There was one particular discussion of the case, on the night of the crash, in the lounge at the officers’ club. But to appreciate what passed between the three, Norris, Weyman, and Crawley, who held that quiet conference you must know many things that went before.
II.
Three years intervened between Billy Cobb’s first crash and his last. He had three crashes in all—which, as any pilot will tell you, is not a high score for so long a time, particularly when you consider the amount of flying that Cobb packed into those years.
He was a man who originally took the dangers of his profession philosophically.
“Sure, there’s always got to be a last crash,” he would say when the question of hazard came up, “but it won’t be today.” Hence his sobriquet.
And having satisfied himself that all the cotter pins were clinched in place and the controls well greased at the bearings he would swing into the cockpit, buckle his safety belt, and command “Contact!” with the perfect assurance of the pilot who knows that barring an act of God he is safe in his own hands.
Some pilots fly on faith, others fly on nerve, but Last Crash Cobb flew on skill which was consummate and knowledge which was complete. It was no fault of his that tragedy entered his life by way of the air.
He was an aviator neither by chance nor by interest. He was an aviator by vocation. And fortunate it was for him that he first saw the light of day in a flying age for had he been of an earlier generation it is difficult to imagine what would have become of him. He had gone to flying at the first opportunity as the steel goes to the magnet.
There was something ascetic about his devotion to his profession. He wore his wings as a priest wears the cloth—reverently. What the air might bring him he never questioned. Advancement, power, gain he never considered excepting as they might be turned back to the profit of the air.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said one day to an heretical upstart who was talking about flying pay and trying to prove the candle not worth the risk; “this is no game for a brainy young business man like you who’s going to be a major general some day. Clever boys don’t thrive on the air. What we want here is men with hearts. Go back to the school of the line, sonny. You’ll be a great man in a few years. But you’ll always be a bum flyer!”