“Boy, what they’d say if they knew that I never flew a De Haviland in my life before today! But I got this baby off the ground at Donovan and nobody’ll ever dream I never flew one!”
No more than they’d dream how much his wings and flying meant to him. The dogged, heart-breaking fight he had waged to drag himself from the poverty-stricken slime of his boyhood, through school, and then to an officer’s commission. The ambition of terrible years was fulfilled for Shag Moran. And nobody suspected that there had been tears in his eyes when he got his commission. Big, hulking, shambling Shag Moran was supposed to be hard-boiled. That’s what the carelessly competent young fliers thought about him, and he was glad of it. He would have cut off his hand rather than let them know his real love for the air, and of his perfect contentment, now that he was a flyer. Why, if the border men knew how he felt about being one of them, they’d laugh themselves sick. Think he was crazy. They took the job as a matter of course. They hadn’t worked a lifetime for it.
There was McMullen, and he was going to hit it right on the nose. It must be, according to his map. There was a dun pocket-handkerchief of a field, surrounded by buildings, a few miles west of a sizable town. Surely those big, black blotches against the ground were the two iron hangars flanking the field to east and west. And that town was McMullen, all right—it was too big to be an unnoted settlement. Southward a few miles the Rio Grande was a twisting, silver ribbon, glinting in the flooding sunlight.
He’d start down, now. Had he been more familiar with De Havilands, he might have essayed spiraling down closer to the field. He would take no chances now, though.
He eased back on the throttle, until the tachometer was down to nine hundred revolutions a minute, and nosed down slowly. He watched his airspeed meter like a hawk. He kept the speed of his ship at a hundred miles an hour. The wind was making the wires sing, and there was considerable vibration.
In a perfectly straight, conservative dive he flashed earthward, his body tense with the strain. Now he could see tiny figures lounging on the steps of one of the buildings which formed the southern boundary of the sandy airdrome. He was going to have an audience for his landing, which made it worse. With every moment, it seemed, that field was shrinking in size. The northern boundary of it was a fence. He prayed that the wind would be from the south, so that he could land in from the north. It would be impossible for him to bring that big plane down over the obstacles on the other three sides.
The altimeter read a thousand feet when he pulled the ship up and shoved the gun all the way on. He was a half mile back of the field as he flew level toward it. He circled it once, and saw that the wind-sausage on top of one of the corrugated iron hangars indicated a south-east wind. Some one had said that the wind was usually southeast—the Gulf breeze. Yes, there were at least a half dozen men lounging in the shade of a porch. There were several buildings along that southern rim, and two long lines of tents.
He drove northward a half mile, circled warily, and cut the gun to seven hundred revolutions. He fairly felt his way toward the ground, trying to watch the ground, his airspeed and the tachometer all at once. He must barely ease over that fence, at the lowest speed possible.
He got too low. He was only fifty feet high, several hundred yards back of the fence, and the motor barked into sudden life as his hand thrust the throttle forward. He seemed to be going terribly fast, for being so close to the fence, and he cut the motor to idling. Downward, bit by bit, the fence had flashed beneath him. He was going like lightning.
From a height of six feet it seemed that the D.H. dropped out from underneath him. The wheels hit the ground hard, and the big ship bounced high in the air. His hand automatically found the throttle as the plane hung, nose in the air, and jammed it all the way forward.