In a letter to Katharine written the following day, he told her he could not help thinking over and over that if he had been with Orville the accident would never have happened. “I do not mean that Orville was incompetent to do the work itself, but I realized that he would be surrounded by thousands of people who with the most friendly intentions in the world would consume his time, exhaust his strength, and keep him from having proper rest.
If I had been there I could have held off the visitors while he worked or let him hold them off while I worked. . . . People think I am foolish because I do not like the men to do the least important work on the machine. They say I crawl under the machine when the men could do the thing well enough. I do it partly because it gives me opportunity to see if anything in the neighborhood is out of order.
He presumed their father was terribly worried about Orville’s condition, he wrote in conclusion, but things would turn out right at last. Of this he was sure.
At his upstairs desk in Dayton that same day, September 19, Bishop Wright wrote to Wilbur in much the same spirit.
It is sad that Orville is hurt and unpleasant that his success is delayed. It is lamentable that Lieut. Selfridge lost his life. I am saddest over his death. But success to your invention is assured. The brighter day will come to you.
On Monday, September 21, at Camp d’Auvours, Wilbur was back in action taking “the bull by the horns,” as he liked to say, before ten thousand spectators. He flew one hour, 31 minutes, and 25 seconds, over a distance of 40 miles establishing another sensational world record.
Among the enormous crowd was the American ambassador to France, Henry White, who was reported to have been the most excited man present and who, “quite forgetting his usual diplomatic dignity” went racing across the field to be the first to shake Wilbur’s hand.
III.
Katharine reached Washington early the morning of September 18 and found Charles Flint and two army officers waiting at the station, ready to drive her immediately in a Signal Corps automobile across the river to Fort Myer. At the hospital she was met by the young army surgeon and shown into Orville’s room.
“I found Orville looking pretty badly,” she reported in a letter home to Lorin. His face was cut in several places, the deepest of the gashes being over his left eye. He was so sore everywhere he could not bear to be touched. His leg was not in a cast, as she had expected, but “in a sort of cradle” held up by a rope to the ceiling, she wrote to Wilbur.
“When I went in his chin quivered and the tears came to his eyes, but he soon braced up again. The shock has weakened him very much, of course.” As the day went on Orville turned extremely nervous and on edge. “I suppose the working with his leg has made him so. I bathed that side of his face that was exposed, and his chest and shoulders. That quieted him, some.”
She liked the doctor and the male nurse on duty. The room, she was also pleased to report, was full of flowers and there was a great basket of fruit and a pile of telegrams on a side table, including one saying, “The thousand proud pupils and teachers of Steele High School unanimously extend sympathy and encouragement.”
“I will acknowledge the notes and telegrams,” she said. “There is a desk in the room, and I can sit there and write. After a bit I can read to him.” How long she would be staying was impossible to say. He was not dangerously injured, she stressed, but she was sure it would be weeks before he would be able to leave.
At first she lived with a couple named Shearer, relatives of a Dayton friend. To get to the hospital from their home in Washington by trolley required three transfers and took fully an hour. Still, she was at Orville’s bedside every day without fail. Some nights, too tired for the return trip to town, she slept at the hospital.
Orville’s progress was not steady. “Last night was a rather bad time for little brother and this morning, too,” she wrote to her father. His leg was broken in two places, she explained, but the breaks were “clean and in as favorable places as they could be,” in the thigh bone of the left leg. The doctors were making a great effort not to let the leg be shortened and apparently they were succeeding. The broken ribs made it necessary to bandage him tightly and that made his breathing hard.
“Tonight I am staying all night with him. After I came today he quieted down and was so much easier that I made up my mind to see him through the night. It is after eleven now and he has been asleep nearly an hour. Last night codeine had no effect. Tonight it has.”
Her letter was written September 21, the same day Wilbur made his record-breaking flight at Camp d’Auvours.
Will had his nerve with him sure enough [she wrote, knowing how her father must feel]. One hour, thirty-one minutes, twenty-five seconds! All the newspapermen began calling up the hospital to tell me. Orville did a great deal of smiling over it. That did him an immense amount of good.