Part 2

Cautiously he worked the plane downward, trying to get below the clouds and see lights again. It was useless. The “feel” of the air, the stronger uprush of wind, warned him he could go no lower; the next thing he would be crashing into some treetop. Yet his landing lights, switched on and off once more, showed nothing but the streaming swirls of snow. He could not see beyond the nose of his plane.

He worked upward again. He was not used to this blind flying, this driving ahead at a hundred miles an hour “by the bubble,” having to rely on instruments, instead of on his own eyesight and sense of equilibrium, to tell him whether or not his ship was on an even keel, and so in no danger of side-slipping: whether or not he was ascending or descending too rapidly, and so in danger of a nose dive or tail spin. He sent the plane up gradually to a height of more than a mile, on the chance that he could get above the snow and get his direction, at least, from the stars. But the smother was as thick there as nearer the ground, and the twisting force of the wind seemed even more terrific. Too much chance of having his plane torn completely apart. He worked back down to twelve hundred feet, throttling his motor to sixteen hundred a minute. No use wasting extra gasoline.

Completely lost, now, he started circling, hunting for a break in the clouds, yet trying to keep where he felt the course was. Two complete circles, as nearly as he could estimate, and he straightened out again. Not a break anywhere.

Air pilots alone know the helplessness, with present-day instruments, of “flying blind.” A steamer, in a fog at sea, can slow down or stop entirely. Near a coast, the skipper can take soundings, and learn how much water there is beneath his keel. Besides that, he is on a level surface--the sea itself. He can go wrong only to right or left, starboard or port. But an aviator in the skies has to keep driving ahead. He cannot stop, to learn where he is or wait until the storm passes; if he slows to less than around a mile a minute his plane will crash to the ground like a wild goose with a broken wing.

A ship at sea has a trustworthy compass. Because of the mass of metal in his motor, the airplane pilot has no instrument on which he can rely with certainty to tell him whether he is heading north or south. Even the best of airplane compasses, particularly in times of storm, is apt to go mad. And instead of having to contend only with dangers or right and left along a given course, airmen can go wrong in four different directions--right or left, up or down--and tipping to one side or the other, so that the plane falls like a dish. Skilled flyers, racing over the Pacific, lost their lives when the light on their instrument board went out: they could no longer see the bubble that told them their plane was level in the air.

Crager was bothered most by the wind. In addition to the continual danger to his plane from the twisting gusts, he did not know which direction it was from. Just before the snow clouds had shut down, it had veered. Blowing forty, or perhaps even fifty miles an hour, it was taking him--where? Flying directly against it, his ground speed would be only fifty miles an hour; flying with it, it would be a hundred and fifty--with his air-speed indicator registering the same in either case. If the wind was blowing from the right of his course, he would be sweeping off to the left at fifty miles an hour, unless he flew his plane crabwise into it to offset the drift. If it was coming from the left, and he held his plane crabwise to the right in the supposition it was coming from that direction, he would lie carried to the right of his course eighty or a hundred miles an hour. And it doesn’t take long, at that pace.

No instrument has yet been devised that can tell pilots who are flying blind from which direction the wind is coming. That is why pilots, perhaps supposing themselves over level ground, crash headlong into mountainsides, that rush at them suddenly through impenetrable fog miles from their course.

Crager himself had once followed the shore line of Lake Erie in a dim mist, confident that it would presently bring him to Cleveland. Miles after he should have reached the city his gasoline gave out and he came down--in Canada, instead of Ohio, flying west instead of east.

Where was he now? Amid these snowflakes that filled the night, he had been flying only by intuition and dead reckoning--guessing at the direction of the wind, guessing at its force, guessing at the accuracy of his compass. By now he might still be on his course, or a hundred miles on either side of it. If he had kept it, with the wind still in the same direction, he should now be perhaps a hundred miles from Chicago. It was conceivable he had already flown past the city. Even the great night glare of lights would not penetrate many feet into these snow clouds. He might be over land. He might be over Lake Michigan. By this time, instead of being over flat country, he might be over rough hillsides.

Suddenly--the first time in an hour’s flying--he saw a light in the darkness below him. Almost instantly it was gone. A hole in the clouds! For a few moments he held ahead, to make sure that the blanket about him was as thick as ever. Then, at the risk of getting his sense of direction--and that of his compass--still more hopelessly confused, he banked and turned back. Although it was like locating a single eddy in the ocean, he must cross again that well in the clouds. Trusting he was still over level land, he brought his plane lower and lower: the light had been several hundred feet below.

Again! There it was! Lucky the opening itself had not closed in. This time, before his ship reentered the cloud, Crager banked again. It enabled him to hold the opening. As the plane turned, one wing was already in cloud fog. Swiftly he descended, almost in a nose dive, coolly gauging the distance below. A hundred feet above the ground, as nearly as he could judge in the darkness, he leveled out, looking for a place to land. The cloud opening was larger here; he could not tell how large. But his landing lights told him little. At least he was over farm country, fairly flat. Rather than be caught in the clouds again, he would take a chance and come down. It might mean freezing to death in the blizzard, even if they didn’t crack up, but that would be better than smashing down from the skies. Yes, all things considered, much better.

