"May the Good Lord take a liking to him." This was the devout prayer of a grizzled old cowman, as he stood spellbound for a full twenty minutes, and watched an airman and his craft standing still in the heavens. He was witnessing the heroic battle against a 100-mile hurricane by Pilot Burr Winslow in his famous speed-distance ship 158 (the ship that holds all records for distance flown and all records for speed, except one for the Transcontinental Red Line air road), thousands of feet above Reno in the murky spume of mists in the gathering of the full forces of the terrific storm that shortly followed.
Above, far, far above the earth, the monstrous silvered petrel of the clouds stood stationary, and the glints of the lustrous body could be seen, hanging and shivering, like a living, lost and frightened creature from another world.
As the flashing hurrying mists drove by the seeming suspended ship, a small speck of dark could be marked as the airman out in the cockpit. The struggling plane was being manipulated by this driver with sinews of steel and muscles of seasoned hickory, with the nerve and initiative acquired in his signal achievements of past performances in dangerous situation. But never before had this sky scooter been called upon to meet a like condition of such extreme danger.
Overhead and covering the entire sky, high up and beyond the quivering man-made bird, the dense black clouds moved with the velocity of light. The thunder roar of the billowing mists, angry and white-rimmed, swirled through the sky with momentum incalculable. Along the Sierra peaks there was a wide stretch of clearness, confined to the width of the tops of the range, an unheard-of and unusual circumstance. A scene creating a Dante's Inferno. Here was an electron striving and fighting against the supremacy of the thunder and storm gods, a vision, a picture in that sky that will make lasting impression of such vividness that it will never be effasced from the memory of those who witnessed it.
Hundreds of people between Reno and Verdi, 14 miles away, watched breathlessly, and with straining eyes, and shortened breaths, the battle, expecting every second to see the tragedy that it seemed would issue and become a broken hurtling mass earthward.