"You know a lot you just think. I'll send for some, right off. Let's go.
No use burning gas standing still!"
Mary V, her camera sagging in her two hands so that the lens looked at
the wheels, gazed wistfully after them as they rose and went humming away
toward the rising sun, that had just cleared the jagged rim of mountains
and was gilding the ledge behind her. They climbed and swerved a little
to the south, evidently to avoid looking straight into the sun.
Sandy stamped and snorted, tugging at the rope that tied him. Mary V
looked down, away from the diminishing airplane, and gave a shrill cry of
dismay.
"Jake! You come back here--_Whoa!_"
She stood with her mouth partly open, staring down along the ledge to
where Jake, whom she had daringly borrowed again because of his strength
and his speed that could bring her to Sinkhole in time to watch the trial
flight, was clattering away with broken bridle reins snapping. Sandy
wanted to follow. When she ran toward him to catch him before he broke
loose, he, too, snapped a rein and went racing away after Jake.
Mary V stamped her foot, and cried a little, and blamed Bland Halliday
for flying down that way where Jake could see him and get scared. She had
been very careful to tie Jake back out of sight of the strip of sand
where Johnny had told her they would make their start and their landing.
It wasn't her fault that she was set afoot--but Bland Halliday just
_knew_ Jake would be scared stiff if he went down past where he was, and
he had done it deliberately. And now Sandy was gone, too--and Johnny only
had a couple of bronks in the little pasture--and she would just like to
know what she was going to _do_? She should think that the least Johnny
and Bland could do would be to come back and--do _something_ about the
horses. They surely must have seen Jake running away, and Johnny would
have sense enough to know what that meant.
But Johnny, as it happened, was wholly absorbed in other things. He was
not thinking of horses, nor of Mary V, nor of anything except flying. He
was crowding into a few precious minutes all the pent emotions of his
dearest dreams. He was getting the "feel" of the controls, putting his
theoretical learning to the test, finding just how much and how little
it took to guide, to climb, to dip. Bland Halliday was a good flyer, and
he was doing his best, showing off his skill before Johnny.
He shut off the motor for a minute and volplaned. "Great way to see the
country!" he shouted, and climbed back in an easy spiral.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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