The Flying Banker: A Cure for Care
I
To fly three thousand hours and live, only to find thirty minutes an eternity in which every second seemed the last; to contend and struggle for years with growing success in the roar of Wall Street, then to be caught on a lonely, silent prairie, unable to get back, to do anything, to avert anything, and to learn that one was going broke hour by hour — such were the contrasts of experience through which I have lived.
As a wide-eyed youth, I tremblingly went aloft with the pioneers, and I’ve been flying, on and off, ever since. As a grown man, I became absorbed in that curious life endured by those who live and die by the sword — that is, the stock market. In other words, I became an investment banker. I nearly always worked; I often flew. The two went well together, strangely enough, for flying has not, as yet, anything to do with making money. . . . But, once acquired, the fascination of flying never leaves anyone; and the fascination of making money is denied only by those who have never done it. Things were high, wide, and handsome, when, most suddenly, the result of my work went smash, and the apparently solid things lay in bits; but right at that moment my faithful pastime staged a counterclimax, and kicked me up against forces far greater than anything the Street could muster. It worked. I got back, or for the first time acquired, a perspective; and for once I knew what was real and what was n’t.
It started after the first big market crash. The pennies, a little lonely after repeated decimations, were still a respectable band. That was all right. But the universal, insistent, unnecessary gloom became altogether too much to be borne.
A friend of mine, a real banker, had a client rush in on him and exclaim: ‘Mr. P-, this situation is terrible! I feel as if I were caught in one of those revolving mousetraps, going round in a circle. For God’s sake get me out, and to hell with the cheese!’
This gentleman expressed my sentiments perfectly, but I could not get out. I did the next best thing: I departed for the Middle West and joined a friend who owned a powerful aeroplane, and we concocted a trip into the Northwest, half business, half pastime. He was not a pilot, but he employed a very good one.
The machine was rather exceptional; it is still, I think, the finest aeroplane that can be had. A cabin monoplane, quite small, streamlined to within an inch of its life, hung behind a huge engine of four hundred and some horsepower, itself a magnificent piece of mechanism. At full throttle the machine had an air speed of about a hundred and seventy-five miles an hour; we usually cruised at about one hundred and fifty to sixty. The landing speed was high, and thereby hung tales. The body was cigar-shaped and smooth, even the door being curved to follow the shape of the body.
Inside, the pilot sat right up in front, behind the engine, with a bulkhead behind him. Farther back were two comfortable leather seats, and directly before them two tip-up seats, which we never used. Our bags went in behind us.
The big wing was attached to the top of the body, and we looked out sideways through glass windows, under the wing. The pilot, of course, had windows looking straight ahead. The gasoline tanks Avere inside the wing, and gave us about five hours’ supply, or enough for around eight hundred miles. Few Army or Navy pursuit aeroplanes, even single-seaters, were as fast or could carry as much gasoline, and if a man wanted speed — why, here it was.
The weather was poor, and a day or two passed before we cared to start on such a long trip. It was gray and raining when we finally stood on the tarmac watching the pilot warm up the engine. The ceiling was about five hundred feet, the visibility about half a mile.
We went to the main office at the Kansas City airport and found out about the weather on our route. Our first stop was to be Minneapolis. We found that the weather at Des Moines was much clearer, and looking better to the north. On a long flight one is pretty sure to run into bad weather somewhere, and frequently it is a good sign to start in a poor Aveather area, Avith the consequent likelihood of running out of it. Still, it looked rather poor for high-speed flying.
We went back to the machine. It glistened; every part was smooth and shining, and even the wheels were three-quarters enclosed in a metal streamlining, to cut down resistance. The pilot had the engine nearly wide open, the aeroplane quivered, the roar was deafening. Then the pilot cut the throttle until the propeller just barely flicked around, and climbed out.
‘She’s hot,’ he said. ‘What about it; do we start?’ We told him the weather situation to the north. He considered. ‘Fine,’ he replied. ‘We’ll probably run out of this stuff in half an hour, although it’s mighty poor around here.’
He turned to me, as the inexpert but gray beard pilot; ‘What do you think?’
I thought the weather was horrible, but my friend and the pilot were obviously all set to go, so I assented with such brightness as I could assume. We said good-byes, and climbed in.
