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all the women were wearing two-strand chokers of cultured pearls that looked smarter and more genuine. The man was shorter than she with a long neck as though he had stretched it in an attempt to appear taller; and his Habsburg blood showed in his prognathous jaw which should have looked strong but didn’t. He wore one of those suits carefully made by a Central European tailor who long ago had served an apprenticeship in London’s Savile Row. But he had apparently lost the knack of line for the suit was tight where it should have been easy.
    Leslie went forward to meet them as Vashti scrambled for the slipper at the side of her chair.
    “I hope you slept, Sir. And you, Ma’am. Everyone was warned to be very quiet on pain of death, but you know…ranch noises are so…Sir, may I present Mrs. Mott Snyth. Mr. Mott Snyth…Ma’am, may I present…”

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    “ It isn’t far,” Bick Benedict assured them. “Four hundred miles. We’re early. We can cruise around. I’d like to show you something of the Pecos section of Reata—from the air, of course. And you could have a look at historic old Beaumont later. That’s the site of old Spindletop, you know.”
    “Spindletop?” said Miss Lona Lane, the movie girl. “Is that a mountain or something? I don’t like flying over mountains very much.”
    The Texans present looked very serious which meant that they were bursting inside with laughter. The Dallas Moreys and Congressman Bale Clinch and Gabe Target of Houston and Judge Whiteside did not glance at each other. It was as though a tourist in Paris had asked if Notre Dame was a football team.
    “Uh—no,” Bick Benedict said, turning on all his charm which was considerable. Miss Lona Lane was extremely photogenic. “Spindletop was the first big oil gusher in Texas. It dates back to 1901.”
    The Texans relaxed.
    “What’s this San Antone?” inquired Joe Glotch, the former heavyweight champion turned sportsman and New Jersey restaurateur. “I heard that’s quite a spot.”
    “Nothing there but Randolph Field,” the Congressman assured him.
    Bick Benedict addressed himself to the King.
    “Perhaps tomorrow we can fly up to Deaf Smith County in the Panhandle. There are some Herefords up there I’d like to show you——”
    “That would be interesting. What is the distance?”
    “About eight hundred miles.”
    The young man smiled nervously, he fingered his neat dark necktie. “To tell you the truth, I am not as accustomed to this flying as you Texans. You see, my little country could be hidden in one corner of your Texas. At home I rarely flew. It was considered too great a risk. Of course, that was when kings were…Our pilots were always falling into the Aegean Sea. Or somewhere. Perhaps it is because we are not the natural mechanics that you here in the great industrial United States——”
    His English was precise and correct as was his wife’s, clearly the triumph of the Oxford tutor and English governess system over the mid-European consonant.
    “That’s right,” said Congressman Bale Clinch. “Here every kid’s got a car or anyway a motorbike. And a tractor or a jeep is child’s play. Flying comes natural, like walking, to these kids.”
    The group had been whisked to the ranch airfield where the vast winged ship stood awaiting them. A miniature airport, complete, set down like an extravagant toy in the midst of the endless plain. The airport station itself in the Spanish style, brilliantly white in the sunlight with its control tower and its sky deck and its neat pocket-handkerchief square of coarse grass and specimen cactus and the wind-sock bellying in the tireless Texas wind. A flock of small planes, two medium large Company planes, and the mammoth private plane of Jordan Benedict. Down the runway Luz was warming up for her flight, you could see the trembling of the little bright yellow bug, its wings glinting in the sun, gay as a clip in a Fifth Avenue jeweler’s window.
    They all climbed