The red rim of the sun was just dipping out of sight behind the western hills that evening when Jennie, dressed in white of a crispness that belied the drooping state of her spirits, slipped away from the screened veranda and made painfully off toward the hangars. All afternoon the sultry air had screamed and reverberated with the voices of engines. But now only one ship remained aloft, doggedly circling the field in the falling twilight with throttled motor droning sullenly. The ship was Billy’s. Soon he would make the field and taxi in to the hangar. Jennie meant to be there to meet him. She wanted to let him know in this fashion that she approved and that her strength was equal to the ordeal even of watching him fly.
It was hard going. She stumbled innumerable times. Once she all but fell. But she reached the hangar at length and pulled herself together for the benefit of Hansen, who was waiting with his crew.
Billy’s ship was still circling. Hansen brought Jennie a folding camp stool to sit on while she watched. He never suspected how grateful she was for that small piece of hesitant courtesy.
The mechanic dug a heavy watch from the breast pocket of his oil-stained coveralls and consulted it.
“Been up twenty-five minutes on this hop, Miss Brent,” he said. “He’ll be coming in any minute now.”
As he spoke Billy commenced a sedate spiral at the northern extremity of the field. He was coming in. Not a breath of air stirred. He might have landed equally well from the east, the west, or the south. But the “T” in the white circle clearly pointed the only right way. Billy never disregarded flying regulations. He would have landed the way the T pointed if there hadn’t been another plane to cut his right of way within a million miles.
As a matter of fact there was another plane, but Billy didn’t know it. A strange, battered affair it was, with patched and tattered wings, that came coughing along, low down, out of the west; a disreputable gypsy of the air, a mangy sky pariah, seeking lodging for the night. Just above the treetops it scuttled, driving heedlessly for shelter, its pilot intent only on reaching a safe field before his gas was spent. Without a thought for other traffic or regulations it cleared the last obstacle by a scant yard and shot for the landing dead across the monitory T, coming fast from west to east.
It was then that Billy first saw it. And he saw it as soon as anybody else, for it had slunk into port wholly unobserved under cover of the landscape, the sound of its puny engine muffled in the full-voiced note of Billy’s Liberty.
“Hell and all!”
Hansen’s fervid exclamation drew Jennie’s eyes from their anxious vigil over Billy’s landing. She saw the furtive gypsy shooting in at dead right angles to the course of the oncoming DH. And a rapid glance from ship to ship told her that the thing she had spent the last month dreading was at hand. There was going to be a crash. The gypsy and the DH had leveled off together. Both were losing flying speed. Neither could open out and pick up fast enough to gain the air and clear the other. They were going to meet—going to meet hard! And Billy was in the DH!