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Dallas and Lubbock and Austin and El Paso. Local air lines with cosmic names tacked to and fro between cotton towns and oil towns, wheat towns and vegetable valleys. Hatless housewives in jeans or ginghams with an infant on one arm and a child by the hand flew a few hundred miles to do a bit of shopping and see the home folks. Everywhere you saw the pilots in uniform—slightly balding young men who had been godlike young aviators with war records of incredible courage. Years ago they had come down out of the wild blue yonder; and now they found themselves staring out at the Southwest sky in two-engined jobs that ferried from Nacogdoches to Midland, from Brownsville on the Mexican border to Corpus Christi on the Gulf. In the duller intervals of the trip they would emerge from the cockpit to chat with a sympathetic passenger and to display the photograph of the thin and anxious-looking young wife and the three kids, the oldest of these invariably a boy and always of an age to make the beholder certain that he had been born of their frantic love and their agonized parting in ’42 and ’43.
    The Wonder Bird, the dazzling invention of the twentieth century, had become a common carrier, as unremarkable here in Texas as the bus line of another day.
    “This way!” Bick Benedict called. “Just follow me through thisgate, it’s supposed to be closed but I know the…right through here…those are our cars lined up out there…”
    There were signs printed in large black letters on the walls. One sign read DAMAS . Another, CABALLEROS . “What’s that?” inquired Lona Lane scurrying by. “What’s that sign mean?”
    “Sh-sh!” Vashti Snyth hissed as she puffed along. “That’s Spanish. Means toilets for the Mexicans. Men and women, it means.”
    Through the motor entrance another sign read RECLAME SU EQUIPAJE AFUERA A SU DERECHA . Miss Lane glanced at this, decided against inquiring.
    “H’m,” said the ex-Presidente. “I find this interesting, these signs in Spanish. It is like another country, a foreign country in the midst of the United States.”
    “Texas!” protested old Judge Whiteside puffing along, redfaced and potbellied. “Why, sir, Texas is the most American country in the whole United States.”
    “I should have thought New England, or perhaps the Middle West. Kansas or even Illinois.”
    “East!” scoffed Judge Whiteside. “The East stinks.”
    Through the withering blast of the white-hot sun again and then into the inferno of the waiting motorcars that had been standing so long in the glare. The newspaper men and women crowded around the windows, they said lean forward a little will you king, as they tried for another picture.
    Bick Benedict’s eyes blazed blue-black. “Look here, you fellas!” But Leslie put a hand on his arm, she was the diplomatic buffer between Bick and his rages against the intruding world forever trying to peer into the windows of his life.
    “We’ll see you all later,” she called in that soft clear voice of hers. “Tonight.” She pressed her husband’s arm.
    “See you later, boys,” Bick muttered grumpily, not looking at them. He climbed into the huge car in which the King and Queen were seated in solitary grandeur except for the driver and their aide in the front.
    “You all going to be at the Conky?” one of the reporters yelledafter them as they moved off. Leslie, with the others about to step into one of the line of waiting cars, smiled over her shoulder at the cluster of reporters and cameramen. “Conky,” she repeated after them with distaste. She caught a glimpse of the royal pair, an artificial smile still pasted, slightly askew, on their faces. Then their car picked up speed and was away like the lead car in a funeral cortege. The grimace of forced amiability faded from their weary features. With a gesture Leslie seemed to wipe the smile from her own countenance, she thought, I’m one of a family of rulers, too, by marriage. The Benedicts of Texas.