“Watch me,” said Josephine. She raised her bloody arm and opened her fingers. “I can move my hand, do you see?”

“I see that the bone is not broken,” said the doctor. “But you have had terrible shock to your system.”

Isaac Bell observed the determined set to her jaw and the sudden fierce gleam in her eye. He beckoned the boys and tossed each a five-dollar gold piece. “Rustle up oil and gasoline for Josephine’s flying machine. Gasoline and castor oil for mine. On the jump!”

“She can’t operate a flying machine in her condition,” the doctor protested.

“Patch her up!” Bell told the doctor.

“Do you seriously believe that she’s flying to El Paso in her condition?”

“No,” said Isaac Bell. “She’s flying to San Francisco.”

Chapter 35

35

TWO DAYS LATER, Josephine circled El Paso’s business district while Isaac Bell swept field glasses across the rooftops in search of Harry Frost with a rifle. Her Celere monoplane had taken the lead on the run today from Pecos, as it had the day before from Midland to Pecos.

The ground below was seething with ten thousand El Paso Texans who had turned out to greet the aviatrix, primed for her arrival by newspaper headlines blaring:

HERE COMES THE BRIDE!

They crammed the business district to watch from streets, city squares, windows, and sixth-story roofs. Mindful of the mobs they encountered in Fort Worth, Bell had demanded that Whiteway move the actual alighting spot to a more easily guarded rail yard beside the Rio Grande. Looking at the mad scene below, he was glad he had.

Josephine was still giving them a show when Steve Stevens’s big white biplane appeared in the east with Joe Mudd’s red Liberator laboring after it. She circled once more for the crowd, embellished the maneuver with a string of steep spiral dips that set them ooohhhing and aaahhhing, and descended to the rail yard.

Bell landed beside her.

The air racers had battled strong headwinds all day, and their support trains had already arrived. The crews were celebrating. With the state of Texas behind them now, the finish line seemed almost in sight. South, across the river, exotic Mexico shimmered in the hot sun. But it was the west that gripped their interest—the New Mexico Territory, the Arizona Territory, and finally California at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

They weren’t there yet, Bell knew, his eye captured by a series of blue mountain ranges that pointed toward the Continental Divide. To clear even the low end of the Rockies, the machines would have to climb higher than four thousand feet.