Read Ebook: The last crash by Latour Kenneth

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Ebook has 539 lines and 26752 words, and 11 pages

Billy was still thinking anathema on the score of kiwis in general and Weifer in particular when he reached the hangar and was confronted with Jennie. His own scout ship was standing just outside the curtains with the blocks at the wheels and the engine idling gently. The crew chief, Hansen, was in the seat, holding back the stick. A little cloud of dust eddied in the mild backwash of the propeller and blew outward across the green expanse of the field. The little ship was straining at her blocks and vibrating just a trifle along her stubby fuselage as a whippet strains at the leash and trembles at the haunches on the scratch line. She was settled back taut against her stocky tail skid, with her landing gear gathered in a crouch beneath her stream-lined belly and her nose lifted eagerly toward a perky white cloud that drifted temptingly across the blue of a tender spring sky. Her four varnished wings--she was a biplane--stretched out, it seemed to Cobb as he came up, in a pathetic gesture of appeal to be off.

Jennie was standing just by the right wing tip, a caressing hand curled lightly about the leading strut. She was drinking in the picture of the eager little craft with a wistful eye. Billy appraised her at a glance, much as he appraised airplanes. And it struck him suddenly that he wanted to know this girl--wanted to know her right away, and intensely. She was small--like a scout ship he thought. And her nose turned up, not arrogantly but eagerly--also like a scout. And she was lithe and taut and alert. A queer comparison flashed through Billy's mind.

Ordinarily Cobb would have resented the presence of a woman on an airdrome. In the first place he sensed an incongruity between most women and airplanes--a lack of understanding and sympathy. In the second place he was shy and uncomfortable in the presence of women anywhere.

But now without any of his usual gaucherie and diffidence with womankind he went straight to Jennie, slipping off his oil-stained helmet and exposing a shock of crumpled light hair that matched appropriately the viking blue of deep-set steady eyes.

Jennie, watching him advance, saw that he was not tall, but heavy for all that, a solid four-square pattern of a man, thick through and wide across, with stocky legs that had a suspicion of a bow. She guessed that he had ridden horses before airplanes, which was true.

Their meeting was singularly devoid of either form or reticence. They might have been childhood companions. Yet neither had set eyes on the other until that moment.

Jennie was the first to speak, forestalling the casual greeting and introduction that had risen easily to Billy's lips.

"Is she yours?" asked Jennie, patting the polished wing of the silver scout.

"Mine and the government's," grinned Billy. "But she minds me best. Like her, eh?"

"Don't you?"

"You bet!"

"Then for goodness' sake hurry and take her up top before she gets hysterics waiting. Her plugs will be all foul with impatience if she has to idle much longer!"

Billy shot a startled glance at the girl.

"Gosh," he said, "you know ships, don't you?"

"I love them," said Jennie.

"Well," said Cobb, "this little bus will stand a lot of affection, sure."

He slipped on his helmet and was fumbling with the chin strap as he turned to circle the ship's wing. Jennie laid a restraining hand on his arm.

"Let me fix that for you," she offered.

The gesture had the untaught spontaneity of twenty years of innocence. There was no art in it, nor coquetry. It was the purest act of friendliness. Which is probably why it was so deadly. Billy Cobb, submitting, looked down at Jennie's earnest face, her tightly pursed lips, the little wrinkle of concentration between her slender brows; he felt the small fingers working strap and buckle at his throat; and a new religion reared its altar in his heart.

He waved the mechanic from the cockpit and swung under the top plane and into the seat--but not until he had circled the ship twice with an eye to details like cotter pins and turnbuckles, and a hand to the tension of flying wires and fabric. Jennie could just see the top of his leather-sheathed head turning slowly from right to left as he ran his eyes over the cluster of dials on the instrument board. She heard the engine drop and pick up as he tested first one magneto and then the other. She saw the ailerons and tail surfaces fan the air tentatively as he swung the stick and rudder bar.

Hansen, the mechanic, fell back to the tail and propped himself on the empennage.

"All fast, sir," he bawled. "Let her out when you're ready."

Notch by notch the throttle moved forward. The engine speeded in a crescendo roar until it was screaming off a clear sixteen hundred r. p. m., and mechanic, airdrome, and the hills of the distant landscape disappeared from Jennie's view behind the choking veil of dust that billowed back whirling in the cyclone of the propeller stream. She did not flinch nor stop her ears.

Gradually the uproar subsided, the dust cloud thinned, mechanic and landscape reappeared, and the motor resumed its drowsy, chuckling drone, like water bubbling in a giant boiling pot.

