Floating along precariously with no more than bare flying speed Billy took the spare wheel tucked beside him and waved it overside. The moonlight drenched the form of a man who rose in the nose of the XT-6 and flung a gesture of understanding back at him.
Then the DH coughed and spat. And Billy slipped her off with engine stalled. The gas was out. There was none in the emergency tank for the very good reason that he had been flying on that for the past twenty minutes.
Wheeling slowly the DH spiraled down the night. With the voice of the engine stilled the wind whispered forebodingly around her tilted struts. The wires sang a high-keyed dirge.
“It’s the last crash now,” said Billy Cobb. And then he thought of Jennie and his throat went dry.
Into the mottled light and shadow, under the isles and headlands of the breaking clouds, Billy and the DH coasted reluctantly. Below where the moonbeams struck he could make out in patches the silver blue of fields and the argent thread of a meandering stream. Far away down there a single ruddy star marked the lighted window of a farmhouse. A chalk-white road ran east and west. The road was straight. That meant level country.
There were fields, anyhow. They weren’t swamps, he judged. But they would be none too wide. At a thousand feet he circled one that promised some degree of safety. It looked a smooth clear surface. If there were no great amount of wind, there was an even chance. The black and white of light and shadow showed the run of the furrows which gave him his landing direction.
Once he would have made this landing with scarcely a qualm. But now, after all he had been through, with his nerve weakened and his muscles taut with fear, his judgment warped by overanxiety, could he do it? He held his breath as he made the last flanking leg along the ends of the furrows and turned in fearfully for the landing.
Roadside trees barred the way, and a string of bare poles with wires swayed between. He must clear them to a nicety, perhaps a yard to spare, no more, for the field was short in all conscience and at the far end he could see what looked like a stone wall—a barrier of some sort, in any case.
The trees reached up to clutch him down and barely missed their grip. He had done this before. It was still with him, then, the cunning he had thought was gone. Bare crosstrees strung with copper strands flashed by at either wing tip. Whispering gratulatingly the DH settled groundward, her tail dropping inch by inch as the furrows rose to brush the wheels.
She touched smoothly. And then Billy saw that fate was set against him. A crazy gray form lay dead ahead, a weather-beaten plow, waiting like a grim skeleton. He kicked the rudder bar violently. But too late. The ship ground into the obstacle with a snarl. Her undercarriage crumpled. She plunged her heavy nose into the rain-soaked earth, stopped with a crash of snapping spars, and quivered her upflung tail helplessly at the moon.