Hal Dane’s blood pounded, he gasped for breath. Then he relaxed into a feeling of keen delight.
Hal Dane actually flying! The boy knew instinctively that from now on flying was to be his real life. He had managed this one time to skim the clouds. Somehow he would manage it again and again.
Raynor had ascended rapidly. Two thousand feet below them the pine forests lay like flat dark carpets. Little rivers and streams were like silver threads reflecting the moonlight. In the distance a row of small, swift-moving lights must be the east-bound mail train they were racing.
Looking earthward from the heights stirred no qualm, no dizziness in the boy. He felt at ease, in his own peculiar element. Turning his mind backward, it seemed that every event in his life had culminated in this engine-powered flight with wings.
Even as Hal’s serene gaze sought the pinpoints of trees and the silver dots of water on the earth below, the great plane shot higher, looped downward, aimed her nose at the stars again. After that came a sensation of falling, then a careening, tipping of wings from side to side.
Rise, fall, dip—all consumed mere space of a breath.
Hal Dane whirled around from his earth gazing, to steal a glance at the pilot behind him.
There was reason for those wing-dips. Rex Raynor hung in a fainting huddle across his strap. Almost at the glorious end of his race for time, the flyer’s iron will had lost its fight against pain.
Raynor’s ship was a teaching boat, outfitted with dual controls. Between Hal’s knees rose a stick, mate to the control from which the pilot’s hand had fallen.
Instinctively Hal Dane’s hand shot out to grasp this lever. His one desire was to shove with all his power on the gear,—forward—back—anywhere, to steady this awful tipping, skidding roll that was hurling the boat downward. But even as Hal’s hand touched the knob of the stick, reason surged through his brain like a shout of “Wait, wait! Death lies that way!”