The Race

least had mountain experience, flying in the Adirondacks. Though, to tell the truth, it wasn’t much help when Wild West crosscurrents grabbed her wings, updrafts kicked like a mule, and the same air that knocked her down seemed unwilling to pick her up again. She looked over her shoulder. Isaac’s Eagle, on faithful station above and behind her, was bouncing up and down like it was on an elastic string.

At last she worked up to three thousand feet, gave up on any more, and headed for Lordsburg, hoping to keep climbing high enough to clear the mountains. She followed the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks and soon overtook an express train that had left Deming thirty minutes ahead of her. The locomotive was spewing smoke straight up, slowly climbing a heavy grade, clear warning that the land was still rising, and she had to climb with it.

Grim thoughts of Marco suddenly wrenched at her concentration.

She did not fear that he had actually died in Platov guise. He had warned her in Fort Worth that he would “disappear.” But when he reappeared in whatever form he conjured next time, the first question she had to ask was, who had died in the fire in his place? It was a terrible question. She could not think of an answer she could accept. Thank goodness, she had her hands full for now, trying to get over the Continental Divide, and she had to shove all of that out of her mind.

Ahead she saw the rails enter a pass between two mountain peaks. Despite the pure blue sky everywhere else, a thick cloud bank hung over the pass. It looked like someone had stuffed cotton between the mountains and railroad-tunneled through it. She had to climb even higher to stay above the clouds. If she got inside them, she would get lost and have no clue where the peaks were until she ran into one.

But hard as she tried manipulating her elevator and alettoni, and coaxing effort out of her straining Antoinette, she found herself enveloped by cold mist. Sometimes it was so thick that she couldn’t see the propeller. Then, for a moment, it thinned. She spotted the peaks, corrected her course, and braced for the next blinding. All the way, she had to coax the monoplane to climb. Again the mist thinned. She saw that she had steered to the right, not even realizing it. She corrected hastily. The cloud closed around her. She was blind again. But, at the same time, she felt something in the cloud that made the air stronger.

Suddenly she was above it all, higher than the pass, higher than the cloud, even higher than the peaks, and the sky was as blue as she had ever seen in her whole life in every direction.

“Good girl, Elsie!”

For a crazy moment, she thought she could see the Pacific Ocean. But that was still seven hundred miles ahead. She looked back. Isaac Bell was above her, and she swore that when she won the race the first dollar she would spend of the prize money would be to buy a Gnome rotary.

Farther back, Joe Mudd’s sturdy red tractor biplane was flying in circles as he patiently fought for altitude before tackling the pass. Steve Stevens soared under Mudd, passed him, and shot for the pass, using the power of his two engines to force his machine higher. It dove into the cloud bank straight in line with the railroad tracks. Josephine looked back repeatedly to see him emerge.

But instead of the white biplane suddenly boring out of the cloud, a bright red flower of fire suddenly erupted from the bank. She heard no explosion over the roar of her engine, and it took her a moment to realize what had happened. Josephine’s breath caught in her throat. Steve Stevens had smashed into the mountain. His biplane was burning, and he was dead.

Two terrible thoughts pierced her heart.

Stevens’s twin-motor speedster – Marco’s amazing big and fast heavy-lifting machine – was out of the race, leaving Joe Mudd’s slow Liberator her only competition. She hated herself for thinking that way; not only was it uncharitable and unworthy but she realized that even though she disliked Stevens, he had been part of her tiny band of cross-country aviators.

Her second terrible thought was harder to bear. Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin would probably have won if Marco hadn’t caused damage to his Curtiss Pusher.

That night in Willcox, Arizona Territory, having stopped in Lordsburg only long enough for gas and oil, Josephine overheard Marion tell Isaac Bell, “Whiteway is pleased as punch.”

“He’s gotten what he wanted,” Isaac replied. “A neck and neck flying race between America’s plucky Sweetheart of the Air and a union man on a slow machine.”

EUSTACE WEED’S WORST NIGHTMARE came true in Tucson. The race was held up by a ferocious sandstorm that half buried the machines. After they got them dug out and cleaned up, Andy Moser gave him the afternoon off to shoot pool downtown. There, Eustace encountered a Yaqui Indian, who tried to take his money shooting eight-ball. The Indian was good, very good indeed, and it took Eustace Weed most of the afternoon to take the Yaqui’s money and that of his friends, who were laying side bets that the Tucson Indian would beat the kid from Chicago. When Eustace left the pool hall at suppertime, the Yaqui named him “the Chicago Kid,” and he felt like he was on top of the world until a fellow waiting on the sidewalk said, “You’re on, kid.”

“What do you mean?”

“Still got what we gave you in Chicago?”

“What?”

“Did you lose it?”

“No.”

“Let me see it.”

Reluctantly, Eustace Weed produced the little leather sack. The guy shook out the copper tube, inspected that the seals were intact, and handed it back. “We’ll be touch. . soon.”

Eustace Weed said, “Do you understand what this will do to a flying machine?”

“You tell me.”

“It’s not like your motor quitting in your auto. He’s up in the sky.”

“That makes sense, it being a flying machine.”

“Water in the gas will stop a motor dead. If that happens when he’s way high up, the driver might be able to volplane down safely. Might. But if his motor stops dead when he’s lower down, his machine will smash, and he will die.”

“Do you understand what will happen to Daisy Ramsey if you don’t do what you’re told?”

Eustace Weed could not meet the guy’s eye. He looked down. “Yes.”

“Enough said.”

Eustace Weed said nothing.

“Understand?”

“I understand.”

37

“TEXAS” WALT HATFIELD showed up suddenly on a thundery morning in Yuma, Arizona Territory. The town sat on the banks of the recently dammed Colorado River. Across the wide water lay California. The racers were itching to make Palm Springs by nightfall. But it was thunderstorm season in California, and the locals advised waiting a few hours for the risk of lightning strikes and torrential rains to diminish. The machines were tied down under canvas, and the support trains were still in the rail yard.

“Does Mr. Van Dorn know you’re here?” Bell asked, knowing the Texan’s penchant for bulling off on his own.

“The range boss ordered me to hightail it here and report in person.”

“You have something on Frost?”

Texas Walt shoved his J.B. back on this head. “Ran down his Thomas Flyer outside of Tuscon. How the heck he drove it that far, I don’t know. But neither hide nor hair of him or his boys. I had a strong inkling they caught a train. Found out yesterday they rode out in style, having reserved a stateroom on the Limited.”

“Which way?”

“California.”

“So why did Mr. Van Dorn send you here?”