“Want any help?” Andrew Burgess called, with his eyes warm and lively again. “Rotten luck. I’ve been ready for a bottle of beer for the last fifteen minutes. Hope this won’t make us too late for lunch.” Ronny, looking up at Bill as he climbed over the seat and seeing the curious slant look he cast down at his father’s nonchalance, knew as suddenly as if he had spoken that the matter was to be graver than that. He clung to the edge of his seat as the plane swung down in a smashing burst of spray that flew over them and stung their faces, considering the thing soberly. The violence of those Gulf Stream waves was still almost unbelievable. They had looked down so long upon the seeming flatness of this water. Ronny’s clothes were getting wet and he shifted about on his seat to avoid the stinging spray that came inboard. His father and Gloria Cargill were singing “Where do we go from here?” and “When do we eat?” with voices that seemed a little too boisterous. He knew that Gloria was showing what a good sport she could be, for his father’s admiration, who watched her powder her nose and rouge, and do over her lips with the scarlet lipstick. Gloria was lovely, glancing sidewise into her tiny mirror, sidewise up at him. Mrs. Kinney was not singing. Her plump cheeks had gone a little sallow under the rouge, and her bright yellow hat and bright yellow dress looked startling on her. She sat hunched up very close to her husband, with her eyes fixed upon the lifting wave tops. Colonel Kinney patted her hand regularly and watched Bill. As the plane lifted to a racing wave Ronny could look out over the sea to some distance to more racing blue wave tops with flashes of white boiling at their crests, under the dazzling beat of the sun. The horizon that had shrunk to this, from the vast sweep of the air, was jagged and uneasy with waves, and the sky beyond it was a remote unnoticed blue. It was the sea that had suddenly taken the menace that the air had had; the sea, looming and tossing around the incongruous smallness of the plane, an awkward alien, unfitted for this heavier element. It seemed to Ronny that they sat a little lower among these waves than they had at first. The aviator, Bill, was slashing at a tangle of stiff canvas and wires and broken sticks under the lower wing. Ronny saw him slip and the tangle drop into the water, where it hung and splashed, held by a single wire. The plane veered suddenly at the crest of a wave and Ronny saw it plunge, stern down, on the wreckage. With a scream from Mrs. Kinney, a broken strut crashed through a thin floor board and in the jagged rip sea water bubbled smoothly, wetting their feet and ankles and legs. “Hey, look here!” Ronny’s father called suddenly. “We’re getting wet! Here, Bill; come here and fix this! Put your feet up, Gloria. It’s all right, Mrs. Kinney. We’ll be all right presently.”