He leveled out for a while to get speed, then rose another thousand feet.
Hal Dane had taken off at a little after six o’clock in the morning, and he had headed out with his back directly to the rising sun—or at least with his back to the place where the sun would have been seen rising if the cloud banks had not hidden it.
In a few moments, the skyscrapers of San Francisco, looking white and spectral, were swallowed up in the gray-brown pall that enshrouded the Golden Gate. Hal’s last picture of them was of mere tower tops that seemed to hang like a magic city in the clouds. A forerunner this, of the mirages he was to encounter later on, when magic cities would seem to rise before his tired eyes, then crumble away among the clouds.
Below him swept an immensity of ocean, the color of ashes in the misty haze. Nowhere was there any mark to guide him. From now on he must rely entirely upon his instruments, and Hal began to keep a wary eye upon his inductor compass.
That compass was the most remarkable of all the splendid equipment features of the Wind Bird. It was based upon the principle of the relation between the earth’s magnetic field and the magnetic field generated in the airplane. When the plane’s course had been set so that the needle registered zero on this compass, any deviation would cause the needle to swing away from zero in the direction of the error. Such an error could be corrected by flying the plane with the needle at the same distance on the other side of zero, and for the same time that the error had been committed. This would set the aircraft’s nose back on her course again.
When well out over the ocean, he took calculations and set his course due northwest. He was figuring on covering the ocean in a crescent-shaped sweep that would have the advantage of sighting the Aleutian chain of land points at better than midway, and it was a course that he hoped would send him well within the range of certain air currents.
As his course steadied, the roar of his ninefold engine assumed a pleasing grandeur, like music flung out over these far spaces. The motor was working to perfection, humming along under its mighty load. It was a comfort to know too that every pound of fuel burned meant a lightening of the weight and an added capacity for speed, more speed.
In a flare of fire, the sunlight burst through the gray world of clouds. The rainstorm was lifting. Weather conditions that had frowned so on his take-off were changing to a golden glory to speed him onward. But Hal Dane knew all too well that this fickle glory of sunshine could change back to black thunderheads in the twinkling of an eye.
To the right of his plane, he caught a glimpse of a faint dark blurred line. That could be the west coast, the land of America that he was speeding away from now in a northwestern diagonal.
Was this blurred glimpse all that he’d ever see of land again? Who could tell? He might land safe on those other shores, and again, a hundred different causes could crash his gallant sky ship into the gray waves, to sink eventually to the ocean bottom.