The crowd would be denied no longer. It broke through the guards, surged over to the little group beside the wreck. Women laughed and sobbed in relief as they saw the child standing unhurt, clinging to his grandfather’s hand. Men laughed huskily and tried to hide emotion in heavy handclasps. They wanted the whole story,—how had McGinnis brought her down without a worse wreck, where had Raynor and young Dane found them, got the warning across to them?
It was full thirty minutes before the crowd could be dispersed so wreckers could haul off the disabled plane, and so the aviators in this thrilling episode could slip away to some place of quiet and rest.
That night Hal Dane and Fuz McGinnis attended their first banquet. It was not altogether an unmixed pleasure—this the first formal festival in the whole of their work-filled young lives. The fact that they were seated rather high was not altogether comforting to their timidity, either. This was the celebration that had been planned weeks ahead of time and was staged to do honor to the school’s guest, Colonel Wiljohn. Then here at the eleventh hour, so to speak, and at the Colonel’s especial request, this couple of young aviators had been dragged in to sit next to him.
It was comforting to feel the Colonel’s kindly presence but even that did not compensate entirely for the unmitigated terror of a startling array of forks with varying uses staring balefully up at one from the heavy linen of a banquet cloth. One felt conspicuous in such a dazzle of lights, in such a gathering of notables.
“I’m not much up on banquets,” hoarsely whispered Hal under cover of a speech by one of the notables. “Y-you don’t reckon anybody’ll expect us to say anything?”
“Gosh, no!” from Fuz. “Anybody could look at us and know we couldn’t talk. But something else is bothering me—”
“Bothering me, too,” mumbled Hal, and subsided glumly beside a plate of broiled chicken, green peas and mushrooms in ramekins, potatoes in some newfangled way, a spiced jelly.
Colonel Bob Wiljohn responded to a speech of welcome. Other speeches followed.
Then Hal Dane and Fuz McGinnis became redly aware that Mr. Rand, standing very erect beside the table, was talking in a serious voice and mentioning their names considerably.
“The blow’s going to fall now,” Hal’s lips silently sent a message to his chum.