Calmer now, he peeled off his overalls, drew a wool-lined leather jacket over his coat, climbed into the cockpit, and inspected the indicators. As he was testing the spark Tad Warren got away.
Third and last was Carl. The race-fever shook him.
He would try to save time. Like the others, he had planned to fly from Belmont Park across Long Island to Great Neck, and cross Long Island Sound where it was very narrow. He studied his map. By flying across to the vicinity of Hempstead Harbor and making a long diagonal flight over water, straight over to Stamford, he would increase the factor of danger, but save many miles; and the specifications of the race permitted him to choose any course to New Haven. Thinking only of the new route, taking time only to nod good-by to Martin Dockerill and Hank Odell, he was off, into the air.
As the ground dropped beneath him and the green clean spaces and innumerous towns of Long Island spread themselves out he listened to the motor. Its music was clear and strong. Here, at least, the wind was light.
He would risk the long over-water flight—very long they thought it in 1910.
In a few minutes he sighted the hills about Roslyn and began to climb, up to three thousand feet. It was very cold. His hands were almost numb on the control. He descended to a thousand feet, but the machine jerked like a canoe shooting rapids, in the gust that swept up from among the hills. The landscape rose swiftly at him over the ends of the wings, now on one side, now on the other, as the machine rolled.
His arms were tired with the quick, incessant wing-warping. He rose again. Then he looked at the Sound, and came down to three hundred feet, lest he lose his way. For the Sound was white with fog.... No wind out there!... Water and cloud blurred together, and the sky-line was lost in a mass of somber mist, which ranged from filmy white to the cold dead gray of old cigar-ashes. He wanted to hold back, not dash out into that danger-filled twilight. But already he was roaring over gray-green marshes, then was above fishing-boats that were slowly rocking in water dully opaque as a dim old mirror. He noted two men on a sloop, staring up at him with foolish, gaping, mist-wet faces. Instantly they were left behind him. He rose, to get above the fog. Even the milky, sulky water was lost to sight.
He was horribly lonely, abominably lonely.
At five hundred feet altitude he was not yet entirely above the fog. Land was blotted out. Above him, gray sky and thin writhing filaments of vapor. Beneath him, only the fog-bank, erupting here and there like the unfolding of great white flowers as warm currents of air burst up through the mist-blanket.
Completely solitary. All his friends were somewhere far distant, in a place of solid earth and sun-warmed hangars. The whole knowable earth had ceased to exist. There was only slatey void, through which he was going on for ever. Or perhaps he was not moving. Always the same coil of mist about him. He was horribly lonely.