Excerpt from "Medium Boiled": "The big De Haviland bombing plane was a little more than eight thousand feet high, and “Shag” Moran, its pilot, had an excellent view of a considerable portion of south Texas. His big body was hunched deep into the front cockpit to avoid the terrific airblast which swept back from the propeller, and his black eyes alternated the maze of unfamiliar instruments before him and the unending desert of mesquite below. In long, gray-green waves the chaparral billowed away to the horizon on every side, and there was not so much as a wisp of smoke to indicate that a living thing inhabitated that trackless waste, a mile and a half below It was a sight calculated to make any pilot concentrate on his motor, for there was no possible landing field below, in case that twelve-cylinder Liberty ahead should start to miss. To Shag Moran, however, the very ugliness and desolation of it was a pleasant thrill—a constant reminder of where he was going, and why. Even the thought of himself, alone in a world of his own, was delightful, for the time being. It was the visible evidence of the fact that he had attained combined objectives for which he had dared not hope, three months before. “First Lieutenant John Moran, of the McMullen flight of the Border patrol—” He mouthed the words with leaping heart us his eyes swept the wastes below him, which seemed to epitomize all the romance and danger of the job he was on his way to do. He was bound for the border. More than that, he was to be a member of the blue ribbon outfit of the Army Air Service, the Border patrol. And as the last ingredient of what he conceived to be flyer’s paradise, he was to be one of the McMullen flight of that patrol—the flight with the finest record along the Rio Grande."
