But Bayard took the helmet and goggles and went on across the aerodrome toward the hangar. The group followed him and stood quietly about with their bleak, wind-gnawed faces while the engine was being warmed up. But when Bayard got in and settled his goggles, the man approached and thrust his hand into Bayard’s lap. “Here,” he said brusquely. “Take this.” It was a woman’s garter, and Bayard picked it up and returned it.
“I won’t need it,” he said. “Thanks just the same.”
“Well, you know your own business, of course. But if you ever let her get her nose down, you’ll lose everything but the wheels.”
“I know,” Bayard answered. “I’ll keep her up.” The shabby man rushed up again, still talking. “Yes, yes,” Bayard replied impatiently, “You told me all that Contact,” he snapped. The mechanic spun the propeller over, and as the machine moved out the shabby man still clung to the cockpit and shouted at him. Soon he was running to keep up and still shouting, until Bayard lifted his hand off the cowling and opened the throttle. But when he reached the end of the field and turned back into the wind the man was running toward him and waving his arms. Bayard
opened the throttle full and the machine lurched for ward and when he passed the shabby man in midfield die tail was high and the plane rushed on in long bounds, and he had a fleeting glimpse of the man’s open mouth and his wild arms as the bounding ceased.
There was not enough tension on the wires, he decided at once, watching them from the V strut out as they tipped and swayed, and he jockeyed the thing carefully on, gaining height. Also he realized that there was a certain point beyond which his own speed would rob him of lifting surface. He had about two thousand feet now, and he turned, and in doing so he found that aileron pressure utterly negatived the inner plane’s dihedral and doubled the outer one, and he found himself in the wildest skid he had seen since his Hun days. The machine not only skidded: it flung its tail up like a diving whale and the air speed indicator leaped thirty miles past the dead line the inventor had given him. He was headed back toward the field now, in a shallow dive, and he pulled the stick back.
But only the wingtips responded by tipping sharply upward; he flung the stick forward before they ripped completely off, and he knew that only the speed of the dive kept him from falling like an inside out umbrella. And the speed was increasing: it seemed an eternity before the wingtips recovered, and already he had overshot the field, under a thousand feet high. He pulled the stick back again; again the wingtips buckled and he slapped the stick, over and kicked again into that skid, trying to, check his speed. Again the machine swung its tail in a soaring arc, but this time the wings came off and he ducked his head automatically as one of them slapped viciously past it and crashed into the tail, shearing it too away.
3
That day Narcissa’s child was born, and the following day Simon drove Miss Jenny in to town and set her down before the telegraph office and held the horses leashed and champing with gallant restiveness by a slight and surreptitious tightening of the reins, while beneath the tilted tophat and the voluminous duster, he swaggered, sitting down. Though he was sitting and you would not have thought it possible, Simon contrived by some means to actually strut. So Dr. Peabody found him when he came along the street in the June sunlight, in his slovenly alpaca coat, carrying a newspaper.
“You look like a frog, Simon,” he said, ‘Where’s Miss Jenny?”
“Yessuh,” Simon agreed. “Yessuh. Dey’s swellin’ en rejoicin’ now. De little marster done’arrive. Yessuh, de little marster done arrive’ and de ole times comin’ back.”
“Where’s Miss Jenny?” Dr. Peabody repeated impatiently.
“She in dar, tellygraftin’ dat boy ter come on back byer whar he belong at.” Dr. Peabody turned away and Simon watched him, a little fretted at his apathy in the face of the event. “Takes it jes’ like trash,” Simon mused aloud, with annoyed disparagement. “Nummine; we gwine wake ‘um all up, now; Yessuh, de olden times comin’ back again, sho’. Like in Marse John’s time, when de Cunnel wuz de young marster en de niggers fum de quawtuhs gethered on de front lawn, wishin’ Mistis en de little marster well.” And he watched Dr. Feabody enter the door and through the plate glass window he saw him approach Miss Jenny as she stood at the counter with her message.
“Come home you fool and see your family or I will have you arrested” the message read in her firm, lucid script. “It’s more than ten words,” she told the operator, “but that don’t matter this time. He’ll come now: you watch. Or I’ll send the sheriff after him, sure as his name’s Sartoris.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the operator said. He was apparently having trouble reading it, and he looked up after a time and was about to speak when Miss Jenny remarked his distraction and repeated the message briskly.
“And make it stronger than that if you want to,” she added.
“Yes, ma’am,” the operator said again, and he ducked down behind his desk, and presently and with a little mounting curiosity and impatience Miss Jenny leaned across the counter with a silver dollar in her fingers and watched him count the words three times in a sort of painful flurry;
“What’s the matter, young man?” she demanded. “The government don’t forbid the mentioning of a day-old child in a telegram, does it?”
The operator looked up. “Yes, ma’am, it’s all right,” he said at last, and she gave him the dollar, and as he sat holding it and Miss Jenny watched him with yet more impatience. Dr. Peabody came in and touched her arm.
“Come away, Jenny,” he said.
“Good morning,” she said, taming at his voice. ‘Well, ifs about time you took notice. This is the first Sartoris you’ve been a day late on in how many years, Loosh? And soon’s I get that fool boy home, it’ll be like old times again, as Simon says.”
“Yes. Simon told me. Come away.”
“Let me get my change.” She turned to the operator, who stood with the yellow sheet in one hand and the coin in the other. “Well, young man? Ain’t a dollar enough?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he repeated, turning upon Dr. Peabody his dumb, distracted eyes. Dr. Peabody reached fatly and took the message and the coin from him.
“Come away, Jenny,” he said again.
Miss Jenny stood motionless for a moment, in her black silk dress and her black bonnet set squarely on her head, staring at him with her piercing old eyes that saw so much and so truly. Then she turned and walked steadily to the door and stepped into the street and waited until he joined her, and her hand was steady too as she took the folded paper he offered. Mississippi boy it said in discreet capitals, and she returned it to him immediately and from her waist she took a small sheer handkerchief and wiped her fingers lightly.
“I don’t have to read it,” she said. “They never get into the papers but one way. And I know that he was somewhere he had no business being, doing something that wasn’t any affair of his.”
“Yes,” Dr. Peabody said. He followed her to the carriage and put his hands clumsily upon her as she mounted.