Weyman gaped again.
“John, you’ve got me going! It’s so. I was trying to think up some way to break the bad news gently to Bill when a hurry call came in over the phone. An enlisted man’s wife had convulsions. I told Bill I’d be right back. But I was kept away for an hour and he must have thought everything was all right, because he wasn’t in the infirmary when I got back there. I sent an orderly to call him in but he was just taking off when the man reached the field. See here, John, how in hell did you guess that?”
“I didn’t guess it,” protested Norris. “It’s simple enough. Bill wouldn’t have hopped if he’d known officially he was disqualified. He never deliberately broke a flying regulation in his life.”
“Yes, he did,” recalled the surgeon. “I saw him do it. The day he went after you with the wheel he crossed the T on the take-off.”
“Poor old Bill,” said Norris. “That was like him. Somebody else’s show was at stake then.”
“Well,” said the surgeon, “you’ve explained your second guess, anyhow. But I’m damned if I see how you figured so surely that Bill had been disqualified. Nobody knows that yet excepting the three of us here.”
“Never mind how I figured it, doctor. I’ll try to make it clear another time. But while you and Crawley are waiting for the explanation you might ask yourselves if the way events shaped themselves this afternoon wasn’t a little—a little—awesome. In a minute more, doctor, you would have told Bill he couldn’t fly—that the air was through with him. But something intervened at the critical moment. You were prevented. Then you sent an orderly. The orderly reached Billy just in time to miss him. He was prevented. That’s twice running. Do you think those things were accidents, or were they deliberately arranged?”
“Don’t be an idiot, John!” grunted the surgeon, who was careful to keep both his mental and physical feet on the ground all the time.
But young Crawley, who belonged to the air, stared wide-eyed at Norris.
“Gosh!” he exclaimed. “Gosh, it certainly looks⸺” Then catching the skeptical eye of the man of science frowning on him he held his peace.