“I’ve got a fierce summer cold,” he explained.
“Oh, sure,” said the baggage man tactfully. “This flyin’s a mighty risky game, anyhow.”
“It’s a damn lie!” exploded Billy Cobb, and put his handkerchief away until the argument was over.
All of which may seem like a great deal of bootless rambling. And rambling it is—but not bootless. The only way to illumine a portrait properly is to light it from various angles.
The important thing to know about Billy Cobb is that he was intensely earnest about the craft of which he was a master. He loved it and revered it and lived for it only. If you believe that you may then understand better how the things that happened to him came about as they did, and perhaps—perhaps—you may think you perceive why.
It has just been said that Cobb lived only for his profession. That should be qualified. There was a brief period when he lived only for Jennie.
Until Jennie appeared Cobb had regarded women with the same indifferent toleration that bespoke his attitude toward everything else outside the level frontiers of the airdrome. But Jennie was of the air herself. She commanded devotion the minute he set eyes on her. He was born to Jennie just as he had been born to the air.
It was on a bright May morning at Langstrom Field—this was three years ago, remember—that they discovered each other and for all spiritual purposes were instantly merged into unity. Billy had just come from officers’ call at headquarters where he had met the new C. O.—not for the first time in his life. The old C. O., a man named Weifer, to Billy’s intense gratification had departed to a staff detail with the D. M. A. the night before.
“Staff is right!” mused Billy, reflecting on the demerits of the departed. “But cane or crutch would be more accurate. He needed one to keep his wings from limping. The big kiwi!”
Now a kiwi, “for the information of all concerned,” as the technical bulletins put it, is the human counterpart of a certain type of training plane with reduced wing surface which roars like a lion but never leaves the ground.