Reason was right. Hal’s fingers clenched into palm to keep from seizing the gear. He must think it out, know what he must do before he ever shoved that lever a hair’s breadth. With cold sweat bursting out to drench him, and his brain prickling to the terror of falling, falling,—yet Hal Dane held himself rigid, eyes closed, while in his mind’s eye he made himself see again the paper diagram of a Wright motor’s control board. In his own cluttered old workshop at home he had memorized every movement of manipulating ailerons, elevators, rudder. Memory must save his and another’s life now.
When Hal opened his eyes again, his stiff lips were muttering, “Stick pushed forward, manipulates elevators—plane descends; pulled back, plane rises; pushed to right, operates ailerons for right wing bank; left, for left bank—”
To the boy mere moments had seemed hours of hurling earthward. He felt that the very tree tops must soon be dragging at the landing gear, crippling the plane for its crash. He longed desperately to look, to see just what space lay between him and death.
Instead, for two dreadful seconds, he forced calm eyes to study the control board, forced his hand to hold the fat knob of the stick in a firm grip, to pull back—gently, gently.
And gently the ship lifted. Descent changed to ascent.
A sob of relief tore through the boy’s throat. They were going up, up! The waving octopus arms of the tree tops could not snare them to death now.
It seemed he could never get enough of going up. He was above the clouds now. The ship answered beautifully to every touch on the controls. A slight pressure on the stick to the right operated ailerons and the right wing dropped to form a right bank that drifted the ship in a wide, lazy circle.
The response of the mechanism was wonderful. It was like a living thing that moved at a touch. Hal Dane felt lifted on wings of his own.
Then he passed beyond the bank of clouds. Two thousand feet below him on the earth crawled a tiny earthworm thing strung with lights—the mail train, the crossing!
Elation ebbed from young Dane’s mind.