“Kennedy going down?” I asked him, noting meanwhile that Shirley and Kennedy were holding hands.
“Begged to,” boomed O’Reilly. “He’s got guts, all right, and a craving for excitement.”
“How’s he acting—toward you, I mean?”
“Doesn’t speak. Hardly speaks to anybody. I think he’s afraid some of the rest are wise to him.”
Just then I saw Shirley lean forward, as if to kiss him good-by. He looked around almost furtively and held her off. Mr. Ralph Kennedy, for the moment, was very unsure of his ground. As Penoch and I passed him on our way to our ships, his eyes rested on us for just a moment. They were passionless, but when his face was serious the meanness in it seemed to be intensified. Funny what an effect eyes too close together can give. Add that mouth—and my imagination—and perhaps you can see what I mean. Somehow, I shivered.
A moment later I was in my ship, giving her the last look-over, as she strained against the wheel-blocks. Oil pressure, air pressure, rotations per minute, battery-charging rate, temperature—all were O. K. Captain Kennard was already swinging out on the field; I being Number Two followed him, and the others took up the parade in their proper positions. One by one we took off, circling the field for altitude in single file. At a thousand feet the C. O. zoomed, and I slid in, twenty-five feet behind him, twenty-five feet to one side, and ten feet higher than he. Tex MacDowell came in on the left, and the others followed, until a V of ships, three on one side and four on the other, turned eastward and thundered their way toward the Gulf.
Formation is tricky stuff. You hold your position by throttle-handling alone. There are no brakes on airplanes, as you may have heard. It’s no time to commence mooning upon the whichness of the what, nor the why of the how. You ’tend to your knitting, if you don’t want a collision, and I ’tended to mine plenty. Subsconsciously I noted that Kennedy, at the rear of the left side, was holding his position well. Pretty fair flyer, he was. Penoch was behind me.
In an hour we were on the outskirts of the flood district. Ten minutes later I was stealing looks at the ground. We seemed to be flying over a shallow lake, from which houses and barns and cattle protruded. About two feet of water, I should say, covered the ground, and dozens of people were gathered on each knoll. Houses were down here and there, but not until we reached the outskirts of Laguna itself, did the real devastation become apparent.
As we circled that town, it seemed as if I couldn’t move. It looked like some gigantic canvas, whereon some artist had painted his idea of a shambles. The back part of the town still had buildings; the streets, clogged with small débris and overturned automobiles, was the sole evidence, save for broken chimneys, of the water. The beach section was nothing but one gigantic rubbish pile. Ten-story buildings had toppled and fallen in ruins, and for a space of at least a square mile, it seemed, there was not even a lane through the wreckage. Try to picture a heap of rubbish, so gigantic that a hundred automobiles, or more, flung upon it looked like so many flies. Dozens of boats, ranging from oil-tankers to canoes, had been flung hundreds of feet inland, like so many children’s toys flung on a dump.