He waved the mechanic from the cockpit and swung under the top plane and into the seat—but not until he had circled the ship twice with an eye to details like cotter pins and turnbuckles, and a hand to the tension of flying wires and fabric. Jennie could just see the top of his leather-sheathed head turning slowly from right to left as he ran his eyes over the cluster of dials on the instrument board. She heard the engine drop and pick up as he tested first one magneto and then the other. She saw the ailerons and tail surfaces fan the air tentatively as he swung the stick and rudder bar.
Hansen, the mechanic, fell back to the tail and propped himself on the empennage.
“All fast, sir,” he bawled. “Let her out when you’re ready.”
Notch by notch the throttle moved forward. The engine speeded in a crescendo roar until it was screaming off a clear sixteen hundred r. p. m., and mechanic, airdrome, and the hills of the distant landscape disappeared from Jennie’s view behind the choking veil of dust that billowed back whirling in the cyclone of the propeller stream. She did not flinch nor stop her ears.
Gradually the uproar subsided, the dust cloud thinned, mechanic and landscape reappeared, and the motor resumed its drowsy, chuckling drone, like water bubbling in a giant boiling pot.
Jennie nodded a judicial nod of approval to herself. Nothing overlooked. Nothing hurried. Here was a pilot who gave a ship a chance, a pilot after her own heart! Billy had declared that the girl knew ships. She did—and pilots too. The colonel, her father, had swung in the baskets of the early army spheroids when the Wrights were still bicycle tinkers with absurd dreams. She had entered life in the shadow of the hangars. She had played dolls in the cockpits of old JN’s. The song of the propeller and the blast of the exhaust had been her reveille and her lullaby since days she could no longer recall. She knew the ships of the air and the men that rode them, for they were her life and her people. She did not know Billy’s name yet, but she knew Billy. He belonged, at sight, to the elect of the upper levels.
He was waving a brown hand from side to side above the cockpit now, the signal to clear away. The mechanic jerked the blocks from the wheels and hung back against a wing while Billy eased the tail and swung the ship around with gentle prods of the throttle, heading out for the field. His upflung arm saluted Jennie as he taxied away toward the line.
She watched the take-off. Nose down, tail flaunting high, Cobb drove the ship up the wind till it took the air cleanly without sag or falter. A line of blue showed between the far-off hilltops and the hull of the craft before he altered course or angle. Then the nose dropped sharply, just a hair but just enough, the left wing flipped up, wheels and undercarriage flashed into view against the silver of the ship’s belly, and she was around in a vertical turn and heading full out along the back track and up in a thirty-degree climb with the needle on the altimeter registering, as Jennie guessed, a thousand feet a minute.
Back and forth above the field Billy shuttled the ship, his turns at the end of each soaring leg crackling with precision. At five thousand he caught the cloud, drove up under it, passed it, spun around on a wing tip, and shot downward. The wisp of drifting vapor engulfed the airplane for an instant. Then with gun cut and wires screaming the silver scout emerged, whooping groundward with flaunting tail waving the astonished cloud an impertinent Godspeed.
Billy’s landing was a classic. At three thousand over the downwind limit of the airdrome Jennie saw him start his left-hand spiral. It began with a steady, majestic sweep. Twice around the spacious rim of an invisible half-mile funnel the silver airplane moved, her engine purring at an easy twelve hundred. Then the inverted cone of its course grew tighter. Higher and higher the flashing wings tipped as Billy inched back on the tilted stick. Faster and faster the shortening circuit ran until ship and pilot were whirling down the air like a chip in a racing vortex.