Billy felt his belt snap with the shock. Then he knew nothing more until he saw Jennie coming toward him, sweet and luminous, along the moonlit field.
She came to him slowly, picking her way across the furrows. He stepped from the shattered wreck of the DH and went to meet her. She held out her hands to him. He put his arms about her and kissed the smile that met his lips.
He heard her whisper something.
“Only for a little while, Billy, my dear. Just to say good night. But I shall be waiting—waiting dear, again—when the air is done with you—at the last crash.”
She was gone. His arms were empty and aching. He raised his head and saw that he was not standing in the furrowed field at all. He was slumped on the flooring of the cockpit still, with a shoulder braced against a spar. Blood was trickling down his face from a cut on his forehead.
He pulled himself up unsteadily, clambered to the ground, got a handkerchief from the pocket of his leather coat, slipped off his helmet and bound up the flesh wound as best he could. Then he stumbled out to the road and staggered away toward a white building with one lighted window that gleamed comfortingly through the green haze of the ground mist in the moon’s rays.
He knew now what the colonel might have told him—but mercifully withheld—five hours ago at Langstrom. Jennie had gone on to wait for him in the place she called the Afterward. And strangely enough he was not grief burdened. Rather happy instead. Happier than he had been through many anguished weeks.
He had returned to the air. And in the end the air would bring him back to Jennie.
IX.
A year slipped by. Then another. Billy Cobb was shunted from post to post and detail to detail wherever his talents were most needed. The third year saw him back at Langstrom again for the summer activities. And chance and the D. M. A. brought Norris and Crawley and Weyman there to meet him once more.