II
We took off forthwith. Our take-offs were always exciting, like our landings; that is to say, a great deal seemed to be going on. Like all pilots, this pilot had ways of his OAvn. At about eighty or ninety he took the weight off the wheels, but held her down to within a few feet of the ground until he had about a hundred and fifty miles an hour. As one looks ahead over the engine, the sense of speed is considerable, but peering out under the wing at the ground three feet away conveys a sense of real action. He then executed a verticalbank climbing turn, which again is not a dull sensation, and thus brought himself out at about five hundred feet and facing the airport again. The operation is not possible, of course, except with a powerful machine.
We squared away, just under the ragged clouds. The ground near the city was cut up into small fields. Mechanically I eyed possible landing places in case of engine failure, as no oldtimer — or new-timer, for that matter — fails to do, however fine his engine. In our case, our aeroplane had only one fault, and that was its high landing speed; and over involved country it was a very real fault. Notwithstanding designers’ efforts to the contrary, machines which fly fast also land fast. The higher your maximum speed, the higher your minimum, and if you fall below the latter you stall, lose the power of flight, and the machine dives violently until it regains speed. If you happen to be too close to the ground, it’s too bad.
Our machine was generally ‘brought in’ to a landing at about one hundred and twenty miles per hour, so as to retain full control, and then, on straightening out for the actual landing, the speed was dropped to about sixty to seventy, at which speed the wheels touched; being so perfectly streamlined, the machine took a long run without slackening. It had brakes, but you cannot use these until going very slowly, or the machine will turn over on its nose. We needed a whole lot of territory to get down on, and on anything rough it took a lot of skill; and if we had a crash we could be sure of one thing — it would be at a nice high speed. If you disconnect the brakes of your car, and get it going at around seventy in a small field, you will grasp what I mean; but not for long.
However, the engine was going as smoothly as a sewing machine; the ground began to open out into farms. The ceiling rose just a little, then a little more, and soon we were up about a thousand feet. The sense of speed left us, except when we dashed through a cloud streamer. Rain blurred the windows at times, but quite suddenly the clouds broke all round us and patches of strong sunlight lit us up; and we nudged each other with relief and pleasure. I relaxed against the back of my seat; the pilot wriggled a hand back through the little opening in the rear of his compartment and waved.
Soon Des Moines came in sight, under our right wingtip, indistinct under the film that hangs over every city. We were now flying at about four thousand feet, seemingly suspended in the air while the distant earth very slowly unrolled below us. Tiny clouds, little masses of golden vapor, flicked past the windows sometimes. I gazed my fill at the immense pattern of thousands of fields, brown, gray, green, every autumn color, and all speckled with yellow sunlight and cloud shadows. Misty in the east and full gold in the west, there was no break in the farms, unless for a town. Everywhere a vast fertility, the furrows marked on every field; the rich earth seemed boundless — America!
Ahead, the earth began to disappear beneath a wide curtain of smoke. In the smoke cloud one sometimes saw the flash of windows down the side of a tall building, or a faint white tower of offices. Over a gray-black rope that was the river, St. Paul was quite hidden under its own pal!.
The engine softened; we began to glide. The earth became very distinct, and the sense of speed returned to us. We flashed over a line of hangars still five hundred feet up, and Minneapolis airport, enclosed in the white ring of an old concrete race track, lay beneath us. The pilot opened his engine up full at about a hundred feet, and we tore across the airport while he surveyed the ground. A sharp climbing turn, back down wind, then he turned right up on a wingtip and began a steep sideslip to kill speed; I looked down at the inevitable hightension wires along the side of the airport. We slung level, the open end of a hangar flicked by the windows, the sense of terrific speed came back. Then, bumble-rumble, the loud noise of our wheels along the ground. We taxied to fhe concrete pavement by the hangars, and got out.
It was a brilliant evening, very cold, the sky vivid orange, and all very Northern. We looked at our watches; sitting quietly in our warm cabin, watching an unforgettable picture, we had come four hundred miles in two hours and twenty-six minutes! The airport men gathered around and exclaimed, and perhaps disbelieved. I thought of the long overnight journey by train, and patted the glossy side of the machine when no one was looking. We carefully put her away in a hangar. Earth-bound, we bundled ourselves and our bags into an itinerant taxi; the driver, overcome by his temporary environment, avid for speed, tried and tried to break through fifty, swinging from side to side while we clutched each other in terror.
