“Wait!” he gasped to Hansen. “Wait—I⸺”
What were those things she had said to him? “Back to the air—wrong to think of yourself—Afterward—After⸺”
“Let’s go!” cried Billy Cobb. “Clear away!”
No rolling to the line, this time; no dropping of precious minutes in deference to flying rules. Billy opened out the instant the blocks left the wheels. He was off the ground and flashing into a turn before Hansen realized that the ship was gone.
“Gosh!” grunted the amazed mechanic spitting out dust as he watched Billy flip around a fifty-degree bank and scream off southward. “He’s full out again, all right!”
Billy was far from full out as yet. But he was driving himself to a semblance of that attitude which looked very much like the genuine thing. The line of hangars streaked past as he bore on the stick, then some trees and a huddle of farm buildings. Swiftly the landscape flattened beneath him and in three minutes the world had lost its familiar contour of wood and hill and valley and was changed to a slowly crawling panorama, a giant painted map that rolled up out of the haze-dimmed horizon and slipped back into the haze.
At five-forty a blur of smoky white emerged from the veil ahead, and the glint of orange sunlight on water showed through the whirling disk of the propeller as Billy stared into the south.
New York and the harbor!
He tore past Manhattan at three thousand feet. The lower city looked as flat as Harlem, its jagged, towering sky line merged with the cable slots of Broadway, humbled and erased from that height.
The yellow stubble fields of Jersey began their steady passage far below. Off to the left a creamy thread of ocean beach slipped past, flanked by a vast expanse of gray-blue surface that ran out and up into the mist without a break. Little shreds arranged in parallels, north and south, were steamers and windjammers in and outbound on the bosom of the Atlantic.