“Any hop is foolish, and a last one is suicide. You’ve made it sure death by letting Penoch fly you.”
“In fact,” Tex MacDowell chimed in, in his soft southern drawl, “I’ve had a shovel all ready to pick Penoch up with, for a long time. I’d pick a hang-over in preference to Penoch any time.”
I guess nobody outside of the men who fly understand what air kidding is. Probably I don’t myself. But in my dumb way I think that it’s like a kid’s whistling when he passes a graveyard, or, perhaps, laughing at the worst that could happen, so that, when it does happen, it won’t mean anything.
When lunch was over, and we were all drifting out of the mess-hall, I suddenly realized that I would like to share, a little bit, those last hours. I’d been so close to the thing that I wanted to hang around the outskirts of it, until Kennedy left. In other words, I was sentimental, and I thought quite a lot of Penoch, at that. So I said casually—“I think I’ll take a little private hop for myself when you do—a sort of chaser for the poker game, eh?”
Kennedy, I think, bewildered as he was at the world that had been opened to him so recently, appreciated the impulse behind my suggestion.
“Sort of be my guard of honor, eh?” he said. But those cold eyes were soft. “In fact, we’ll be glad to have company, won’t we Peewee?”
And so it happened that a half-hour later the three of us were on the line. Our two ships were being warmed up, and the mechanics, satisfied, had brought them down to idling.
“I’ll sit in the back seat, big boy,” Penoch told Kennedy, “but don’t think that I won’t take the stick away from you any time!”
You know, of course, that De Havilands are dual-control ships, but all the instruments are in the front cockpit, and that, in a manner of speaking, is the driver’s seat.