From the platform of the caboose, men waved excitedly as Nick passed them.
The “field” at McLearson was in reality a farmer’s rye pasture. The green shoots had pushed themselves through the water-soaked soil and into open air; yet they did not form a sod, and Nick could see, even from the air, that his plane’s wheels would sink down into the mud so far that there was a possibility of “nosing over” when he landed. On three sides of the pasture pine trees lifted themselves forty feet into the air; on the fourth side—the one toward which Nick would approach in landing— there was only a low fence, which, at one point, dipped down into a ravine and then up again to the level of the ground.
The field sloped rather steeply from the fence up toward the trees; and the wind was blowing up the hill. Nick had his choice of landing over the trees, into the wind and downhill, or over the fence and uphill—but downwind. And the wind at his back increased the possibilities of the plane nosing over when its wheels sank into the mud. But landing up the hill was the only logical way, for the trees were so tall that if he approached the field over them he could not settle the ship to the ground before he reached the fence.
He cut his gun and glided in, rolling the stabilizer back until the plane was decidedly tail-heavy. He came in on a long glide, downwind, and crossed the fence at five feet above the ground, gunning his motor spasmodically to keep the ship in the air until it was over the fence. He cut his gun, jerking the lever back violently, and pulled his control-wheel back into his stomach with both hands. The plane settled into the mud with a soft splash; the mud from the spinning wheels slapped up against the taut fabric of the wings with a crackle like the splattering of hail on a tin roof.
The muck clutched at the tires and dragged them down; the plane, with the flippers hard up, reared its tail off the ground and tried to bury its nose into the mud in front of it, but Nick slammed the throttle open before the propeller was far enough down to flick the ground. The propeller blast slapped back at the tail, but at the same time it pulled forward on the plane, and thus created forces that opposed each other. While the tail tended to be blown down into its proper position, the wheels were almost stuck, and tended to nose the ship downward. The tail remained four feet in the air—higher than normal take-off position—and gradually the plane decelerated to a pace that permitted safe taxying. The mud was so deep that at fifteen hundred revolutions of the propeller, the ship barely crept over the ground.
“I’ve gummed things now!” Nick muttered, when the ship had stopped. “We’ll never get out of this field before next summer! That brakeman will have to stay where he is.”
But, hopeless as he was of taking off from the field again, he left the Douglas in a corner of the field and hurried to town. He went first to the depot, and routed out the station agent.
“Where’re the men who got hurt in the train wreck?” he asked. “I’m down here with an airplane—an ambulance—to take them to a hospital.”
“Up the track a piece,” the agent replied. “The conductor walked back through the water and told us about ’em, but there haint nothin’ we can do about it.”
“Do? Haven’t you got a boat?”