III
Winter weather, that bane of longdistance flying, gave us a mist so thick that we could scarcely see the street beneath when we looked out the next morning. It drizzled, and it felt raw. Our next leg was a long one, straight out West, to Wyoming. It was not over any mail route, and we wanted fair weather, with our machine, for the trip. So we had to wait around, victims of irony, while the despised trains came and went.
That evening I was electrified by newspaper headlines announcing another stock break. After the terrific smash we had had, with its primary and secondary breaks and all the rest of the performance, this was indeed startling news. I was overwhelmed again by the dead, hopeless feeling of wondering how bad it would be tomorrow and to-morrow. It is not a light matter to watch the work of years, into which the whole serious energies of one’s maturity have gone, crumbling away before the blind effects of a universal disaster. It is no light thing to think of the patient toil that must be begun to rebuild the shattered edifice stone by stone.
I mooned about in the drizzle, feeling very low, particularly as I was so far away and helpless to do anything or to understand what was going on. So, even though preoccupied with sixteen-million-share days, Wall Street spared one of its little demons to come out, crouch on my shoulder, and claw my neck.
All next day was the same, and sometimes we engaged in that most footless of occupations, cursing the weather. The evening papers revealed that the market in New York was still falling. Ignorant of flic true conditions, my imagination ran only too wild, and with nothing to do but sit around and wait for the weather, I was rapidly becoming what the cowboys call ‘spooky.’ The ensuing morning we were all in a mood to take off directly there was enough visibility to leave the ground. The airport was foggy and gloomy. We went over the machine very thoroughly; the tanks were filled; and we waited around, hoping it would clear. As our route did not go over any air line, we were ignorant of the conditions out West; and, with all the uplift which was being showered on aviation, it seemed too bad that a great city like Minneapolis knew nothing whatever about the weather west of it.
Around lunch time, the ceiling rose to about a thousand feet, and the ground visibility extended to about a mile. I telephoned from the airport office to the little town we were bound for; there was no weather man, so I spoke with the local newspaper. An individual described the weather conditions as being very dull and cloudy; it sounded about the same stuff as we had; but he added that he did not expect any precipitation. I was to remember this naive prophecy. Cheered, I reported my investigations. We had a council of war; we were all sick of waiting, and agreed to take off and see how far we could get. The pilot started warming up the engine, an operation which took about twenty minutes or more, for we never hurried over this most important preparation.
We took off and reached the cloud ceiling in about a minute. Everything looked overcast and gloomy. We had laid out our exact course and set the dial of our earth inductor compass, so we started off. We began to cross the strings of little lakes west of Minneapolis, flying at about eight hundred feet, and around one hundred and sixty miles an hour. The ground was very broken, with lakes, clumps of trees, little fields, but as usual our engine was purring its steady, unvarying drone. Generally it was a sound we were never even conscious of unless it changed its note, but flying so low we listened to it intently, and there was an atmosphere of strain about the start of the flight. After a while, the country opened out into huge farms, with fields big enough even for us, and we relaxed a little. We noticed occasional patches of snow; the clouds remained as thick as ever, and the ceiling a shade lower.
We did not go up through the clouds, because we had no idea of what lay ahead. No sound pilot, will ever willingly fly above a thick cloud body unless it is known for a fact that the clouds are at a reasonable height above the dest ination; for obviously you must eventually come down through the clouds, and if they happened to be very low-lying at that place, you might fly right into the ground, for a fatal crash. It is a horrible sensation to be rushing at two miles a minute down through the clouds, knowing you are getting close to the earth, unable to sec anything whatever, keeping level only by the instruments, straining your eyes into the gray opacity for the ground that may flash into view fifty feet or a. thousand feet below you. Your height indicator tells you only your height above sea level, and you may be over a hill, or the whole terrain may be higher than you estimate. So we kept down where we could see at least the ground immediately around us.
The ceiling had become about two hundred feet. The clouds were very ragged, and the late afternoon light was almost all reflected up from the snow, giving an unearthly effect. The desolate snow-clad land was constantly rising to the west, and becoming hummocky, with deep washes or gullies; the clouds steadily became a little lower; so the two were coming together with our hurrying aeroplane in the middle.
