The Asuncion mail signaled that it was about to land. Even at the darkest hour, Rivière had followed, telegram by telegram, its well-ordered progress. In the turmoil of this night he hailed it as the avenger of his faith, an all-conclusive witness. Each message telling of this auspicious flight augured a thousand more such flights to come. “And, after all,” thought Rivière, “we don’t get a cyclone every night! Once the trail is blazed, it must be followed up.”
Coming down, flight by flight, from Paraguay, as from an enchanted garden set with flowers, low houses, and slow waters, the pilot had just skirted the edge of a cyclone which never masked from him a single star. Nine passengers, huddled in their traveling-rugs, had pressed their foreheads on the window, as if it were a shop front glittering with gems. For now the little towns of Argentina were stringing through the night their golden beads, beneath the paler gold of the star cities. And at his prow the pilot held within his hands his freight of lives, eyes wide open, full of moonlight, like a shepherd. Already Buenos Aires was dyeing the horizon with pink fires, soon to flaunt its diadem of jewels like some fairy hoard The wireless operator strummed with nimble fingers the final telegrams, last notes of a sonata he had played allegro in the sky—a melody familiar to Rivière’s ears. Then he pulled up the aerial and stretched his limbs, yawning and smiling; another journey done.
The pilot who had just made land greeted the pilot of the Europe mail, who was lolling, his hands in his pockets, against the plane.
“Your turn to carry on?”
“Yes.”
“Has the Patagonia come in?”
“We don’t expect it; lost. How’s the weather? Fine?”
“Very fine. Is Fabien lost then?”
They spoke few words of him, for that deep fraternity of theirs dispensed with phrases.
The transit mailbags from Asuncion were loaded into the Europe mail while the pilot, his head bent back and shoulders pressed against the cockpit, stood motionless, watching the stars. He felt a vast power stirring in him and a potent joy.
“Loaded?” some one asked. “Then, contact!”
The pilot did not move. His engine was started. Now he would feel in his shoulders that pressed upon it the airplane come to life. At last, after all those false alarms—to start or not to start—his mind was easy His lips were parted and in the moon his keen white teeth glittered like a jungle cub’s.
“Watch out! The night, you know...!”
He did not hear his comrade’s warning. His hands thrust in his pockets and head bent back, he stared toward the clouds, mountains and seas and rivers, and laughed silently. Soft laughter that rustled through him like a breeze across a tree, and all his body thrilled with it. Soft laughter, yet stronger, stronger far, than all those clouds and mountains, seas and rivers.
“What’s the joke?”
“It’s that damned fool Rivière, who said . . who thinks I’ve got the wind up!”