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two or three lined up to be operated on this morning – maybesome as urgent as Captain Pascoe. It’s just a chance if you could get a man like that to come.’
    ‘By the time we got him here, Dr Parkinson could have flown up from Hobart. He’s all set to go. But either way we lose about three hours.’
    ‘That’s so.’
    He evidently wasn’t going to help me much; he had nothing constructive to suggest. If a decision had to be made quickly, and apparently it had, the onus rested squarely upon me. I was rushing into this, bullying an unwilling and inexperienced young doctor into doing an operation which he clearly felt to be beyond his capacity. I was doing this purely on the score of time, because Johnnie Pascoe had a fractured skull and there was no time to get a better surgeon. But what if I was wrong? What if the weather forecasters were wrong, as they so often were? What if it should be a brilliant, sunny day, all day, with a light, gentle breeze that would permit a proper landing on that strip?
    I looked up, and the sky was blue to the west right down to the horizon, with every promise of a brilliantly fine day.
    I made up my mind. ‘I’ll fly Dr Turnbull in,’ I said. ‘I’ll land him if I can, and get back here as quick as I can. While I’m away, we’ll try and get a better surgeon here, and if it keeps fine, then I’ll make a second trip and fly him in as well. That’s what we’ll do.’
    ‘Aye,’ said the sergeant, ‘that’s a good idea.’ We went on to the aerodrome.
    The aerodrome at Buxton is a square grass field only about a mile from the town, about six hundred yards long in any direction. No scheduled air service flies to it because there isn’t the demand; sheep graze on it from time to time and have to be herded off before a landing. There is one corrugated iron hangar with a tattered windsock on the gable, capable of housing four or five small aeroplanes. This hangar had a board on it, PASCOE FLYINGSERVICES PTY. LTD., rather in need of a new coat of paint.
    Billy Monkhouse had got the Auster out and was running it up outside the hangar in the strong, gusty wind; he had two boys to help him, hanging on to the wing struts to prevent it blowing away. The conditions were not good for flying a light aeroplane, and I hoped that my hand hadn’t lost its cunning. I had a short talk with the sergeant and sent him back to the police station to ring up Dr Simpson in Devonport and see if there was any chance that he could come to help us; the ground engineer would run me back into the town.
    I moved over and stood by the wing tip of the Auster in the cold, bleak wind. Presently the ground engineer throttled down; I looked at him in enquiry and he raised one thumb. I moved to the door as he got out. ‘I’ll do about three landings and bring her in,’ I said. ‘Get the boys to stay on the wing struts while I taxi out downwind.’
    I sat in the machine for several minutes, trying to accustom myself to the size again after years of flying airliners. There my seat when the machine was on the ground was nearly twenty feet up; a landing at that height was a good landing. Here it was about three feet from the ground. I sat there savouring it all. The horizon came just
so
upon the windscreen; that was how it must be when landing. The grass looked
so
. With a glance down I could actually see one wheel upon the ground; I did not think that that would be a help, but it was possible. There was the throttle and the mixture control, there the flaps. I was glad to note that the machine had navigation lights and a blind-flying panel of instruments; that was a benefit that I had hardly dared to hope for.
    Presently I waved the chocks away and nodded to the engineer, and we began to taxi out down-wind at walking pace.
    I turned her in the strong, unpleasant wind, waved theboys away, and took her off at once. She was just like all the Austers that I had flown before, lightly loaded and so wallowing a bit in the