“In the cockpit again he opened the radiator shutters so that the motor wouldn’t boil under the labor of the take-off, raised his goggles to his forehead so that his eyes would be free from shattering glass in case the plane crashed at the end of the field, and pressed the throttle slowly forward until it struck the end of the slot. The motor picked up its revolutions slowly—it was swinging a big propeller—and gradually the ship began to roll, mushing down into the soft mud as each foot of advance was gained. Nick felt its tendency to nose-over as it picked up a little speed, and he was forced to pull his flippers up to prevent the nose from burying itself in the ground, although in doing that he knew that he prolonged the take-off. Half the length of the field had been used before the men who were pushing against ship began to drop away from their places at the wings; when that much speed had been obtained the acceleration was fairly rapid, and within a hundred feet more the last man let go his hold upon the wing and flung himself upon his face to dodge the tail of the ship as it flicked over him.
The take-off had been made directly toward the ravine, just as Nick had planned it, but he expected the Douglas to pick up speed quicker than it did. When the edge of the ravine was reached, the fence still fifty feet away, it was not yet in the air. It rolled over the edge of the ravine and settled down, picking up speed more quickly because of the greater slope. Slowly it began to rise; it was clearing the ground nicely when the wing-tip on the right side struck the bank of the declivity with a soft, sickening sound. The ship swung sharply, shuddering and almost out of control, to the right; for a moment it seemed to hesitate as if wavering just before a fatal plunge into the ground. But Nick was quick on the controls; he wound the wheel hard over and leveled the plane in time to prevent the crash; he looked out along the right wing and saw that three feet of the wing-tip had been torn away, and was hanging now, an inert but dangerous mass of débris, to the spars and wires of the wing structure.
“With full aileron control depressing the left wing of the plane, it would fly level, but try as he might, Nick could not roll the ship into a left bank. He skidded the Douglas around in a left turn, hoping to increase the lift on the right wing enough to bring it up into a higher-than-normal position, which would have offset to some degree the decreased lifting surface of the right wing caused by the accident. He eased the plane around, finally reaching the direction which he must fly toward Little Rock, but the plane was still flying level—with the aileron control hard over to the left side.
Above him now, Nick saw the darker gloom of wet clouds, three hundred feet above the earth. At times he flew in the base of them, the black water of the earth invisible below. Rain still filtered out of the clouds, and the ship flew into it and brought it back into the faces of Nick and the girl with a velocity that made it feel like grape-shot. It was almost impossible to face it, yet it must be faced; refuge behind the windshield of the ship was impossible—the utter black of the night required constant vigilance.
“For perhaps five minutes the Douglas handled normally enough that Nick was able to hold it on its course, flying by “feel” and his compass and his altimeter. A gnawing fear of a hidden hill or ridge in front of him clutched at the Patrol pilot; he had had friends who met their death by colliding with such barriers, made invisible by fog or darkness. From the disablement of the plane itself there seemed no immediate danger of a crash; it was extremely right-wing-heavy, but still manageable.
He was seven minutes away from McLearson, battling doggedly with the Douglas, when he felt a severe shock against his controls. He could not see what had happened, because of the darkness, but a moment later he felt the plane rolling into a right bank. He realized, then, that some part of the injured wing had given way. He did not know whether a crash would result immediately or not, but he knew that the crash would come, in spite of everything he could do. He experienced a pang of regret for the injured men—they would never see a hospital; if not killed in the crash, they would drown in the angry water into which they would be thrown when the ship lunged in!
The girl beside Nick had seen the wing strike the bank and had seen him struggling with the controls since that time. Perhaps she understood something of what was taking place, but that realization produced no display of emotion. She looked at the damaged wing, then at Nick, then down into the blackness beyond which the ugly waters of the flood were concealed. She looked back at Nick—and smiled!
The Douglas had been rolling into a steeper bank momentarily. Nick knew that it was a matter of a few seconds until it would tilt up and slide off into the ground—unless, by some means, a weight could be placed on the left wing to counteract the decreased lifting surface of the right one. He placed his lips to the girl’s ear and shouted out his lungs above the roar of the motor.
“Going to crash!” he yelled. “Climb out on the left wing to balance the ship! Hurry!”
The girl nodded. Nick unbuckled her safety belt with a single fling of his hand, and she stepped up on the cowling just behind the cockpit. Slowly, fighting for every inch of progress against the biting wind and the sting of rain, she made her way to the edge of the fuselage and down upon the left lower wing. The force of the propeller blast struck her and slammed her up against the cutting edges of the streamlined flying-wires; by the pale glow of the exhaust Nick could see her clutching desperately to hold her place. She moved farther out upon the wing, and Nick lost her in the darkness; but he knew that she made progress because the ship slowly began to right itself. As she neared the wing-tip the plane resumed normal flying position.