Another half hour went by; we dashed through several snow flurries, and I began to be worried lest we were getting into a really dangerous situation, with no even reasonably good landing places anywhere. Our high landing speed was always in our minds. I hurriedly scribbled a note to the pilot, on the back of a map: —
This weather is getting much worse; suggest turn hack and try find some town and land there.
He considered the note, then pushed back his reply. I had to lean against the window to read it, for darkness was coming on.
Think about forty or fifty miles due east of finish. Believe we can make it O.K. What say?
I looked out; from moment to moment we rushed farther into solitude — nothing but snow and the endless sullen clouds. I did not consult my friend, although he owned the machine; the pilot and I had been piloting for many years, and it seemed to me that seconds counted. I started to write a reply suggesting that we turn round anyway; in the middle of it, I suddenly saw a dark wall right in front of us, and the next second the light was all but blotted out by a dense blizzard. Instantly I heard the engine throttled; the nose fell as we tried to keep the ground in sight. For a few moments, engine on and off, we fumbled for it at nearly three miles a minute, in a dense mist of swirling snow; then it flashed into view very indistinctly, about twenty feet below.
The pilot was struggling frantically to open a little triangular window in front of him, for the snow had blanketed the front glass and he had only a side view. He got it open, and the cold air and snow rushed into the machine. He throttled back all he could, but even so our speed was terrific for the conditions, over two hundred feet a second. We could see barely half a second of time ahead. I crouched on one knee on the floor, trying to look out of both sides at once. A white flash of snow-clad hilltop snapped by right under the wheels, so swiftly that it was a bare impression on my senses; then a gray blur as we crossed one of the wdde gullies between these flat-topped hillocks; then another instantaneous flash of light, a blur, and so on.
In all our minds was the thought, suppose one of these hills is higher? The pilot had the worst of it; I could just see him, one hand on the throttle, the other on the control stick, his head strained forward, trying to see through the gloom. Repeatedly, maddeningly, I recalled the horrible crash when a machine, caught in just such a storm, had flown right into Mount Taylor and killed every soul aboard. As I looked from side to side, every muscle tense, making instinctive motions with an imaginary control stick as we caught each glimpse of ground, I raged at myself for being so frightened. But with nothing to do I could only crouch motionless and await each second. I swore monotonously to myself. Sometimes we caught a little area of visibility, two hundred yards perhaps, and we had a momentary relief; then the snow clamped down again. It was getting very dark. I could not recall ever having been in such a desperate situation before for so long a time, even in the war; for a fight in the air was absolutely decisive within literally a few seconds — then it was all over one way or the other.
This went on and on, none of us knowing whether or not the next second we should know anything at all. It may seem consoling that we should never have known it had we hit, but the thought does n’t help at such a time. Self-preservation is dominant; you want Life — all of it. We cursed our high landing speed; with a slowmachine we could have effected some sort of landing, but with ours we should have been certain of a bad crash. I looked with longing at each patch of snowy ground; we all wanted tremendously to set our feet safely on it — so near, only ten or twenty feet, but how very far it was! We all knew that the survival of each approaching minute was largely a toss-up.
To try to execute a turn under such conditions was possible, but most tricky. Besides, the wind was from the north, and the blizzard probably covered our course from the cast; south of us lay the western end of the Bad Lands of South Dakota, so that was closed. The blizzard was coming from the north; somewhere ahead of us was our destination, just between us and a range of mountains. We clearly had only one chance. As we peered out, we knew that if we missed this little town sitting out in the middle of the prairie we should pass on to a range of mountains ten thousand feet high. The town was a small mark to hit, after flying five hundred miles on a compass course. Right in front of the pilot’s face was a little dial with a swinging upturned needle; as long as he maintained the set course the needle remained bolt upright, and he had to try to keep one eye on it all the time, holding his feet rock-steady on the rudder bar, resisting the instinctive flinch to one side when we nearly touched the ground. If we missed the little town by only two or three hundred yards, we could never see it in the gloom. The thought passed through my mind that they would never find us until the spring.
IV
Fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes of this miserable, solitary groping passed by — hours in our minds. Tearing along at an insane speed, one’s hands pressed against the sides, one’s head against the curved roof, of a small polished cylinder of plywood with a mass of roaring steel at the fore end, going headlong into the unknown — it was, if nothing else, a cure for the sorrows of the stock market. There was now scarcely any light; visions raced through my mind of happy people switching on the electric fight in warm rooms. The luxury of throwing another log on the fire, of listening to the comfortable crackle of the burning wood! To be down, anywhere, in the humblest shack! The good feel of the solid quiet earth under one’s feet — to stride over it, swinging one’s arms and legs! The looking forward to the coming days, the continuity of life! We crouched, weary and intensely alert.
