“Let’s not. Let’s wait. Let’s try once more,” I shouted back.
Then I shouted again, scraped my fingers on the windshield, reaching, grabbed Bunny’s shoulder, but too late. Even as I shouted, reached, and grabbed, the ship banked on its ear, wheeled over, and dove safely through a brown passage tunnel to the earth. Bunny had seen it too—a hole in the fog, and through it, ground.
The warmer lower air flowed over us. The ice dripped from our wings in glistening drops. We came out in the San Joaquin Valley with plenty of ceiling, and it was plain sailing from there on.
[RUN! RUN! RUN!]
It is a bright, golden day in Texas. A little Mexican boy is working in a field of sugar cane just back of Kelly Field. The airplanes from the field are droning in the sleepy air above his head. Occasionally he pauses in his work to glance half curiously at one of them. He is not much interested in them. They are like the automobiles swishing endlessly past on the highway near by. He is accustomed to them. And besides, they are not of his world.
Sometimes the long motor roar of a ship coming out of a dive attracts his half-hearted attention. Occasionally an intricate formation maneuver over his head warrants his momentary gaze. Often he stares, half abstractedly, skyward while he works. Like a shoe cobbler in a window watching the crowds passing in the street.
This time, however, a curious interruption in the steady beating drone of a three-ship formation of DHs passing over him makes him involuntarily raise his head from his work. It is a strange sound, somehow ominous to him. He is accustomed to hearing the motors run. Even their tapering off for a landing is a different noise than this one. His unknowingly trained ears and maybe some strange premonition tell him that.
He sees two of the three ships locked together in collision. He sees them, startlingly silent and arrested in their flight, falling in their own débris. He sees two black objects leave the wrecks. He sees a white streamer trail out behind each of them and then blossom open into two swinging, slowly floating parachutes. He stands with his head thrown back, his Indian eyes rapt in his Asiatic face.
Suddenly he is alarmed, then full of fear. The two milling wrecks, black harbingers of doom by now, are going to fall on him. He begins to run. Any way, any direction at all. He runs as fast as his little brown legs will carry him. He covers a considerable distance from where he was standing by the time the wrecks hit.