He got up, walked around the table, kissed her fervently. “All right, Mother. I don’t know if it’ll help my cause. But it might. She’s about as headstrong and independent a wench as I ever met. I’d need a way to handle her!”
“I think,” his mother answered, “we’ve discovered a way.”
2
The vast airfield shook with motor noise in the gray, windy afternoon. A dozen huge bombers had left the hardstands and roared out on the runways to take off on a regular training flight.
Each one had six propellers. Each prop sent back a wash of air and dust and din, adding it to the boring Texas wind.
Chuck Conner, Lieutenant Conner, closed the door of the office with difficulty. The building behind him, long, low, caked from its corrugated roof to its foundations with dirt, was like fifty buildings parallel to and behind it and fifty more, barracks, on the opposite side of the field. Chuck hunched in his coat, took a better grip on the brief case under his arm and looked for a jeep. There wasn’t any in the vast, concrete environ. Just cement and wind and stinging dust, cold, and the planes moving like things from Mars, far out on the Hat, tremendous field.
He walked.
Another day, another job, he thought.
A jeep buzzed behind him and he got aboard. Riding was colder. The sky was a yellowish-gray, the color of old laundry soap. The clouds must be moving fast, he thought, but they were without definition, so you couldn’t tell.
The jeep stopped at a less dusty building, less dusty, less caked by the wind, because GI’s cleaned it with water every day. Chuck went through a storm door and a second door and performed the military amenities with the officer of the day. He went to the colonel’s conference room, turned over his brief case to Sergeant Lee, saluted. There were four men in the room: Colonel Eames, the Commanding Officer, Major Wroncke, Major Taylor and Captain Pierce.