Without the slightest warning, a few houses and a road burst into view, the chimneys about level with our tires. We all yelled at once. We were going so fast that we were right in the town before we could utter a coherent word; but quick as was the amazing alteration from solitude to civilization, men in danger think mighty fast, and almost in the same eventful instant we swung violently over on one wing. As I braced to the whirling turn I peered directly past the undercarriage wheels, now higher than the horizon, and saw the blurred shape of a big dome, above us! We had nearly flown directly into the Court House! The turn took us up a few feet, and the lighted streets disappeared from view. We leveled off, the nose went down, and they came into view again. It was just possible to see the ground, unless we were looking right into strong lights.
Level for only a moment, a wingtip fell beneath us as we commenced circling just above the rooftops, looking for somewhere on the outskirts of town to land. We knew there was a landing field two or three miles north, but we’d never seen it, and we did n’t dare leave the town now that we had found it, for fear that we should never find it again. The snow was as thick as ever. Our turns were always nearly vertical and very rapid, because in a fast machine the turning circle is of large diameter, and it was difficult to stay over any one area close beneath us long enough to examine it. We found a football ground in an oval enclosure; it was beautifully smooth, but it became only too plain that we could never pull up in such a space. Regretfully we turned away, coming level for a moment after having pirouetted on one wingtip for several minutes.
We were all tremendously relieved to have the houses beneath us. After the horrible desolation of the snowcovered empty plains, this little town looked most beautiful; every signboard and store and street was a lovely sight to us. It still looked as though wo should have a crash landing, but the psychological effect of knowing that plenty of our fellow beings were near us was tremendous. We hunted all round the edges of town. The pilot found a wide road, very straight. Deep brown ruts showed through the snow, but the telegraph posts were well to one side: it looked as if we could get down on to it somehow, assuming perfect piloting, of course, and preparing for a crash of some sort toward the end of the run. This area we examined most thoroughly, up and down, up and down, while the pilot took in all the hazards.
The pilot had just about decided to go to it and essay the road landing, when he caught sight of another possibility and started to examine that. It was a triangular patch of land, with telephone poles along the down-wind side, and a farm and gully at the far end. A road to the farm ran up one side, and there were some low buildings alongside the telephone wires. The pilot went down to ten or fifteen feet for a second or two, to see the ground contours; the snow carpet looked very level, and he assumed that the snow could not be more than six inches deep.
It was now far into dusk; quickly he made up his mind. I heard a rapid clanking jiggle aft as he set the adjustable tail surface into landing position. Up we went into the dense snow cloud; the engine note abruptly sank to a whisper, the right wingtip dipped until it was directly below us. We went down in a vertical sideslip; the earth flashed into view so close that we seemed to have reached it. We leveled out very violently just past the telephone poles. For a moment, there was a level glide at about sixty, then I felt the tail drop a little. The snow brushed our wheels.
The side of my face was glued to a window as I squinted ahead. The farm and ravine tore toward us. We bumped roughly once, twice; then the familiar loud rumble of the wheels. We were still going very fast. The brakes squealed suddenly, and I felt rather than saw the pilot pull the stick hard back into his stomach to hold the tail down. We skidded forward in the snow, like an animal with all its legs stiff before it. At the last second, the pilot stood right up on one brake, and we ground-looped and made a complete turn. She did n’t turn over; she stopped dead, almost silent, the engine whispering quietly round. We were down.
We stood on the ground with the snow swirling around us in the half light and soaking into our shoes. We did not speak. I was still trembling all over with the tension of the past half hour. The pilot’s face looked gray from the terrific strain of flying a few feet above the ground at two and a half miles a minute, trying to watch his earth inductor compass indicator and pierce the blanket ahead at the same time, one hand on the throttle, the other on the stick. He had accomplished a superb piece of flying. We stared down into the ravine beside the machine.
