And that, in truth, was the result of the aircraft investigation. There were other inquiries and other suggestions, but nobody went to jail. Nobody seems to have been seriously discommoded. There weren’t any airplanes that anybody could lay a hand on. And the $1,000,000,000 just disappeared. Gutzon Borglum was much disturbed about this. He could get angry thinking of it to the day of his death. But it always seemed to a casual friend that he was puzzled by the wrong side of airplane production. What he should have contemplated as the scintillant miracle of all the days he was to live was the fact that he was allowed to make the investigation at all. * * * * * It is a little late after all these years to try to figure out how a billion dollars could disappear without leaving a trace on somebody. Borglum used to get indignant about the matter ten or twelve years afterward, but the targets of his wrath were always anonymous. He had some shrewd suspicions, but left at the bottom of the well was the evidence which in this situation would have been necessary to convict anyone of wrongdoing. To give the fiasco a fair estimate, it seems likely that we were very young then. Up to the time when war was declared we had left the building of our planes to rugged individuals who whittled out the parts for them with jackknives and put them together in moldering barns and sheds. When we had to get an air force aloft we did the best we could, which wasn’t very good. We didn’t trust our cow-barn airplane manufacturers. Largely, they weren’t where we could find them anyway. They had gone into the air corps themselves. So the searchers for planes took a chance on some people who apparently knew something about a gasoline motor and how to make forms out of tin--that is to say, of course, the automobile makers. These lads muddled through and nobody got any airplanes. They produced pieces in large numbers and blithely shipped them away to places where they were supposed to be assembled into airplanes. But, apparently, nobody had thought to provide an assembler. It is one thought about this--a thought that would have meant nothing to Gutzon Borglum--that nobody about the airplane production, if it can be called that, got rich ... not so far as can be determined. Nobody seems to have had the remotest idea of what he was doing, and it takes at least a billion dollars to keep thousands of men in jobs where they have nothing to do but nothing. CHAPTER FIFTEEN _FLIGHT, PATIENCE AND SHERIDAN’S HORSE_