and taxied to a heavy marking buoy, to which the men made the plane fast to keep her from drifting in the swift tide. Then, having crossed the Atlantic by air, we waited for the village to come out and welcome us.
The buoy was about half a mile from shore and probably our craft looked no more exciting than any other seaplane. There were three men whose identities I should like to know working on the railroad along the water’s edge. Certainly no philosophers could have cultivated more incurious or placid natures than they. They looked us over, waded down to the shore, and then calmly turned their backs and went to work again.
Perforce we stayed on the Friendship and waited for something to happen. Time passed and nothing did. After a while, groups of people slowly gathered in the rain. Slim Gordon crawled out on the pontoons and called for a boat, to no avail. Probably if the townspeople heard it at all, his American sounded as strange to the Welsh people as their own language did to us. Something like this that was—lmnpqrs.
“I’ll get a boat,” I said finally, and squeezed forward into the cockpit. Out of the open window I waved a white towel as a signal of distress. At my gesture a friendly gentleman on shore took off his coat and waved cordially back at me. But that was all.
Finally boats did begin to come out. Yet, even after the first one returned to shore with news of
