Jerry looked over the situation. The puffy clouds that had glided across their course above them had vanished. Instead there was overhead a thin, grayish stratum that moved inland, creeping in a sluggish race to overwhelm the sun before the latter could escape below the horizon. The air was smoother now, but perceptibly colder. They thundered on up the river. The eastern bank was still bathed in sunshine and its verdure was bright in color, but the high western cliffs seemed to brood beneath their mantle of shadow.
Just one hour later Jerry looked back at his partner somewhat distrustfully, and then turned his eyes very pointedly toward the sinking sun. He shook his head. The bridge at Poughkeepsie was not far behind them.
With a quick hand Beak cut the motor.
“You keep your damned hand still, you pink mouse!” he shouted vehemently. “I said Pittsfield and Pittsfield it is. D’you think I don’t know this country?”
He opened up again at once, preventing any back talk from Jerry.
The young aviator glanced down at the country on the eastern side of the river. Pools of whiteness were filling up the hollows in the ground. Mist, like a phantom ocean, was seeping up through the warm, porous earth into the cooler air. It was rising steadily—for so Jerry interpreted the growing size of the vapor-filled valleys. He scowled at it uneasily.
Another half hour passed and then Beak abruptly swung northeast, away from the river, across the misty earth.
“He’s trying to throw another scare into me,” Jerry decided with rising resentment. “He’s going to land at some field he knows this side of Pittsfield, after letting me think he’s flying right into the fog and the night. Well, I won’t scare.”
He clamped his jaw shut and stared with rising perturbation at the mixture of dusk and water vapor that was erasing the landscape. The ship itself still flew in brilliant sunlight, but somewhere down there in that growing gloom they must find a broad, flat space to set their landing wheels on. And broad, flat spaces below were scarce. The land high enough to escape the murk was the wooded tops of hills—the rolling, uneven Berkshires.
What fog can do to a ship is nothing compared to what fog can do to a plane. There is no stopping for a plane. It must keep on—on—on or fall.