By the time the second engine died, the sky looked like it was tearing apart.

The B-17 bucked and shuddered as a burst of 20mm cannon shells walked up its left wing. Metal screamed. Shards of aluminum skittered across the floor like ice. In the radio compartment, Staff Sergeant Joe Keller felt the whole aircraft lurch sideways, his headset slamming against his cheek.

“Number Two’s on fire!” somebody yelled over the interphone, voice high and ragged. “Feathering the prop!”

Joe swallowed, tasting cordite and fear. He pressed the microphone switch.

“Radio to pilot—” he coughed as smoke poured back through the fuselage. “Radio to pilot, we’ve got fighters all over us. I count—hell, I can’t count, they’re everywhere!”

Out the side window, the world was madness. Twin-tailed shapes flashing past, wings canted, guns winking bright. BF 109s and FW 190s, the entire Luftwaffe, it felt like, was clawing its way through the bomber stream.

Above the contrails over Schweinfurt, Germany, October 1943, the theory of daylight precision bombing was dying one smoking fortress at a time.

“Stay in formation!” the pilot barked. “We fall out, we’re dead!”

They were already half-dead, Joe thought. Half the box was trailing smoke. One Fortress ahead of them rolled, slowly, almost gracefully, then broke apart, a wing tumbling away. Tiny black shapes spilled out—men—with parachutes that didn’t open.

Joe saw one go by so close he could see the man’s face. He looked about nineteen.

Just like me, Joe thought.

He grabbed the .50-calibre machine gun in the radio hatch and fired at a streaking fighter just because it was something to do, something that felt like action instead of helpless waiting.

The fighter flashed by, untouched.

“Where the hell are our fighters?” the copilot shouted.

Nobody answered. The P-47 Thunderbolts that had escorted them as far as they could had turned back an hour ago. They didn’t have the fuel to come this deep.

From here on, they were alone.

Joe’s last clear memory of that mission was the sight of the horizon tilting—the unimaginable realization that their Fortress, their shield, was sliding out of formation, turning from the safety of the herd into the jaws of the hunters.

Two years earlier, in a drafty hangar in Ohio, a different aircraft was failing to impress anyone at all.

It sat hunched on its landing gear, all smooth curves and sharp lines, the sunlight from the open hangar doors brushing the olive-drab skin of its wings. A handful of officers and engineers in long coats stood around it, collars turned up against the draft, breath smoking in the cold air.

“It looks fast,” one captain offered, more out of politeness than conviction.

“It is fast,” said the North American Aviation engineer at his side. “Down low, she’ll run rings around a P-40. New laminar-flow wing section, see? Reduces drag. You get your lift a little farther back on the chord, keeps the boundary layer attached longer—”

The colonel leading the evaluation squadron waved a hand, cutting him off. “Save the sales pitch, son,” he said. “We read your brochure.”

He walked slowly around the aircraft, boot heels clicking on concrete. Nose down, cockpit set far back, wings sharper than any American fighter he’d flown. It looked like it wanted to go fast, to turn fast, to fight. On looks alone, it certainly beat the tubby P-47s parked outside with their cowlings open like fat mouths.

“What do you call it again?” he asked.

“Mustang,” the engineer said proudly. “NA-73. Designed for the British, originally. They wanted something we could build quick, something with teeth.”

“Yeah?” The colonel squinted up at the nose, where a row of .50-calibre barrels poked out. “And the engine?”

“Allison V-1710.” The engineer patted the cowl. “We’ve been using them in P-40s for years. Reliable as sunrise.”

“Reliable until you get above fifteen thousand feet,” the colonel said dryly. “And we’re not fighting this war at tree-top level.”

The engineer’s smile faltered.

“In tests,” he insisted, “she does three hundred and eighty miles an hour at fifteen thousand. The P-40 tops out at—”

“Captain Reynolds!” the colonel called, ignoring him. “Get your gear. You’re taking this wonder-horse up. Give me your honest opinion.”

First Lieutenant Jack Reynolds had been leaning against a crate with his hands in his pockets, watching the exchange with a kind of detached amusement. He straightened, rolling his shoulders as he walked over to the Mustang.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Is it going to fall apart on me?”

“If it does,” the colonel replied, “at least then we’ll know.”

Jack climbed onto the wing, ran a hand along the smooth, cold metal. There was something seductive about the way it felt under his palm. New paint, new aluminum. A promise.

He dropped into the cockpit. It smelled like dope and paint and a hint of oil. Instruments were neatly arrayed on the panel. The canopy rails were smooth and new under his gloved hands.