Meanwhile, as long as the visibility lasted, he would try to better things a little. For nearly a minute he flew at the edge of the smother, circling the opening as a boat might follow the coast line of a lake, one wing tip touching the gray fingers of the cloud, the other in the clear.

Then, far away to his left, a white light flashed for a moment. An air beacon! He was only a few miles from his course!

Heading in the direction of the flash, he dropped as near the ground as he dared, noting the snow-covered dimness beneath him to get the direction of the wind and an idea of its force. It was snowing again; all lights had disappeared. A darker patch in the grayness below came toward him swiftly, and he rose to clear it. A patch of woodland. He recalled the story of one of the early air-mail pilots out of San Francisco, whose motor went dead above a ravine in the Sierras, and who, misjudging his distance a trifle, struck the treetops on one of the slopes with his landing gear as he planed down----

The flash of the beacon again! A mere hint, this time, because of the snow, but almost dead ahead.

For several minutes, he could see nothing more, except vague markings as he crossed fields below him, rising intuitively for each fancied obstacle and coming down again at once to avoid losing sight of the earth, flashing his landing lights off and on at intervals in order to try to get more of an idea of his altitude. Failure to clear a single tree or slope, and it would all be over. Once out of sight of the ground, and he would be as blind as before.

The beacon again! Near at hand, this time, defying the snow!

Only a few seconds more, and he was close in, daring to rise a little higher in the certainty of reaching that revolving light. Sure enough--there was the field, marked by its spectral border of lights, seen dimly, close beneath him, through the snow. No hurry now. There was still the chance of a crack-up in this wind, with the possibility that he might nose over into a snowdrift. But the wind had kept the frozen field almost bare. He banked, swept away, and came down into the wind, just above the border lights of the field, in a perfect landing.

The field lay beside great farm buildings, seemingly deserted, except for the clicking beacon above them, turning solemnly through the blizzard. As Crager switched off his motor, the staccato _putt-putt-putt_ of a gasoline jack cut the whistling of the wind, loud in the desolation of the night.

Between the wings the cabin door swung open. “What’s the dope?” asked Webber, the passenger.

“Well,” said Crager casually, “it was a little thick, so I just thought we’d sit down.” He pulled off a glove and tried the palm of his hand against his cheek to see if it was frozen. “We’ll go over ’n’ see what we can find.”

They climbed out of the plane. The single watchman was asleep. The telephone wires were down. The field was almost exactly a hundred miles from Chicago. They sat around the fire in a tiny room and yawned over the monotony of life--outwardly, at least--though the passenger’s mind was still on reaching his destination, and the pilot’s back on Stella Fleming and his troubles with the line.

An hour, and the storm lifted a trifle.

“Believe we might as well push on,” said Crager, after a look outside. “I can see the next beacon. We can get at least that far.” He had decided that the best thing would probably be to leave the line--unless---- Well, there was little likelihood that Stella and he would ever get together now. “Want to try it?” he asked Webber.

“Surest thing you know.” There was no risk of flying with these mail pilots. They wouldn’t take you up unless they knew they’d get you down again all right!

Again they took off for the city, flying low into the storm, over a dim night world screened by streaming snowflakes.

An hour, and they were in--the only mail plane to reach Chicago that night. Bill Melford was down two hundred miles out.

“I certainly do thank you,” Webber said, “for getting me through. I knew we’d make it, the moment you said you’d take me.”

“Yeah?” said Crager. “Well, we did.”

It was two days before he got back to Feldman, and his home airport. The field manager came out to greet him as he taxied up to the hangar.

“’Lo, Eddie,” said Crager, when he had cut the switch.

“Hullo, Slip,” said Feldman. “Get down and come over to the office.”

When they were in the little room, he shut the door behind him, leaning against it.

“It’s about Stella Fleming,” he said. “Thought I’d put you wise before she gets down here. She’s been talking to my wife.”

Slip sat down and began to loosen his moccasins.

“Yeah?” he said.

“You bet.” Feldman grinned suddenly. “Men have to stand together, sort of. Oh, you’ll find out, all right. Well, I just thought I’d tip you off. You hold all the cards, so don’t pay any attention to a damn thing she says. Women are like that.”

“Yeah?” said Crager. He sat up without pulling his moccasins off. “What about the line?”

“What about the line?”

“Yeah. That ‘avoid undue risk’ stuff, and all. You know perfectly well, Eddie, my going out that night, with a passenger, was a damn-fool thing to do.” He hesitated a moment, to make sure of his voice. “I sorta figured that, with the line, I’m about through.”

Feldman looked at him curiously.

“Forget it,” he said. “You’re jake with the line, and all the boys, too, the way you never were before. I thought you knew. That Webber lad is the Prince of Wales, sort of--if you know what I mean. They were all pulling for him to get through. I came pretty near telling Melford all about him, only the line didn’t want to bring any extra pressure on taking chances. Webber and his wife were on the point of a split when this accident came along. Lucky thing for everybody. I supposed you knew. She’s old J. K.’s daughter. Oh, you’re in right!”

Crager stared at him.

“The hell!” he said.

Then Stella Fleming came in.

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the Second August Number, 1929 issue of _The Popular Magazine_]