And again he was sent before a general court and deprived of ten files for bearding a lieutenant colonel of the technical section with the following sally:
“The asphalt is all cluttered up with kiwis like you. You ground grippers are set to make the conquest of the air if it costs the last flyer. Did you ever fly? No! Why don’t you join the tank corps then?”
That was Last Crash Cobb. He was of the same breed that makes the sea leaders. Narrowed to his own sphere he was, without a doubt, as the sailor is; and indifferent to all that lay outside it, impatient especially of ignorant meddlers who tried to dictate and interfere. He could abide the man who was frankly not of the air and approached him without pretense, but the airfaring dilettante, the “expert” whose vicarious knowledge was always on parade, he could not tolerate, nor would he. However, that is beside the point excepting as it gives some vague index to the character of Cobb and his type—a type that will live some day in tradition as the type that won the sea now lives.
With airplanes he had a way and an understanding that might be likened to the way and the understanding of certain men with horses. To Billy Cobb an airplane was a sentient thing, with life and personality. The sailor has the same feeling about ships. He would appraise a craft at a glance and in that glance instantly catalogue its faults and its talents, knowing with a knowledge that is not promulgated in the manuals of the technical section just what might be expected of that ship—whether she were sluggish on the level, fast, or very fast; whether swift on the climb, long on the glide, tricky on the turns, treacherous on the landings, and all the other points that a pilot must canvass in his ship before he may invest her with his confidence.
He never asked more of a ship than was built into it, either. And it outraged him to see anybody else do it.
“Hinky,” he said to his roommate one evening—this was during his first detail as a tester at McCook—“if you treat that bus of yours the way you’re doing any longer I’m going to lick you. It’s fiendish cruelty. She ain’t made to zoom like that. What’s more, she’s got spirit and she’s going to take it out on you some early morning. You watch. You’ll try her patience an extra degree too much and we’ll have to pick the dirt out of your teeth before we plant the daisies on you.”
And the records show that “Hinky” Morse did not live to get his licking. For he rode in a baggage car the next night, inside a long white box.
Billy Cobb, sitting on the floor beside the casket—he refused the comfort of a Pullman berth—blew his nose frequently, and to the baggage man pronounced Hinky’s brutal epitaph, between stations.
“I feel pretty bad about this,” said Billy. “I don’t mind about him so much,” indicating the pine box; “he asked for it and he got it. But you should see what he did to the poor little ship. It’s birds like him that give the service a black eye. Gosh darn it all!”
He blew his nose eloquently.