gear and perhaps lash it back into place.
A hopeless task, it appeared, for Fuz McGinnis slowly dragged himself back into the cockpit. Soon the plane circled and headed back for the Rand-Elwin grounds.
All that wild race to Clanton had taken a bare fifteen minutes. Another quarter of an hour saw them back above the home field.
Raynor and Hal made their descent in record time, leaped from the plane and raced for the edge of the field. Men jostled together to give these two room. Like the rest of the waiting throng they stood, heads back, eyes glued to the crippled sky craft.