Jennie nodded a judicial nod of approval to herself. Nothing overlooked. Nothing hurried. Here was a pilot who gave a ship a chance, a pilot after her own heart! Billy had declared that the girl knew ships. She did--and pilots too. The colonel, her father, had swung in the baskets of the early army spheroids when the Wrights were still bicycle tinkers with absurd dreams. She had entered life in the shadow of the hangars. She had played dolls in the cockpits of old JN's. The song of the propeller and the blast of the exhaust had been her reveille and her lullaby since days she could no longer recall. She knew the ships of the air and the men that rode them, for they were her life and her people. She did not know Billy's name yet, but she knew Billy. He belonged, at sight, to the elect of the upper levels.

He was waving a brown hand from side to side above the cockpit now, the signal to clear away. The mechanic jerked the blocks from the wheels and hung back against a wing while Billy eased the tail and swung the ship around with gentle prods of the throttle, heading out for the field. His upflung arm saluted Jennie as he taxied away toward the line.

She watched the take-off. Nose down, tail flaunting high, Cobb drove the ship up the wind till it took the air cleanly without sag or falter. A line of blue showed between the far-off hilltops and the hull of the craft before he altered course or angle. Then the nose dropped sharply, just a hair but just enough, the left wing flipped up, wheels and undercarriage flashed into view against the silver of the ship's belly, and she was around in a vertical turn and heading full out along the back track and up in a thirty-degree climb with the needle on the altimeter registering, as Jennie guessed, a thousand feet a minute.

Back and forth above the field Billy shuttled the ship, his turns at the end of each soaring leg crackling with precision. At five thousand he caught the cloud, drove up under it, passed it, spun around on a wing tip, and shot downward. The wisp of drifting vapor engulfed the airplane for an instant. Then with gun cut and wires screaming the silver scout emerged, whooping groundward with flaunting tail waving the astonished cloud an impertinent Godspeed.

Billy's landing was a classic. At three thousand over the downwind limit of the airdrome Jennie saw him start his left-hand spiral. It began with a steady, majestic sweep. Twice around the spacious rim of an invisible half-mile funnel the silver airplane moved, her engine purring at an easy twelve hundred. Then the inverted cone of its course grew tighter. Higher and higher the flashing wings tipped as Billy inched back on the tilted stick. Faster and faster the shortening circuit ran until ship and pilot were whirling down the air like a chip in a racing vortex.

They reached a point where the diameter of the spiral was scarce two airplane lengths. That was the spout of the funnel. And through the spout they spun vertically, wings whirling in a silver disk about the eccentric axis of the flashing fuselage.

At five hundred Billy set the stick at neutral and nudged the rudder bar. The spinning stopped with calculated precision. Gently he drew back on the stick. The tail dropped. She sailed along on level keel. The grass came up to kiss her wheels. A procession of hangars shot past. She hovered, caressing the grass blades with tire and skid. A faint whispering answered as she touched the sod.

Another hundred feet she ran, the soil showing black in the torn wake of the guttering skid. She stopped.

Jennie, reaching out a hand, touched her polished wing, incredulous.

"I never saw anything so perfect," she breathed. "You brought her to my feet!"

Perhaps already Jennie dimly perceived something symbolic in the landing of Billy Cobb--at her feet.

She gave him her small firm hand to steady him when he heaved himself up from the cockpit and leaped to the ground. They walked off the field together and down the gaunt post street between bare rows of flimsy frame huts.

Jennie stopped before one of them larger than the rest that boasted a screen-inclosed veranda. Odd lots of weird furniture--the potpourri of outlandish home equipment that bespeaks the officer of many "fogies" who has gathered his store of household gods in all the ports of the seven seas--littered the minute grass plots on either side of the cinder path to the door. Sweating men in dingy overalls and campaign hats were bearing it in, table by table, chair by chair, trophy by trophy, to a running fire of humorous comment.

"I live here," said Jennie.

"Oh," said Billy, "you're the new C. O.'s family, aren't you?" It was the first time he had considered who she might be or where she had come from, so completely had he accepted her on sight.

"I'm Jennie Brent, yes."

"Sure," said Billy. "Now I get why you're so--so--dog-goned--well, full out!"

She colored very pleasantly.

"Oh," she smiled--and in her smile there was a combination of pleasure and wistfulness hard to picture and harder to interpret--"you think that?" She turned wholly serious and wholly wistful. "Why?"

She flushed with pleasure and interrupted:

"You know daddy, then?"

"You bet!"

"Then you've got to come in for tea this afternoon. We'll be all settled by then. I'll tell daddy you're coming. Oh, and I almost forgot--how shall I describe you to him?"

"But--but I was going to take a flying kiwi up for his pay hops."

"Why," exclaimed Jennie in mock astonishment, "I thought you knew Colonel Brent!"

It was Billy's turn to be astonished.

"Don't you know what daddy does with flying officers who daren't fly without a nurse?"

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