Forell’s exhibition was done as Finley reached his ship and started strapping his parachute around the back of his thighs. As he snapped the shoulder and crotch straps together at his waist, his placid blue eyes swept the mechanic.
“If anybody’s got any insurance they want to collect, come on and take a ride,” he said with a grin. “Draw a chute, and hop in.”
The men glanced at each other beneath bent heads.
“I got to fix up Sixty-nine right away, sir,” the chief said awkwardly, and the crew men had excuses.
Finley nodded. He was not surprized. Nevertheless, the lines were a bit deeper, from nostrils to mouth, and his mouth a little thinner, as he climbed up on the trailing edge of the left wing, and worked himself ahead to the pilot’s cockpit.
The Larkin was a two-motored bomber, one motor set on each lower wing, just far enough from the pilot’s cockpit to allow the propellers to rotate. As it was, the tips of the big six-foot sticks almost grazed the cowling of the compartment, which jutted forth in front of the wings. It was a four-ton ship, with a wingspread of more than eighty feet. Two years before it had been king of its kind; now it was obsolete.
Finley’s hand dropped to the two throttles alongside his seat, and in a second the left-hand Liberty was turning up fifteen hundred as his eyes swept the instruments. Then the-right hand motor went into full cry, and his eyes read the tale of the needles before him.
He nodded to the crew men, and after they had pulled the wheelblocks he turned the ship on a dime by giving the right motor full gun. The aged Larkin swept around to the left and, as it faced the field, Finley cut the throttle.
Kink Forell was about to land, but he was coming down toward the northern edge of the field in a nose dive. Fifty feet above the trees the scout swept upward, and on its back. As it came swooping out of the loop its under-carriage seemed to graze the trees. It zoomed upward, banking as it rose, until it hung in the sky with idling motor, left wing pointed at the ground. It dropped almost straight downward in a vertical side-slip, straightening just above the ground.
It skidded wildly from side to side as Forell fishtailed it, and landed lightly on three points.