“Conversation,” he said airily, “is the spice of a meal.”
Finley went through his office work mechanically that afternoon, and at four o’clock he was through. He got up from his desk wearily, lighted a cigaret and stared out of the window at the flying field. The Kink was testing a new monoplane pursuit job. The trim, shining little plane was cavorting madly through the sky, like a dragon-fly at play. It frolicked among the silvery, cumulous clouds, and as it darted in and out, hung on its back and dived furiously in joyous exuberance, Finley suddenly sat down at his desk again. His eyes were still staring unseeingly out of the window.
For a moment his mouth worked, then was still. He leaned on the desk. At thirty-five he was a discard in the flying deck—an outcast from the kingdom he had helped to build, part of which he had ruled.
“And now, gentlemen, I want to introduce undoubtedly the greatest big-ship pilot in America.”
His head dropped to his folded arms. That afternoon was his Gethsemane, and he got very drunk again that night.
As the weeks passed his tranquil exterior was not entirely assumed. It wasn’t as bad as he had thought, and the ache within him became only a dull one. Dick Redding took over the big-ship work after Brad Sparks was killed, and Finley was always a passenger on test flights. His judgment of performance, and analysis of it, was as accurate as ever, which helped his self-esteem. It warded off the time when the ground would be his exclusive habitat, and the work of the air would go completely past him.
Nevertheless, the pride of the pilot, which passeth all understanding, was strong within him, and there was no earthly eminence which could replace what he had lost.
And Kink Forell never missed an opportunity to remind him of what he had lost. The Kink was going wild. His callous kidding of Finley, unrelieved by any undercurrent of humorous raillery, had crystallized the growing weariness of the little group of flyers with Forell and all his works. The brilliant youngster sensed the change in feeling toward him, and something indomitable in him made him deliberately pursue the course which had caused it.
He received no more casual compliments about a particularly skillful bit of work, so he went wild trying to force them from the taciturn airmen. His flying brought frequent gasps from even the old-timers, and scarcely a day passed, toward the end of the month, when Forell’s matchless airmanship was not a topic of conversation—when he was not around.