Billy shuddered at the prospect of what lay ahead of Norris. Once he would have leaped at the chance to lay such a course, himself. But no longer. He was amazed that his friend could face the undertaking at this eleventh hour with cheerful banter on his lips. He, Billy, dared not make one circuit of the airdrome off the ground. Yet Norris was talking carelessly about flying to Panama for a drink! It seemed impossible that he himself had been as Norris so short a time ago. Less than two months since, it was! Two months that were a lifetime long.
On the morning of the tenth a thin stream of civilians began trickling into the post and out onto the airdrome where the XT-6 was drawn up before her hangar with heat waves squirming and flickering along the upper surfaces of her tapered metal wings. She was an unlovely, sullen-appearing brute, with a surly upturned snout projecting eight feet above and beyond the main spars of her thick-cambered gray pinions. She had wheels like millstones for size, and the V-struts of her undercarriage suggested the trusswork of a railway bridge. A banquet for ten might have been served on the ample stream-lined spreader board that hid her heavy axles. There was nothing birdlike about her. Rather she was reptilian, hideous, like the imagined flying monsters of the Mesozoic swamps.
Norris went up her ladder and into the pilot’s cabin at the tip of the snout. Behind him, on either side of the fuselage, the twin propeller blades projecting from the motor housings on the wings whirled idly with a vicious whisper. He taxied out to the line and took off for a final air test. The steel-winged monster moved with no effect of speed whatever. She left the ground reluctantly. She climbed reluctantly, although her load was not yet aboard. She turned reluctantly. There was no spontaneity in anything she did. Decidedly she was a flying machine and no airplane.
Other ships were in the air, a small host of them; eager, nervous little scouts, steady DH’s, a pair of wide-winged Cardinals. The XT lumbered past them disdainfully like a dowager at a garden party.
“My Aunt Maria, what a tub!” commented a reporter, addressing Billy Cobb who stood toying listlessly with a spanner. “Can that thing fly to Panama?”
“I guess so,” said Billy, without interest.
Norris eased the XT-6 gingerly into the home stretch and floated her down smoothly for a perfect three-point contact.
“Cunning little mastodon, isn’t she?” he grinned to Billy when he had coaxed her in and turned her over to the crew. “But she’s going to make Cristobal for tea tomorrow—with rum in the tea, too. You’ve groomed her to the pink, Billy.”
“Grin if you want to, John,” said Cobb. “I don’t envy you this hop.”
Norris sobered.