Twice the two planes circled, then the larger one rose sharply on Roberta’s side, and a moment later she could see the underside of a monoplane; its huge floats looking like the bottoms of small flat boats. In another second something like a weight dropped into Roberta’s lap and instantly Mrs. Pollzoff caught it up, so the girl decided that her captor must be receiving a message, or sending one by the other pilot, but the next instant something dragged across her knees and unable to contain herself any longer, she raised her lids, only to close them again quickly, for the woman was standing over her. At the moment her face was raised, but then she looked down.
What the girl Sky-Pilot saw made her gasp in astonishment and fear, for Mrs. Pollzoff was hauling in a long tube, which must mean that she was going to refuel from the air and not come down at all, at least until the supply was depleted. She might take on a full supply, as much as they had had when they left Charleston, and unless the woman went to sleep over the stick, she could keep going until the following day.
Sick with horror, Roberta tried to make her brain function properly, but it was filled with the wildest terrors and in spite of warm clothing, she felt as cold as if she were wearing summer clothing. In the day time, under the best of conditions, what the two planes were trying to do could be accomplished with skilled pilots at both controls, but in the middle of the night, with a woman at the receiving end of the tube who had been disqualified as a flyer, it was a desperately risky undertaking. Nike’s nose might be jammed up into the other plane’s underpinning or drop so low that the tube would be broken and the machine sprayed with the highly inflammable mixture. A dozen things could happen so quickly to make a smash-up inevitable. She wondered dully why Mrs. Pollzoff didn’t take in new containers, which would be less dangerous, and when the girl recalled that the woman had been considered incompetent as a pilot, she was no longer surprised. Probably her examiners had realized that she was too foolhardy to trust with a license.
There were a number of slips, disconnections and reconnections during the performance, and it seemed to Roberta as if hours passed before the work was finally achieved and she felt the long tube with its heavy weight being dragged across her knees again and at last heard them thump and bump against the side of Nike while the other pilot hauled them up to his own machine. Then Mrs. Pollzoff resumed her seat and her appropriated task, but the girl felt her slip down as if weary from the strain. She opened her eyes a bit to see if the woman was able to do anything more and found that she was busy with the controls, and circling in a wide sweep, the second plane was soaring out of her way, the end of the tube extending behind. Then it disappeared from sight.