He went through the start-up checklist with the easy rhythm of a man who’d done it a hundred times before. Fuel, mags, mixture. Clear prop. The Allison cranked, coughed, then caught with a smooth, deep purr that vibrated through the airframe.

“At least she sounds pretty,” Jack muttered. He taxied out into the pale winter light.

The Mustang did feel nimble. Lighter on the stick than a P-40, less of the Thunderbolt’s stubborn inertia. Down low, she ran like a dream, the ground racing past beneath her wings. Two hundred, two fifty, three hundred miles per hour. The laminar wing really did reduce drag. He grinned despite himself as the little fighter carved through crisp Ohio air.

But when he pulled her into a climb, the smile faded.

Ten thousand feet. Twelve. Fourteen. He glanced at the airspeed indicator. It had stopped rising. The Allison wheezed above fifteen thousand, its single-stage supercharger beaten by the thin air. Jack shoved the throttle forward. The engine roared louder but the climb rate sagged.

Up where the real war was being fought over Europe, at twenty, twenty-five thousand feet, this thing would be a sitting duck.

He landed, pushed back the canopy, and climbed out, lungs still full of cold air.

“Well?” the colonel called. “Can your new toy dance with a 109 up where the bombers are flying?”

Jack hesitated.

“She flies nice down low,” he said. “Real nice. Good range, too. But she runs out of breath above fifteen thousand. We’re not going to escort anything to Germany in that. Not the way the war’s going now.”

The engineer swallowed.

“What if—”

“We’re sticking with the Thunderbolts,” the colonel said, turning away. “This thing’s a nice idea, but you can’t fight theory. Not at twenty thousand feet.”

The Mustang stood silent in the hangar, looking for all the world like a thoroughbred locked in the wrong stable.

Across an ocean, under a low, gray English sky, another man stared at a different Mustang and thought, There’s something here we’re all missing.

At Hucknall airfield in Nottinghamshire, Ronald Harker of Rolls-Royce leaned against a wing strut, collar of his greatcoat turned up against the damp.

“So this is the famous American disappointment,” he said.

The RAF test pilot beside him snorted.

“Flies beautifully down low,” the pilot said. “But she’s a bit asthmatic upstairs. Allison gives up the ghost around fifteen thousand. They designed a racehorse then gave it a mule’s lungs.”

Harker walked slowly around the aircraft, his engineer’s eye tracing the lines. The laminar-flow wing intrigued him. Most wing sections thickened nearer the leading edge, but this one bulged farther back, clever mathematics buried in aluminum.

“She looks like she wants to go fast,” he said.

“Oh, she does,” the pilot said. “But what good is fast at ten thousand feet when Jerry’s dropping bombs at twenty?”

Harker put his hand against the cowl. Thin metal, smooth and cool. Behind it, the Allison V-1710 sat like a dog in the wrong yard.

“What if we gave her proper lungs?” Harker murmured.

“Come again?”

“Take that Allison out,” Harker said, warming to the notion. “Install a Merlin. A sixty-one, perhaps. Two-stage, two-speed supercharger. Give her altitude performance to match her wing.”

The pilot blinked.

“Would it fit?”

“Only one way to find out.”

Harker wrote the letter that night, hunched at a wooden desk lit by a single shaded lamp. His pen scratched across paper, laying out the case to his superiors with engineer’s precision and salesman’s instinct.

The aircraft exhibits excellent low-altitude performance and handling, but is severely hampered by the Allison’s inadequate high-altitude characteristics. I am convinced that married to a Merlin, this airframe would be transformed into a superlative high-altitude fighter, potentially superior to current Spitfire variants in range and equal in performance.

When the first Merlin-engined Mustang rolled out of the hangar months later—its long nose slightly altered, its cowl hides filled with British horsepower—Harker insisted on taking a seat in the observer’s position.

The pilot, Squadron Leader “Roly” Beamont, strapped in with the calm of a man who already trusted his machine. The Merlin 61 coughed, spat, then settled into the deep, throaty rumble Harker knew like his own heartbeat from years among Spitfires.

They roared down the runway and climbed. Ten thousand feet came and went. Fifteen. Twenty. The airspeed indicator kept rising.

“Twenty-five thousand feet,” Beamont called, voice in Harker’s headset. “Three hundred and seventy miles per hour. Still climbing like a homesick angel.”

Harker laughed with sheer delight.

“It’s as if she’s been waiting for this engine all along,” he said.

The Mustang wasn’t a disappointment anymore. It was a revelation.

Jack Reynolds met the new Mustang on a bright California afternoon in 1943.

He’d been transferred to Wright Field, then to North American’s plant in Inglewood as a test pilot. He’d flown P-38s, P-47s, prototype oddities that never saw combat, and more P-39s than he cared to remember.

