At Sleepy’s nod, the mechanics pulled the blocks from the wheels, and then swarmed at the edge of the left wing, holding it back while Sleepy turned the De Haviland around with full gun and left rudder on as far as it would go. Without stopping for a moment, he neutralized his rudder, shoved the stick forward, and in a moment was scudding across the field with accelerating speed. The pilot sat carelessly, his right arm draped restfully on the padded cowling that rimmed the cock-pit.
Without any reason at all, he gave the ship right rudder, and it swerved to the right; then left rudder, and a quick left turn was the result. In a moment the ground sank below them; then Sleepy banked carelessly, his lower wing barely three feet above the ground. Then a left bank, combined with a mild zoom, and the thirty-four-hundred-pound ship lifted over the hangars on the western edge of the field in a climbing turn, seeming literally to graze the sides, so close was it.
The pilot looked back with a slow grin, to see Sheriff Trowbridge holding to the cowling as if the force of his grip might make some difference.
“He flies too casual-like,” was Trowbridge’s judgment, before he lost himself in the joy of the rushing air. The flat, misty earth was now five hundred feet below them as they circled the airdrome.
Sleepy pulled back the throttle until the tachometer showed fifteen hundred revolutions a minute, and wheeled the stabilizer forward a trifle until the ship rode level. By means of the stabilizer a ship can be made nose or tail heavy by changing the angle of the two flat surfaces on the tail.
A quick glance at the many little glass-covered gauges before him showed that everything was all right. The ship rode the smooth, cool morning air buoyantly, and by the time it had made one circle of the field had reached a thousand feet. Sleepy threw it into a vertical bank, and in a moment the railroad was in sight, leading northward through the mesquit.
He hunched down farther in the seat, until the great motor ahead of him shut off all forward vision. His right arm rested limply on the cowling, and his feet were propped comfortably on the rudder-bar. The car-shattering roar of the Liberty was as soothing as a lullaby to his accustomed ears. He did not vouchsafe a glance at the receding ground below. He settled down for the forty-minute trip as if in an automobile.
Sheriff Trowbridge was in the seventh heaven. The billowing mesquit, fading into dim nothingness twenty miles away, the rush of the air, the speed with which familiar landmarks were picked up and left behind, all represented the greatest thrill the veteran had ever experienced in his variegated career.
The southeast wind blowing from the Gulf of Mexico was slightly stronger than usual, and in thirty-five minutes the Sheriff glimpsed the clearing that represented Willett. The sun had burned away the ground-mist, and each tiny tree and weather-stained railroad-tie stood out plainly in the clear golden air. He shook the stick in the back seat—the usual signal from cock-pit to cock-pit. Sleepy, who had been sitting as motionless as an image, did not immediately take cognizance of the signal. Not until the Sheriff had actually caused the ship to wabble with the force of his hand on the stick did the pilot turn his heavy-lidded eyes backward. Trowbridge unthinkingly threw out an arm to point. The combined force of the propeller blast and a hundred and twenty miles an hour of speed knocked it backward with painful suddenness; but Sleepy understood.
The tiny station and the store warehouses and corral, with the barely discernible road leading past the store and to the station, labeled their destination plainly. The clearing skirted the road on the south side, and appeared to be about four hundred yards long and a hundred yards wide.