“In the cockpit again he opened the radiator shutters so that the motor wouldn’t boil under the labor of the take-off, raised his goggles to his forehead so that his eyes would be free from shattering glass in case the plane crashed at the end of the field, and pressed the throttle slowly forward until it struck the end of the slot. The motor picked up its revolutions slowly--it was swinging a big propeller--and gradually the ship began to roll, mushing down into the soft mud as each foot of advance was gained. Nick felt its tendency to nose-over as it picked up a little speed, and he was forced to pull his flippers up to prevent the nose from burying itself in the ground, although in doing that he knew that he prolonged the take-off. Half the length of the field had been used before the men who were pushing against ship began to drop away from their places at the wings; when that much speed had been obtained the acceleration was fairly rapid, and within a hundred feet more the last man let go his hold upon the wing and flung himself upon his face to dodge the tail of the ship as it flicked over him. The take-off had been made directly toward the ravine, just as Nick had planned it, but he expected the Douglas to pick up speed quicker than it did. When the edge of the ravine was reached, the fence still fifty feet away, it was not yet in the air. It rolled over the edge of the ravine and settled down, picking up speed more quickly because of the greater slope. Slowly it began to rise; it was clearing the ground nicely when the wing-tip on the right side struck the bank of the declivity with a soft, sickening sound. The ship swung sharply, shuddering and almost out of control, to the right; for a moment it seemed to hesitate as if wavering just before a fatal plunge into the ground. But Nick was quick on the controls; he wound the wheel hard over and leveled the plane in time to prevent the crash; he looked out along the right wing and saw that three feet of the wing-tip had been torn away, and was hanging now, an inert but dangerous mass of débris, to the spars and wires of the wing structure. * * * * * “With full aileron control depressing the left wing of the plane, it would fly level, but try as he might, Nick could not roll the ship into a left bank. He skidded the Douglas around in a left turn, hoping to increase the lift on the right wing enough to bring it up into a higher-than-normal position, which would have offset to some degree the decreased lifting surface of the right wing caused by the accident. He eased the plane around, finally reaching the direction which he must fly toward Little Rock, but the plane was still flying level--with the aileron control hard over to the left side.