When he saw the P-51B on the ramp, with its Malcolm hood canopy and sleek nose hiding a Packard-built Rolls-Royce Merlin, he felt something he hadn’t let himself feel in years.

Hope.

“So they finally listened,” he said, patting the cowl. “Harker and his lads did it.”

The engineer beside him—an American this time, Freeman by name—grinned.

“British sent us the data,” Freeman said. “We got Packard building Merlins under license in Detroit. Slapped one in our Mustang and—well. See for yourself.”

Jack climbed in. Start-up was familiar Merlin music, but the way the Mustang leapt down the runway felt different. More urgent. More alive.

He pulled back on the stick and the little fighter clawed into the sky like it had someplace important to be.

At 15,000 feet, he checked his climb rate and laughed. At 20,000 feet, he rolled and the horizon rotated like it was on ball bearings. At 25,000 feet, the Mustang was still climbing, still accelerating, engine smooth and eager.

He radioed the chase plane.

“Hey, Bill,” he said, unable to keep the grin out of his voice. “You remember that dead horse I flew in Ohio? This is her meaner sister.”

“How’s she do?” came the reply.

Jack checked his altimeter.

“Twenty-five grand, three hundred and ninety miles per hour, and she wants more,” he said. “We put drop tanks on this thing, she’ll fly to Berlin and back with fuel left to fight.”

The idea settled into his bones. You could take these things across the North Sea, across the Low Countries, all the way to the heart of Germany. You could fly them alongside the bombers and not have to turn back. You could be there when the Fortresses needed you most.

Maybe, just maybe, fewer boys would come back to empty bunks.

In a smoky briefing room in England that winter, Lieutenant Sam Walker of the 357th Fighter Group sat at a long table, nursing a chipped mug of coffee while a major pointed at chalk marks on a blackboard.

“Gentlemen,” the major said, “you’re flyin’ a different war than the boys before you. We’re done turnin’ back at the Ruhr. We’re done lettin’ Jerry have the bombers for dessert over Leipzig and Berlin.”

He underlined a point on the map, far to the east.

“Tomorrow, you’re escorting the 91st Bomb Group all the way to this ball bearing plant here,” he said. “Schweinfurt. Yep, that Schweinfurt. Some of you have brothers who flew there last time. You heard what happened.”

Sam’s jaw tightened. He’d read the casualty lists. Everybody had.

“Your job is simple,” the major went on. “Stay with the bombers. Don’t go chasin’ glory. No breakin’ off to chase strays. Hitler’s boys will know you’re comin’ this time. They’ll come in waves. When they do, you stay between them and the Forts.”

He paused.

“And when those 109s and 190s get tired of losing fighters for nothing and try to turn away, then you can go hunting.”

A grin rippled through the room.

After the briefing, Sam stood next to his P-51B, hand resting on the cool metal of the wing as ground crew strapped on her drop tanks.

“Got enough gas for this one, LT?” Sergeant “Red” Murphy asked, cigarette dangling from his lip.

Sam shrugged.

“Heard she can go twelve hundred miles with these things,” he said. “Figure I’ll find out soon enough.”

He climbed in, ran through the checklist, and let the Merlin roar.

As they lifted off and climbed into the pale winter sky, the bombers formed up below them. B-17 formations stretched for miles, little silver crosses stamped across cloud and contrails.

“God, they’re big,” muttered Sam’s wingman, Tommy, on the radio.

“Big and full of kids who don’t want to die,” Sam replied. “So keep your eyes open.”

Over Germany, when the first black puffs of flak blossomed around the formations and the calls of “Bandits! Bandits!” crackled over the interphone, Sam saw what the Mustang was made for.

The first wave of 109s came in high and fast, trying their old trick—diving through the bomber boxes, firing, then zooming up and away before the escorts could catch them.

This time, they didn’t get away.

Sam shoved his throttle forward, felt the Merlin haul him after the German fighters. The P-51’s nose dipped slightly, wings steady. The airspeed indicator spun up. He pulled into a climbing turn, slotting himself five hundred yards behind a Messerschmitt that had just broken off from its run.

He squeezed the trigger and felt the six Browning .50s hammer through the airframe, the vibration coming up through his seat. Tracers stitched toward the German fighter.

They caught the 109 on its wing root. Metal flayed. A panel flew off. Smoke burst from the engine cowling. The enemy pilot bailed out, his canopy flashing by as his aircraft tumbled.

Sam didn’t have time to watch. Another call. “Tally ho! Bandits six o’clock low!”

