“Wait a minute,” interposed Jim Tyler. “You mean you’ll both jump, and let yourselves fall a quarter of a mile or more? Why, that’s the craziest—”
“And the man who pulls his rip-cord last wins, for he’ll land first,” Del O’Connell explained. “As good a test of nerve as ever I heard of.”
“Well, you can fly yourselves, then, for I’ll not have a hand in it,” Jim Tyler announced firmly. “It isn’t necessary for you two to kill yourselves to prove you’re fools. I’ll believe it now.”
His statement made no impression on his partners. This was no sudden quarrel. Each, feeling guilty, was consequently touchy, and doggedly set on doing his utmost to retrieve their misfortunes. And from this attitude it was only a short step, in the ragged state of their nerves, to an open conflict over the issue of courage—or any other issue about which they could contend.
“Well, Jim,” said Burt Minster at last, as Tyler continued to stand his ground unswervingly, “there’s another plane here at the fair, you know. That fellow will take us both up if you won’t.”
Jim Tyler gave in at that, for he saw that his opposition to the plan was only making them more eager to try it. Secretly he nursed the hope that next day would bring them back to rational behavior.
But the opening hour of the fair found them still fixed in their resolve to carry on perhaps the strangest duel of nerve that had ever been devised. The three partners kept apart, since talk only led to acrimony, and each at his post of observation watched the crowds gathering.
They came in battered tin automobiles, and they came on foot, and they came in ancient horse-drawn vehicles, from Baychester County and from the county across the Baychester River which flowed past the Fair Grounds. Jim Tyler’s airworn but still airworthy Burgess training-plane was the center of a milling mob, for Baychester was not so sophisticated as some of its neighbors, and a flying machine was still an object of doubt and an object of awe. The ropes about it strained under the pressure of the curious, and the voices of the guards who reinforced the ropes grew hoarse and querulous. And word of the race to the ground through the thin air spread through the murmuring crowds.
The time of the flight came.