“It’s a grand idea,” Sparky agreed, “but you’ll get tired enough of it before we greet that dawn of yours. We’re going up to twenty thousand feet and stay there for hours. We’ll make better time that way and there’ll be no bumps. You can even sleep if you want to.”
“Sleep!” Mary’s voice rose. “I’d never do that. Suppose you fell asleep, or—or something happened to you!”
“I never get sleepy and nothing ever happens.” Sparky settled back in his place. “Talk when you feel like it,” he drawled. “I like the sound of your voice.”
“Oh, you do,” Mary laughed.
They climbed to twenty thousand feet. It seemed to Mary that she could feel the intense cold creeping through their cabin’s walls and her four-inch-thick suit of wool, leather and fur. But this, she knew, was pure imagination.
As they zoomed along through the blue with the black ocean far below and the stars apparently scattered all about them, she felt very little desire to talk. She just wanted to think.
Her mind went back to childhood days. Happy days they had been, those days with her father. School shut out much of this. And then had come college. College vacations found her flying, first with her father, then alone. She had learned about airplane engines from the ground up and had even become an expert with a machine gun.
“That,” she told herself, “was Providence, a dress rehearsal for war.”
As if he had been reading her thoughts, Sparky said, “Mary, there were a dozen or more who volunteered for this job you’re doing now. I wouldn’t want you to think I don’t like your work. I do. You’re swell, but how come they picked on you? You’re about the youngest of the lot.”
“That’s right,” Mary agreed, “but I’ve had more hours of solo flight than any of them. Fifteen hundred, to be exact.”