There was but one way to find out. Funny, how little he really felt as his steady hand eased the throttle back to twelve hundred. He seemed to be experimenting for some one else, to be off in another ship, watching a man fight for life.
The nose dropped slowly below the horizon, and he shot the throttle all the way forward. For an agonized moment the D.H. remained in an ever-steepening dive. Then, ever so slowly, the nose came up, and he brought the throttle back slowly to fifteen-fifty.
A chance to wreck, now, in a way that might not kill him. His ailerons and rudders were all right. He sent the ship into a shallow bank, speeding up the motor a trifle to offset the loss of lifting surface, and then straightened it out and headed north. The field adjoining the airdrome north of the fence was rough, but unwooded, and at least three hundred yards long. Then another fence, and a cultivated field. North of this last clearing was mesquite.
Ten miles north of the field he turned again, and headed for the airdrome. He brought the throttle back to fourteen hundred. In a gradual dive the ship sped downward, the airspeed meter crawling up to a hundred and fifty miles an hour. At five hundred feet he was still four miles north of that first cultivated field. Now he brought the throttle back further, and the dive steepened. He let it go for a while—he was about three hundred feet high now—and then shoved it all the way on.
He waited like a statue. Would it level off in time? Two hundred feet, a hundred and fifty, and then the nose started up. The ship was level, a mile back of that first field, and a hundred feet high. Again the throttle crawled back to fourteen hundred. His face was covered with sweat, his feet jumping on the rudder bar. In a series of brief steps he brought it down, and when he leveled the last time his heart leaped as the undercarriage brushed the mesquite. The ship darted across it, and as it cleared it he again inched the gun backward. The dive was so gradual this time that leveling off was almost as easy as doing it with the elevators. The stabilizer was already back, the tail as heavy as it could be made. Three feet above the ground he was rushing along level.
He crashed through the first fence, and the airdrome was close ahead. A wild rush across the intervening field, and the D.H. went through the boundary fence like a cannon ball through paper. He snapped the switches off, and the roar of the motor gave way to the singing of the wires.
He had been going more than a hundred miles an hour. A second after the motor died, the nose dropped suddenly. The D.H. bounced twenty feet in the air. For a second it hovered, stalled, and then crashed as its nose fell.
Moran threw his hands in front of his head. A terrific jar, the splintering of wood and rending of linen. For a second all was blank, and then he found himself tearing his way out of the debris as the odor of burning gasoline assailed his nostrils. Bloody, dazed, only half conscious, he was running, thirty feet from the crackup, as a mass of flame burst from the wreckage, and died into a huge bonfire.
He slowed to a walk, and reason returned to him. Men were rushing from everywhere. Captain Kennard was in the lead, two other flyers behind him.
Moran stopped, his knees wobbly in the reaction. There was but one thought in his mind. He had proved himself a flyer worthy of his trust.