California, Winter 1936
Frightened and grief-stricken, Barbara flew the Piper Cub back to her airport near Mohave immediately after hearing from Edna that it was on fire. Jackie Cochran and her other new women flier friends offered any help they could give. Jackie and several others even volunteered to fly back with her in their planes. She declined their offers and thanked them.
This was something she had to face alone.
Enroute home, Barbara reflected on the call from Edna.
Her friend had precious little to tell her because she had made the phone call after just learning about the fire herself.
Edna was frantic. "Russ Oberman called me, just minutes ago. Come quick as you can! Your airport's on fire! I don't know anything more than that right now."
Barbara had left Jackie Cochran's phone number with Edna because she could not trust her partner to be awake or sober, in case of any emergency while she was away. She didn't wait to ask more, just told her hostess and other new friends about it and ran for her plane.
"Your airport's on fire!" The horror of the words sunk deeper into Barbara's consciousness with each mile she flew home.
Finally, as she approached her airport, she saw the full reality of what the words meant. Besides the office building, both hangars were in charred ruins. The roofs collapsed in on all three buildings. They were still aflame after burning for several hours. She could only see the smoking remains of the Jenny in the wreckage of the two hangars.
She thanked heaven both planes hadn't been on the air field. At least she still had the Cub. Down below she could see that her partner and his dog had survived the fire, but then worried frantically about her horse.
As Barbara landed the Piper Cub and then taxied her plane up the airstrip, firemen waved for her to stop a safe distance from the still-burning buildings. When she climbed out of the cockpit, she learned that gasoline in a storage shed near both hangars had recently blown. It not only brought the blaze back to life, but to dangerous proportions.
She wanted to tell them that she never stored gasoline anywhere near the hangars or the office building. But first she had to know about Becky.
"Please," she asked the fire chief from Bakersfield whose men had responded to the all-alarms fire, together with volunteer fire departments from Mohave, Tehachapi, and other nearby towns. "What about the horse that was in one of the hangars? The one without a plane in it."