Men came rushing up in the gloom, big, muffled-up, Scandinavian-looking fellows, eager to help. We were so glad to see them, we wanted to throw our arms round them. Some of them ran off to get us stakes to peg down with; the others stood around ready to help us in any way they could. We decided to tie her down at the far end of the field near the telegraph poles. I ran along to see if there were any holes covered by the snow. I fell into two big ones a few yards from the tracks we had made coming in. Had we chanced to strike them, we should have crashed to splinters. I ran back, rejoicing in the ability to run again, and pointed out the holes.
The pilot climbed back in to taxi the plane down. She had settled into the ground, and he opened up the throttle to pull her out. As he did so, the engine gave two or three stentorian clanking coughs, and died. He got out and we examined it; then we stared at each other, speechless. Those few clanks were the footsteps of the gods to us; for we had seen that the air intake was jammed with ice. The engine would keep going wide open or nearly stopped, but if the throttle was opened up suddenly she choked to a standstill. If the pilot had happened to cut his engine for a moment, after we had got well into the blizzard, he would never have got it again, and we should have flown squarely into whatever was there.
We silently cleaned out the ice, restarted the engine, and took the plane to her resting place and pegged her down, while the cold wind blew the snow into our eyes. Then someone took us in his sedan and drove us, still quiet and filled with a sense of unreality, to the hotel. We could n’t get used to the fact that we were really down, jogging peacefully along lighted streets, able to stop and get out at any moment, warm houses all about us.
V
We registered; the hotel was old, quaint to our eyes, with wide mahogany staircases, an army of cuspidors, aged oak chairs. We went to our rooms, all still quite silent. We sat with our shoes steaming and sizzling against the radiators, looking at the murk outside. After a while we started to talk our heads off; we went over every mile of the journey and especially the blizzard, and the pilot compared notes with us. We told each other what we’d thought of the football ground, the road, the eventual field. Then we were all hungry, for we’d had nothing since breakfast. We trooped down, our shoes dried and warmed, into the dining room. The floors were of whitish tile and the chair legs squeaked on it. We had a large dinner, ham and eggs and browned potatoes and pie and lashings of coffee; it was grand, and we all felt very well.
We went out into the lobby, and as we stood there by the dining-room door a Western Union boy brought me a telegram. I remembered having wired our destination to my secretary, sometime that seemed months ago, that morning before we left Minneapolis. Standing there, I read the message, and as I did so I realized, with a sense of shock, that the game was up. The closing prices, the comments of my secretary, showed a perpendicular smash; at the opening next morning I should be broke, ' busted sky-high.’ Prices had been falling wildly at the closing gong; here was I nearly three thousand miles away, powerless to do a thing. There was nothing to do.
I looked up; it was a funny sensation, standing there and realizing that a good many years of work had gone glimmering, that the shadow which had been hanging overhead had really fallen at last. Then the scales fell from my eyes; wonderingly, I realized that I did n’t care a hang! I was alive! A little while before, I had been hurtling through the air, never expecting to see another hour, another minute, maybe; and here I was, warm under the lights. I thought of the dark desolation a few miles away, the snowfilled air, the cold; and the telegram was meaningless. I threw it into a cuspidor. Here was I alive and strong, a whole world full of exciting things before me; for once I had a grasp on reality, I felt my feet spread firmly on the ground. My two companions stood looking curiously at me.
‘Men,’ I said, ‘I’m busted wide open, but what the hell! And who cares, if I don’t? Come on — movies! Talkies!’
We tramped arm in arm through the snow. I had never felt better. I had a feeling of release, a freedom I had n’t known for many a year, My money was gone; but that event was quite overshadowed by the realization of all the wonderful things there were about me, before me, which I had so narrowly missed knowing any more about. I felt clearly that, given soundness in wind and limb, there was nothing I’d ever done that I could n’t start right over and do again, and much better. It was n’t the mood of a moment — I felt it right in my bones, although heaven knows it had taken enough to get it into me. A whole lot of complicated things seemed rather stupid, and another lot of simple ones came into focus, like the screen image when you set your camera right.
The movie was fine — commonplace enough, but we all felt that gayety which needs no cocktail to get it going, and we went to be amused, so we were. It changed our thoughts completely for an hour or two, and eased off the tension. We strolled peacefully back past all the little shops, their windows beaded with the inside moisture, looking at everything as though we’d just come in from the farm for a big night in town. I passed the Western Union office without a pang. I was glad, for I was half afraid the care-free mood would wear off. It was a wonderful night, the clean wind straight off’ the prairie. I slept splendidly.
