“What was the use of taking all those precautions when you had to jump anyhow?”
“You know that bombsight, Nancy, is America’s own prize possession. No bombardier leaves that for anybody to investigate. St. Peter wouldn’t ever let anybody through the pearly gates who had left that little instrument intact behind him.”
Nancy smiled in spite of her heavy heart. “I don’t see how you can keep up your joking like that.”
Janice, who was on duty, came to take Bruce’s tray away. When she had gone Nancy asked, “You didn’t see Tommy jump after you hit the water?”
“No. I think he meant to ditch the plane after we were out. He loved that bird like something human. He meant to stick to her till the last minute.”
“Then you think he went down with her to the bottom—like a captain with his ship?”
“Oh, no! If he landed on the water O.K. there’d be a few minutes when he could get out and try to swim to one of the rubber boats.”
“Sure! Pete Crawford, our radio man, pulled the levers to release the life boats just before he jumped. You know, they inflate as they go down. Vernon Goodwin, our top gunner, had filled them with water, food supplies and navigation instruments.”
“Did you find one of them when you jumped?”
“We were lucky. Pete and I came down close together and reached one of the boats. We might have made it somewhere with the provisions we had, if those Japs hadn’t picked us up before dark.”
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[Illustration: _“Did You See Tommy Jump?” Nancy Asked Bruce_]
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“If you saw Tommy still in the air after you got into the boat he must have been too far away to swim to any of the other boats after he hit the water.”
“I’ve worried a lot about that,” Bruce told her. “But it looked to me as though the plane was turned back in our direction. There was a wooded island on the horizon, and pretty soon our ship was so low we lost sight of it behind those trees.”
“An island!” exclaimed Nancy. “Do you think Tommy might have swum to it?”
“That was our only hope for Tommy and the others. Some jumped after we did, and might have come down nearer that island. Pete and I started paddling in that direction, but we’d both been hurt and the distances were deceiving. My cracked leg had begun to swell, and any movement was agony. Pete checked out clean for a spell, and I was afraid he was gone. Before we realized what had happened the island was nowhere to be seen.”