“Help me turn ’er first,” called Bland, with a gesture to make his meaning clear.

“’Bye, Mary V!  Now’s your chance to get a picture—­but you’ll have to hurry!”

Johnny climbed up, straddled into the seat ahead of Bland.  He placed his feet, pulled down his goggles, grasped the wheel and felt himself balanced—­poised, with a drumming beat in his throat, a suffocating fulness in his chest.  His moment had come, he thought swiftly, as one thinks when facing a sudden, whelming event.  The biggest moment in his life—­the moment that he had dreamed of—­the culmination of all his hopes while he studied and worked—­the moment when he took flight in an airplane of his own!

“Easy on the controls, bo, till you get the feel of it.”  Bland leaned to shout in his ear.  “You can over-control, if yuh don’t watch out.  You feel my control.  Don’t try to do anything yourself at first.  You’ll come into it gradual.”

He sat back, and Johnny waited, breathing unevenly.  He had meant to wave a hand nonchalantly to Mary V, but when the time came he forgot.

The motor drummed to a steady roar.  The plane started, ran along the sand for a shorter distance than before, smoothed suddenly as it left the ground, climbed insidiously.  The beat in Johnny’s throat lessened.  He forgot the suffocated feeling in his chest.  He glanced to the right and looked down on the ridge that held the hangar in its rocky face.  A perfect assurance, a tranquil exaltation possessed him.  Godlike he was riding the air—­and it was as though he had done it always.

He frowned.  The earth, that had flattened to a gray smoothness, roughened again, neared him swiftly.  Ahead was a bare, yellow patch—­they were pointed toward it at a slackened speed.  They were just over it—­the wheels touched, ran for ten feet or so, bounced away and returned again.  They were circling slowly, just skimming the surface of the ground.  They slowed and stopped, the plane quivering like a scared horse.

“Fine!” Bland shouted above the eased thrum of the motor.  “You done fine, but seems like you showed a tendency to freeze onto the wheel when we were coming down; yuh don’t wanta do that, bo.  Keep your control easy—­flexible, like.  Now we’ll go back where the girl is and make a landing there.  And then we’ll make a flight—­as far as is safe on our teacup of gas!”

“I brought five gallons; that ought to run us a ways,” Johnny pointed out.  “I didn’t want to land, that is why I froze to the wheel, as you call it.  I wanted to keep a-goin’!”

“You get me the gas, and we’ll keep a-goin’, all right, all right!  I got a hunch, bo, you’re holding out on me.”

“Forget it!  Let’s go!”

Again the short run, the smooth, upward flight, the slower descent, the bouncing along to a stop.

“You done better, bo.  I guess this ain’t the first time you ever flew, if you told it all.  I hardly touched the controls.  Now, say!  On the square—­where’s that gas at?  She’s working perfect, and now’s the time we oughta beat it outa here, before something goes wrong.  I know you’ve got more gas than what you claim you’ve got.”