“They might have picked a better time to get killed, at that,” Dumpy Scarth remarked.
Moran’s eyes were on his plate. What had he said that they should disapprove of? Maybe he’d been a little rough for a newcomer. He’d just wanted to show them that he belonged. Why should they pick on him? Every move he made was a mistake, as far as they were concerned. Slowly, as he mulled it over in his mind, his misery congealed into resentment.
Always taciturn, he did not say a word during the remainder of the meal. Instinctively he felt that he wanted to be by himself, and he went directly to his tent. He lay there, thinking. Sensitive to the point of mania, he felt that he was off on the wrong foot with such speed that he could never start over again. His own fault, too. Trying to show off.
No, it wasn’t. Why had that fat-headed runt, Scarth, started picking on him right away?
Toward midnight the flyers, who had been playing cards in the recreation room, came to their tents, and devil-may-care laughter died away into quiet. Shag lumbered to his feet, and went out into the starlit night. The mesquite was murmuring, crackling softly, in the Gulf breeze, and the sky was like a purple roof over him. Over at headquarters, guards were at the telephone, and lights gleamed in the radio shack. East and west stretched the border—hundreds of miles. Southward, Mexico was like a brooding desert. Somehow all the romance, all the tradition, all the pregnant possibilities of the Border country seemed to be whispering to him from the velvet darkness, and his big body thrilled to it and his eyes glowed.
His imagination leaped from station to station—Laredo, Del Rio, Sanderson, Marfa—and he could see the ships on the line, looming like crouching monsters in the darkness, ready to spring into the air after their prey. Life could hold nothing to compare with this, and he was a part of it.
No, he wasn’t, he thought as he went to bed with a thousand thoughts rioting in his brain. But he would be.
Two ships were off on the dawn patrol when he ate breakfast next morning—Dumpy Scarth and Tex MacDowell, with their observers. The others greeted him more or less naturally, but he could see that he was already pegged in their minds as a queer egg. He tried to force himself out of his customary taciturnity but it was hard.
At the end of the meal he said to the captain—
“If it’s all right, sir, I’d like to practise a few landings.”