He rolled, dove, then climbed again, the world turning into a series of blue, gray, white. Cold and adrenaline. Attack. Break. Climb. Attack again. Always above the bombers, always between them and the predators.

Hours later, as the bombers turned west and their nose headings swung toward home, Sam looked down and felt something new.

They were still there.

Still with them. Fuel gauges low, yes, but not empty. P-51s still circling above the battered Fortresses even as they crossed back over the Rhine. German fighters that tried to take one last bite before the border found Mustangs waiting.

Back at the debrief, the statistics were scrappy, hastily chalked on a battered board, but they told a story as clearly as any factory graph.

Bomb group losses: heavy, but less than Schweinfurt last time. German losses: significant and, more importantly, irreplaceable. Veteran pilots shot down did not grow on trees.

A week later, another mission. Then another. Big Week. Seven days of relentless pounding of German aircraft factories. Every time, the Mustangs went with the bombers all the way, and every time, fewer bombers failed to come home.

From the other side of the war, it looked like an invasion of ghosts.

Near Bremen, Oberleutnant Franz Stigler—an ace with a chest full of medals and twenty-odd kills—climbed from the cockpit of his Bf 109, sweat plastering his hair to his forehead despite the autumn chill.

He pushed his goggles up and squinted at the sky. Contrails arched overhead. More American bombers. Always more.

“Fighters with them this time,” his controller had warned. “Different types. Not the usual Thunderbolts.”

Franz had seen P-47s before. Big, brutal machines. Fast in a dive, sluggish in a climb. Easy enough to avoid if you were paying attention.

The shapes above the bombers didn’t look like P-47s. Slimmer. Longer-legged. Like predatory fish coasting above a school.

He throttled up, pointed his nose to where the bombers would be when he reached their altitude, and climbed.

“Luftflotte command says new American type,” his wingman, Dieter, said over the radio. “Maybe another P-38 variant. They keep trying.”

“Then we’ll knock these out of the sky like the others,” Franz said, trying to sound confident.

He spotted the Mustangs first as glints above the bomber boxes. Sleek shapes cutting contrails at slight angles, not the heavy, obvious cigar outlines of Thunderbolts.

They were high. Too high to ignore.

“All Rotten, watch above the bombers,” Franz called. “New escort type at—”

His warning was cut off by a streak of metal flashing past his canopy. Instinct screamed. He snapped his 109 into a break just as tracers ripped through the air where he’d been.

“Verdammt!” Dieter shouted. “They’re on us already!”

Franz rolled, pulled hard, trying to see his attacker. A Mustang swept through his field of vision, sunlight glinting off its wings, nose art too blurred to read. It climbed like nothing he’d seen outside of a Spitfire at full song and it was still with the bombers.

He dove, trying to use gravity as he always had against American escorts. The Mustang came with him. No rolling away, no giving up when it got too far from the main pack. It followed, steady, relentless.

The dogfight that followed was terrifying. The Mustang matched him turn for turn, got its nose inside his circle more than once. Only Franz’s years of experience kept him alive, slipping, rolling, using cloud as cover. He finally shook the American in a steep dive that ended treetop high over a forest.

He pulled up, heart hammering, fuel low.

“Dieter?” he called. Silence.

Back at base, he learned that Dieter hadn’t made it.

What the hell was that?” one of the squadron’s younger pilots asked.

“P-51,” Franz said quietly. “Mustang. The Americans have given their horses wings.”

He didn’t sleep well that night.

June 6th, 1944. D-Day.

The Channel was a carpet of ships. Higgins boats, destroyers, battleships, landing craft, all moving in numbers that seemed obscene.

Above them, the sky was no less crowded.

Sam Walker circled in his P-51 over the Normandy coast at twenty thousand feet, eyes scanning for the telltale glint of German aircraft. Sweat trickled down his neck despite the cold.

“Convoy looks like my kid dumped his toy box in the bathtub,” Red Murphy said over the radio from his own Mustang a mile away.

“Keep your eyes open,” Sam answered. “Not gonna mean much if a 109 gets through and lights up a transport.”

But the Luftwaffe barely showed.

Those German fighters that did appear came in small groups, tentative, probing, and most never made it past the Mustang screen.

Sam caught one FW 190 trying to sneak in low over the hedges and blew it apart with a short burst, pieces of wing and fuselage cartwheeling across a French field.

Others he saw only at a distance, turning away when they realized the sky was full not just of bombers but of fighters with range to spare.

On the ground, amid chaos and blood and fear on the beaches, men looked up and saw Allied planes. Only Allied planes.

The Luftwaffe, once the terror of Europe, had been pushed to the margins.

By late 1944, the war in the air had changed so completely that even Hitler’s wonder weapons couldn’t save it.

