From the moment Andy dropped his message to Ba, he had no time for thought of those he had left behind. For three or four miles he shot straight down the river at a height of about four hundred feet. In that time his first nervousness lessened. He made ready to begin his flight over the water.
The compass course he had laid was almost S.E. by S. His first alarming discovery was that his compass would be of almost no use. The vibration of the frame and the constant alteration of his level in ascending and descending so agitated the needle that it was always in motion.
“That ain’t goin’ to stop me,” he said at once. “There’s land everywhere over there to the southeast. I’ll hit something somewhere sometime.”
Laying a general course by the sun, he veered to the southeast. The moment he passed out over the ocean, the air changed. The movement of it was less regular, and Andy knew it[172] was due to the counter-current of cooler water sent southward by the northward-flowing gulf stream. Steadying the car, he began to ascend. At a thousand feet, the lower eddies disappeared, and he felt the steady southwest breeze reasserting itself.
Taking advantage of this, as a ship tacks, he steadied the car again. Up to that moment every second had been one of activity; both hands had been busy, and every sense was alert. As the aeroplane now fell into a long, almost motionless glide—with nothing to mark its progress but the whistling wind—for the water beneath gave him no measure of flight—the boy discovered that his muscles were already partly numb from the strain.
As best he could, he relaxed his tension—exercised his feet, legs, fingers, and arms. But the attempt to relax his arms brought his second big discovery—when soaring on an even keel at high speed, the slightest movement of the rudder may instantly cost many minutes of hard climbing upward.
Attempting to steady the control lever with his left hand, there was a slight pull to the left and back. As the responsive ship answered her double helm and veered to the left and[173] down, Andy thrust the lever back, changed hands, and his benumbed fingers for a moment refused to act.
Shaking itself, under the conflicting movements, the Pelican wavered and then leaped to the right and down. Aghast, the nervous boy saw the sea—the shore already out of sight—apparently rising to meet and grasp him. Paralyzed for a moment, Andy gave instant proof that he was a born aviator.
Withdrawing his eyes from the sea and bringing all his will power to stamp out his sudden panic, he did two things with hardly the operation of thinking. Setting his teeth and forcing his eyes on the stanchion at his side to get his line, with both hands—and as carefully as if he had minutes for the work—he brought the control lever to a vertical position, and at right angles with the beam to which it was attached.
His intuition told him he could do no more. And it was enough. With a long, gliding, downward sweep the car sped on and at last began to move forward on an even keel. His eyes yet fixed on the lever only, he gradually drew it vertically toward him, and, when the check in the forward speed told him he was[174] ascending again, looked below. He was not over three hundred feet from the almost waveless sea, and he had dashed downward seven hundred feet.
“I understand now what they mean when they kick about long flights,” said the boy to himself. “It ain’t the nerves—it’s the muscles. You’ve just kind o’ got to hold this thing on its course—anyway she ain’t goin’ to run herself.”
When he figured himself to be about a thousand feet in the air, once more Andy looked at his watch. It was 1:30 o’clock. He had been gone twenty-two minutes. He almost groaned. Osborne had estimated the maximum speed of the Pelican at forty-two miles an hour. He was surely going at his best; he was already tired, and since he had not covered quite fifteen miles, he had the hardest part of his voyage before him.
Since there was no relief, he must stand it, and he did. He now kept the aeroplane at the thousand-foot level, as nearly as he could estimate it. The engine never wavered, and finally he was able to ignore it. The boy’s eyes grew hot and began to pain him, and he was no longer conscious of power to move his right[175] hand, when—and the slowly-creeping minutes seemed endless—at 2:51 o’clock he caught sight of a thin white line on the horizon.
The boy knew at once that this must be land. Whether or not it was the land he had started for—the Grande Banks—made no difference. Confidence returned with the knowledge that he had a goal to aim for, and in that assurance he took his first moments to reason. He had done a foolhardy thing, and now he meant to bring his perilous flight to an end as soon as possible.
What the place might be he neither knew nor cared; his wind-swept eyes burning and his spent muscles rigid, he was conscious only of the line of white. As it rose and widened, he hardly knew how or when he altered the course of the plane. But at last, with an effort that he was fearful he could not make—when the white rolled out beneath him—he shut off the engine. At 3:35 P.M., the rubber landing wheels were bounding over the glaring white of a shell-strewn beach.
The exhausted boy still sat in his seat, motionless, his head on his breast and his fingers yet grasping the idle lever. He had carried out his great idea, reached the Bahamas in an aeroplane, but with nothing to spare.
[176]
Until Andy was able to get the numbness out of his limbs, he gave no thought to his surroundings. At last, creeping stiffly from the machine, he found that he had achieved his ambition: the smooth, wide beach, chalk-white from minute shells, the softly surging sea shaded into all colors of blue by shallow bars and outlying keys, the distant ridge of green through which, here and there, palms rose and spread their umbrella-like foliage, all told him that he was at last in the tropics. But where?
When he could, he made his way to the water’s edge. A star-fish lay at his feet. He grasped it as another boy might have caught up a nugget of gold. Then another object rolled in on the swell. At the first sight of it, the boy smiled. Then the smile disappeared, and he sprang forward and secured the floating object. It was an opened tin that had contained English orange marmalade.
“From some passing steamer,” thought Andy. Then he saw that the label on the can was not yet loosened by the water. “It hasn’t been floatin’ long, though,” he added. “Looks as if some Englishman isn’t far away.”
Ahead of him the beach curved into what seemed to be a bay. The Pelican was high[177] above the water, and there was no living thing in sight that might molest it. Glad of an opportunity to get some exercise, Andy began trotting along the beach. Far to the south, beyond a belt of reefs and smaller keys, he could just make out other lines of white,—other islands, no doubt, but nowhere was there a sail in sight.
“But I guess there’s someone nearby, and an Englishman at that,” speculated Andy. “Since he isn’t in sight, he must be in the cove behind the point.”
When the boy reached the turn in the shore, he was astounded to see just the opposite of the solitude in which he had alighted. At the bottom of the bay, where a group of cocoa palms hung almost over the water, the sight of a thatched hut met his eye. In front of it, and anchored several hundred yards out in the cove, was a trim schooner, her sails furled and a white awning covering her deck. Here and there over the wide bay were ............