He fancied the attack was passing. “Must be something I ate last night,” he told himself as he settled his goggles and waved to Hansen to clear away the blocks. Then he tried to swallow and it hurt. His throat was like parchment. He ran his tongue over his lips. They felt like crinkled cardboard.
He swore hoarsely under his breath and headed the ship for the starting line, allowing himself twice as much run for the take-off as even his conservative principles habitually dictated. In the air he was painfully conscious of being careful. He had always been careful but never consciously so. Now, on the turns, he found himself constantly twitching the stick to get the feel of the ailerons and make sure of his flying speed. DH’s are not healthy in a spin, it is true. He had never spun a DH. But he had never been afraid of spinning one. Now he was afraid. If he should lose speed on a turn and she should drop into that eccentric corkscrew descent—and shed a wing⸺
He had a picture of Jennie sitting bolt upright in bed, paralyzed with horror as the echoes of the thud and crash reverberated through the post. Of the crash itself, what it would do to him, he never thought. It was Jennie alone, her tragedy, that fixed his troubled attention.
He circled the field and measured off the distance for his landing. He gave the matter of landing many seconds of intense calculation. Not even in his cadet days had he ever concentrated deliberately on the problem of bringing a ship safely to the ground. He had done it without thought, automatically, and always just right. Now he reasoned about it. Moderate speed, settling gradually with a swift rush, tail skid and wheels brushing the ground simultaneously—that was the best way, for the ship. And the danger of a blowing tire was so remote that it wasn’t worth consideration. But Billy considered it. With the ship running free a blown tire might mean a crumpled wheel, a fast nose over, and—fire or a broken neck! Better to lumber in slowly, level off high, and drop to the ground with most of the headway lost before she touched. A tire was more likely to burst, but then there wouldn’t be enough speed to hurt anything but the ship. Plenty of time as her nose went down and the propeller snapped to cut the switch and nip the fire in the bud. And a hand braced against the cowl would take up the shock. Yes, that was the best way to land—not for the ship but for Jennie. Clumsy, inelegant, unprofessional perhaps, but—safe, eminently safe!
And that was the way he landed. A turtle jumping from a table would have been equally graceful—and not half as secure. The big DH floated ponderously into the airdrome under Billy’s restraining guidance, dropped its tail three feet over the grass tops, yawed along hesitantly for a hundred-odd feet, and then literally sprawled onto the turf with a thump and a bounce and a creaking and straining of struts and wires and longerons. She all but stopped in her tracks. It was a scandalous performance and Hansen, the crew chief, groaned with reprobation when he thought of the ship. He had been with Cobb for a year and had seen nothing to approach this for clumsiness in all that time.
“Holy smoke!” the mechanic snorted. “A major general couldn’t have done it worse!”
But Billy was satisfied. He wasn’t thinking of his reputation as a technician with the stick. He wasn’t thinking of the DH. He was thinking of the girl who lay with straining ears in a chintz-curtained bedroom somewhere to the rear of a one-story hut fronted by a wide screened veranda. When the bumping and the creaking were over and he knew he was safe—for that time—he experienced a shameless sense of prayerful relief.
But what about the next time? He wished there were never another passenger on any airdrome in all the world. But there were nine more on this very one, all waiting for him, all ignorant of the girl who lay and listened. He cursed them all, severally and collectively. Then he gritted his teeth and taxied around to pick up another.
When that morning’s propaganda hopping was over Hansen was ready to burst into tears. He spent the rest of the forenoon and part of the afternoon with plumb lines and a level straightening out the kinks in Billy’s abused ship. But it did little good, for the same thing happened the next day, and the next, and the next, until Hansen was beside himself and almost ready to desert.
He thought his pilot had lost his eye. But he was wrong. Billy’s eye was as good as ever. His hand was as cunning, his brain as quick. Physically there was nothing wrong with him. But he was in a bad way none the less. And two persons at Langstrom Field knew what the trouble really was. One of these was Norris, his roommate—who was also his confidant. The other, of course, was Jennie.