We spent a day or two on our business, looking over a little silica mine in which we were interested. I had a little hope that sometime, by the time I was getting old, perhaps, it might pay back a few dollars, but the hope seemed insecurely founded. For my part, I crossed my fingers and made a wish that it would manage to break even, for I had nothing more to put into it. We spent these days out in t he mine shacks, by the edge of the mountains, pine and spruce trees covering the slopes. I did n’t want to leave, but the mine foreman’s wife summed it up for me: —
‘Wish you were staying, son; but I s’pose ye can’t live on mountain scenery and fresh rabbit tracks!’
We got ready to start home, loading up the tanks with every gallon of gas and oil we could carry. On our big map was a long pencil line drawn against a ruler, across five states, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, into Missouri.
VI
We leveled off at about nine thousand. I looked through the clear air at the sparkling view, mountains, plains, great stretches of clean space everywhere, and found myself humming a tune I’d heard Eddie Cantor sing, starting off, ‘Oh! I’m glad to be alive! ’ With eel-like squirms, the pilot crawled through the little opening behind him, where the padded back of his seat was hinged to the roof; he held the stick at arm’s length while I contorted myself past him into the pilot’s seat. The machine rose and fell uneasily as our hands joggled the stick.
I glanced over the many dials; everything was going like clockwork; the air-speed indicator trembled around a hundred and fifty-five. A scarcely noticeable pressure on stick and rudder brought us dead on our course, with the compass indicator needle bolt upright.
The golden afternoon wore on as we tore over the dense pattern of fields and farms and industrial towns; many an airport we saw, and once we dashed past a tri-motored transport machine as though it were tied to a sky hook. Behind us we could see nothing now but a vast golden haze that shrouded even the ground; only rivers gleamed dully through it. Then things ahead became more indistinct, lights began to appear. The pilot took over from me, and kept her nose down, for we were cutting it pretty fine for the light. Gradually we worked down to about a thousand, going wide open at about a hundred and seventy. The automobile lights, the town lamps, and the shop windows shone up to us diamond clear, for we did not have to look along any ground haze.
I sat aft, overcome by the thrill of this last ten minutes. A constant stream of bright sparks from our exhaust flew by the windows; the electric red and green lights shone steadily at the wingtips; in front of the pilot, the radium dials glowed softly with their strange fluorescence. Every few minutes we passed over the brilliant light of an airway beacon, for we were now following the route of the transcontinental system; soon after we left one, we could see the next one flashing in the distance ahead. For the last five minutes it was very dark.
We came in over the landing field; all the buildings were outlined in colored lights, and it looked like some fair. The instant we were heard, the flood lights were switched on, turning the field white beneath us. With his same technique, the pilot swept the field ten feet from the concrete runway; then we curved up into the dark night, away from the glare of the flood lights. I heard the stabilizer being set, and we swung over on one wing, dowm in a vicious sideslip. This last stone-like drop through the dark was the salutation of farewell; we swung level, and rolled quietly along the concrete.
Friends were waiting for us. After the first greetings, one of them began talking to me about the market. He thought that it must be uppermost in my mind; but for two blessed days I had n’t thought about it. My ears were still roaring from the seven hundred miles of flight, and it was a minute or two before I grasped what he was trying to tell me. Then another shock, another anticlimax! For the morning after our blizzard had been the turning point in the Street, and the market had opened higher and was still going up.
In one breath I passed from serenity to irritable impatience for a newspaper. When I got one, it looked as though I had really been reprieved. The beauty of our great flight dropped from me. Without another glance at the shining aeroplane, I hurried into town. On long distance I got a bank officer at his home, and with the air of a man who says, ‘The lightning struck close to you that time, my boy, ’ he told me that I was still in the ring.
Do it again? Yes, I hope so; but, like everything else in life, never again in quite the same way; for a few months later the pilot, poor fellow, forgot to think far enough ahead, and flew into another great storm. A few seconds later, he and his passengers were dead and our faithful machine crushed into a silent pile of utterly shattered wood and steel.
If you go at it so, it’s the flip of a coin; a hundred spins, it’s heads, and you’re a brilliant fellow; then it spins tails, and you re out.