“We could make it. It’s our business to. Scared, are you? The famous Dumpy Scarth, who can do so much showing off when there’s somebody watching, is scared to death when the real pinch comes, huh? A ⸺ good fair-weather pilot, eh?”
Scarth’s curiously boyish eyes gleamed, and his face was white.
"It's—it’s suicide, I tell you! At night, this wind—”
“All right, stay here and write your letters!”
Moran stopped at the door, his smouldering eyes playing over the tense, uncertain Scarth. And his tongue flayed the youngster mercilessly as he dared him to come on, until the beleaguered Scarth, his own eyes ablaze, shouted:
“All right. ⸺ you! I can go anywhere you can!”
A moment later stunned mechanics were warming up the ships in the flooding illumination of the huge landing lights, set on top of the hangars. Moran got into his cockpit in a daze, and was the first to taxi out. Mechanics stayed at each wingtip to help him in the wind. Certain that he was going to his death, and scarcely caring, he gave the motor the gun, and fought his ship into the air.
It seemed barely moving against the wind as he cleared the buildings. When be banked to make his turn, the wind almost turned him over, and the D.H. was blown a hundred yards, tipped up steeply, before he could force it level again. Crabbing into the wind, the ship pointed southwest as it flew due west, he looked around for Dumpy.
The other flyer was two hundred yards back of him. Shag, tight-lipped and tense, turned his eyes ahead. The earth was like a shadowed sea, turning from silver-green to black as the clouds continuously blotted out the moon.
The wind caught the ton-and-a-half bomber and played with it exultantly. Often it took all his strength on the stick to hold it level. It shot up and down in the scrambled air currents like a dried leaf in an autumn gale. Should the motor cut out, there was nothing but maiming or death in store for him below. He was breathless and physically sick under the strain. He really expected the ship to go to pieces at any moment, but he fought his way westward doggedly.