“Well, sir, he staggered a step, or maybe two. Me, I was sort o’ paralyzed. I just stood an’ watched. The captain was a good friend o’ mine an’ it was my ship done it. I seen him stiffen up all of a sudden. Then he laid himself down careful, just like he was easin’ into bed, you might say. He didn’t fall, sir; he just laid down like he meant to be comfortable.
“Well, then he raised up a little on one elbow, an’—an’⸺ Now, sir, you says I got to tell you what I seen an’ I’m tellin’ you. You don’t have to believe it, sir. But I wasn’t more’n twenty feet away, sir, an’ I seen this, an’ heard it, too. Maybe it didn’t happen that way, but I seen it that way!
“The captain he raises up, like I said. An’ he appears to be starin’ at somethin’ just over his head. He hadn’t his eyes any more but he was starin’ just the same, without ’em. He kind o’ rubs his free arm across his eyes—what was his eyes, that is—an’ his sleeve wipes away the blood on his face. Then I seen that he was smilin’, sir. Yes, smilin’! I ain’t never seen no smile like that, an’ I hope I never will!
“Well, sir, it might ’a’ been a second an’ it might ’a’ been ten minutes the captain stays that way, propped up, starin’ at nothin’ my eyes could see, an’ smilin’. Then he speaks. I could hear him plain. His voice was as strong as mine right now and I could tell by it he was awful glad about somethin’.
“This is what I hear him say: ‘Hello, Jennie, sweetheart. It’s the last crash and you kept your promise. Let’s go!’
“He said that. You won’t believe it. Nobody believes it. But he did. An’ when it’s said he lays down again, flat on his back an’—an’—reaches up with both hands. He seems to find somethin’ to take hold of there in the air. For a minute I can’t make out what he’s doin’. Then I get it. He is holdin’ somebody’s head close to his face—at least he thinks he is—an’ he is—he is—well, he is kissing somebody!
“After that, sir, his hands drop an’ he lays there an’ never moves again. When I get to him he is dead as far as I can see. He’d got the machine-gun butts in the head, the way they all do.
“I don’t know nothin’ more, sir, except that a little ways back from where the ship crashed I found a bit of wood with a big nail in it. Which might explain how that tire come to bust.”
How much of the old crew chief’s deposition actually found credence with the members of the crash board and the personnel generally of Langstrom Field, all of whom, of course, came into possession of more or less elaborated versions of the story, cannot be definitely determined. Publicly the old mechanic was scoffed out of court. The C. O., who was worried for the state of his pilots’ nerves, took occasion to call the talkative witness into private session and threaten certain unspeakable consequences if he let his tongue grow any longer.
So that the affair was a three-week sensation, with everybody talking about it and everybody proclaiming intrepidly that it was all damfoolishness and very bad medicine for a flying field. There are certain things that flying men always affect to disdain—and always take more seriously than anybody else.