“That’s not my fault,” said Beak. “If you want to go, go ahead, and I’ll pay you for your share of the ship—when I can.”
He looked at Jerry keenly. Jerry looked at the plane.
“Where this ship goes—that’s my post-office address,” Jerry declared emphatically.
“All right.” Beak cinched up his flying helmet. “We hop out of here right now, then, toward some place where the people appreciate a pilot like Beak Becket.”
For a moment Jerry Tabor hesitated on the verge of rebellion. Things had been getting worse and worse. But the man before him was Beak Becket, a pilot of whose exploits he had read when he was still in school. And Beak had taught him to fly. The money Jerry had paid—money won by hard work in an automobile factory—seemed little compared to the fact that Beak had made him a pilot. True, Beak had also made him a wing walker, a mechanic and a general errand boy, but allowances must be made, Jerry felt, for a godlike creature like Beak. Nevertheless Beak, though only thirty-eight, often acted like a querulous old man of seventy. The air—or something—had taken its toll of Beak.
“I’ll get ready,” Jerry decided. He glanced at the sun. “How far we traveling? It’s a bit late for a long hop.”
“Give me some more orders!” snapped Beak. “We’re going to hit it for Massachusetts—Pittsfield way, if you don’t mind. If you do mind, we’re going to hit it that way just the same. Get busy!”
As a hero, Beak had become somewhat shopworn as a partner he was a tyrant, but Jerry got busy nevertheless. While he owned half the ship he would not leave her. He ached for the time when he would be his own master, with no old man of the air to ride him. But Beak had made it plain that that time was still far off.
At a word from the pilot Jerry swung the prop and then, while Beak warmed the ship up, he lashed an extra wheel and a five-gallon gas can to the wing beside the fuselage and packed their two suitcases in the front cockpit. As he picked up the parachute pack to stow that, Beak throttled down the roaring motor to speak to him.
“You put that ’chute on,” Beak commanded. “I may want you to do a jump to let 'em know we’ve come—if we hit a likely-looking town.”