“Well, they got the plane finished in 60 days, which isn’t bad time. Out in New York, Byrd and Chamberlin and the others were getting ready to fly the Atlantic. It’s wasn’t really a race to see who would be first, but of course, there’s no doubt that each one was anxious to be the first man to cross the Atlantic. Because after all, nobody likes to be second. So Lindy had to get out to the east coast as fast as he could. He could hardly wait for the plane to be finished. But at last it was, and all the equipment in place. Lindy climbed into the cockpit to test her out. The cockpit was inclosed. I don’t know whether I told that before or not. Anyway, he could see out little windows on each side, but he couldn’t see ahead, or above him. So it was really flying blind all the time, except for a sliding periscope that he could pull in or out at the side, in case he had to see straight ahead. But Lindy doesn’t mind blind flying. He’s a wonderful navigator. “Well, Lindy turned over the motor of his new plane, and it sounded sweet. He hadn’t got it any more than off the ground when he realized that this was the plane for him. It responded to every touch, although it was a heavy ship, and not much good for stunting. But Lindy didn’t want to stunt. He wanted to fly to Europe. “It was on May 10, I think, that he left San Diego. It was in the evening, not quite six o’clock. The next morning, a little after eight, he got into St. Louis. Took him just a bit over fourteen hours, the whole trip. It was the longest cross-country hop that any one man had made up to that time. His old pals at Lambert Field were pretty glad to see him, and he spent the night at his old stamping grounds. But he didn’t stay long. Early in the morning he got on his way, and made New York in the afternoon, in not quite seven and a half hours. Pretty flying. “Nobody much had heard of Lindy until he started from San Diego. Of course, he’d been a dandy mail pilot, but they’re usually unnamed heroes. Nobody hears about them, and they never get their names in the paper unless they crash. Not that they care. They’ve got their jobs to do, and they do them. But when Lindy flew that grand hop from San Diego to St. Louis to New York, people began to sit up and take notice. He didn’t say much after he got to the Curtiss Field. “Out at Curtiss he spent his time seeing that everything was ready, and all his instruments O.K. He had a lot of confidence in himself—he always has—but there was no use in taking chances. In back of the pilot’s seat was a collapsible rubber boat, that he could blow up with two tanks of gas that he carried with him. It had light oars, and was supposed to be able to float him for a week in case he decided suddenly to come down in the middle of the Atlantic instead of flying all the way across. Then there were his regular instruments. He had a tachometer, and an altimeter, an earth inductor compass, a drift indicator, and—”