“I hope so,” said the colonel, with little conviction. “By the way, what will you do when you get out? Jennie will have to eat when she gets well, you know.”
“I can manage. I know something about gas engines. The automobile business⸺”
“Of course. And that reminds me. You’ve got to keep busy until your discharge. I have a job that will hold your mind off things you won’t want to think of. Washington is sending the XT-6 in tomorrow from Dayton—McCook Field, you know. You’ll take charge of her final conditioning for a nonstop hop to Panama. Norris will fly her down about the tenth if she’s ready. I recommended him and his orders are out. He doesn’t know this yet. You might tell him. Ask him to see me this afternoon.”
The colonel was the C. O. again. He would be the C. O. until he left his office. Then he would be Jennie’s father until another day.
Cobb pulled himself together, saluted, and went out to find Norris.
As the door closed behind him the colonel retrieved his resignation from the mail basket, slipped it into a folder marked “Hold” and put the folder away in a private drawer.
“He’s too good to lose,” muttered the colonel. “We’ll wait and see. I almost did that once.”
Into the work of conditioning the XT-6 Billy Cobb threw himself with the fervor of desperation. There really wasn’t much to be done, but he made things to do. Every nut and bolt, every cotter pin, turnbuckle, wire, pulley and bearing that wasn’t spanking brand-new he took out and replaced. He pulled the motor, took it to pieces, and literally rebuilt it. He relined the entire ship with micrometric accuracy. He discovered a way that the McCook engineers had overlooked to enlarge the gas tank and add an extra two hundred miles’ worth of fuel. The massive metal monoplane had been a new ship when she left McCook. She was new-plus before Billy pronounced her ready for the twenty-five-hundred-mile straightaway from Langstrom to the Canal.
Most of the things he did to her were gratuitous. She didn’t need them, for at McCook, her home station, they are thorough before everything else. He did them to have something to do. Driving himself like a fury, driving his team of mechanics, up at dawn and in at midnight or after, he found that there were periods during the day, some of them as long as five minutes, when he ceased to think of the tragedy in the hushed bedroom at the rear of the colonel’s quarters.
Jennie was failing steadily. He had been confident, at first, that his final renunciation of the air would revive her. But it hadn’t. She had chided him as vigorously as her failing strength allowed and then relapsed into pitiable acceptance.