the hands of the Commanding General of the
Ninth Corps Area.

"The trip was quiet and monotonous until after we left Salt Lake City at
dawn this morning. Nothing happened until we were about a hundred miles
east of Reno. We had taken elevation to cross the Stillwater Mountains
and were skimming low over them, my plane trailing the T. A. C. plane by
about half a mile. I was not paying any particular attention to the
other ship when I suddenly felt our plane leap ahead. It was a fast
Douglas and the pilot gave it the gun and made it move, I can tell you.
I yelled into the speaking tube and asked what was the reason. My pilot
yelled back that the plane ahead was in trouble.

"As soon as it was called to my attention I could see myself that it
wasn't acting normally. It was losing elevation and was pursuing a very
erratic course. Before we could reach it it lost flying speed and fell
into a spinning nose dive and headed for the ground. I watched,
expecting every minute to see the crew make parachute jumps, but they
didn't and the plane hit the ground with a terrific crash."

"It caught fire, of course?"

* * * * *

"No, Doctor, that is one of the funny things about the accident. It
didn't. It hit the ground in an open place free from brush and literally
burst into pieces, but it didn't flame up. We headed directly for the
scene of the crash and we encountered another funny thing. We almost
froze to death."

"What do you mean?"

"Exactly what I say. Of course, it's pretty cold at that altitude all
the time, but this cold was like nothing I had ever encountered. It
seemed to freeze the blood in our veins and it congealed frost on the
windshields and made the motor miss for a moment. It was only momentary
and it only existed directly over the wrecked plane. We went past it and
swung around in a circle and came back over the wreck, but we didn't
feel the cold again.

"The next thing we tried to do was to find a landing place. That country
is pretty rugged and rough and there wasn't a flat place for miles that
was large enough to land a ship on. Hughes and I talked it over and
there didn't seem to be much of anything that we could do except to go
on until we found a landing place. I had had no experience in parachute
jumping and I couldn't pilot the plane if Hughes jumped. We swooped down
over the wreck as close as we dared and that was when we saw the
condition of the bodies. The whole