All through the day the air is filled with them--gulls and airplanes sharing amicably the island and the air above it.
Up from the south, with her nose pointed determinedly northward and her rudder set steady as the tail of a frozen fish, the Thunder Bird came humming defiantly, flying swift under the moon.

Over San Diego bay, watching through night-glasses the outlaw bird, the two scouting planes dipped steeply toward their nesting place on North Island.

Three planes were up with students making practice flights and doing acrobatics by moonlight.

These saw one scout go down and land, saw the other circle over the field and climb higher, bearing off toward the mainland to see what the outlaw plane would do.
The Thunder Bird swung on over the island, banked and came back over Point Loma, heading straight for the heart of the flying station.

She was past the finlike reef where the pelicans foregather, when the searchlight brushed its white light over that way, seeking her like a groping finger; found her and transfixed her sternly with its pitiless glare.
There was no hiding from that piercing gaze, no possibility of pretending that she was a government plane and flying lawfully there.
For straight across her middle, from wing-tip to wing-tip, still blazoned THE THUNDER BIRD in letters as bold and black as Bland's brush and a quart of carriage paint could make them.
She volplaned, flattened out a thousand feet or so above the island, circled as the searchlight, losing her when she dipped, sought her again with wide sweeping gestures of its accusing white finger.
Blinded by the glare, poor Johnny was banking to find a landing place among that assemblage of tents, low-eaved barracks, hangars, shops--the city built for the purpose of teaching men how to conquer the air.
Something spatted close beside him on the edge of the cockpit as he wheeled and left a ragged hole in the leather.