At Achmer Airfield, a line of sleek, strange aircraft waited under camouflaged netting. Messerschmitt Me 262 jets. Whispers had passed through German units for months about these machines. Fast as lightning. Faster.

They were.

When Franz finally converted to jets, he felt like he’d stepped into the future. The 262 leaped forward like a wild thing, pressed him back into the seat as the runway blurred into a streak. No prop disk out front. Just clear air. Just speed.

He roared into the sky and almost laughed. Four hundred miles per hour came and went. Five. Six. Bombers that had once loomed ahead in his gunsights now seemed to crawl, fat and helpless.

He could flash through a formation, unload his 30mm cannons, and be gone before the escorts could even bring their guns to bear.

The jets might have turned the tide—if they’d come a year earlier. If they’d been produced in numbers. If they’d had fuel. If they weren’t sabotaged by Hitler’s insistence that they be bombers instead of fighters.

As it was, they were magnificent, fragile toys thrown into a losing game.

And even they weren’t safe from Mustangs.

On a cold January day, Franz lined up to land after a mission. His fuel gauge was a hair above empty. Both jets drank gasoline like a drunk at a beer hall.

He lowered his gear, flaps, wings level, breath slowing as he prepared to touch down.

The first burst hit the runway in front of him.

He yanked the stick, adrenaline flooding his system, as a P-51 flashed across his nose in a high-speed pass. He’d been so focused on landing, on nursing the engines, he hadn’t checked the pattern.

The Mustang climbed, rolled, then dropped in behind another 262 on final approach. That jet didn’t have enough fuel or energy to evade. The Mustang’s guns chewed it up. Fire burst from its tail. It slammed into the ground short of the runway and cartwheeled in a spray of metal and flame.

Later, in the briefing, somebody would mutter, “The bastards even own our airfields now.”

Franz didn’t disagree.

By war’s end, the numbers the generals looked at told the story in cold ink that matched what men like Joe and Jack and Sam and Franz had seen with their eyes.

Range: With external drop tanks, the P-51 could fly over 1,600 miles. London to Berlin and back with diversions. No other Allied fighter could match that in 1943. The Mustang turned the entire Third Reich into reachable airspace.

Speed: The Mustang moved at over 430 mph at altitude. Fast enough to catch or escape from anything but a jet. And unlike a jet, it could loiter. It could escort. It could stay.

Firepower: Six M2 Browning .50s throwing twelve to fifteen hundred rounds per minute, depending on the pilot’s trigger discipline. Enough to shred fighters, hammer bombers, and tear up locomotives and trucks in ground attack.

Kill ratio: In hands of veteran pilots, the P-51 enjoyed kill ratios of 4:1, sometimes higher, against German fighters. Each Mustang downed cost the Luftwaffe four of its own—and more importantly, four pilots they could not replace.

Production: Over fifteen thousand Mustangs built. Enough that by the end, every major escort group seemed to fly them, silver wings with red or yellow or blue noses, each group painting its own personality onto the airframe.

But the numbers, impressive though they were, do not fully capture what the Mustang really did.

It changed belief.

In 1942, boys like Joe climbed into bombers believing they were probably going to die. Doing their job, yes. Fighting for their country, yes. But deep down, they knew the odds.

In 1944, when those same boys saw sleek shapes overhead with the distinctive Mustang silhouette, something changed in their guts.

They believed they might live.

German pilots felt it too. In 1940, the Luftwaffe had owned the sky. By 1944, they felt hunted. Where once they chose when and where to fight, now they were reacting. Climbing to meet bombers only to be met farther out by Mustangs. Taking off from airfields only to find Mustangs already circling overhead.

Systems, not just machines, won the air war. Bombers, radar, ground control, training pipelines, fuel production, and yes, factories churning out engines like the Rolls-Royce Merlin.

The P-51 Mustang was the sharp, gleaming tip of that system. The prototype that nobody believed in, transformed by an engine swap and a faith in range and speed into the most feared fighter of the war.

When German officers were asked after the war which Allied weapon hurt them most, some mentioned the B-17. Some mentioned radar. Some mentioned the Red Army.

But more than a few, especially those who had worn goggles and flight jackets, just shook their heads and said, with a rueful half-smile:

“Der Mustang.”

Years later, in a hangar that did not smell like dope and paint and fear, an old man ran his hand along a wing.

Jack Reynolds stood in the quiet of a museum, the P-51D beside him polished to a mirror shine. Children’s voices echoed faintly somewhere else in the building. The Mustang in front of him was a static display now, engine drained of oil, tanks dry. But in his mind, she was still full of Merlin music.

“Excuse me,” a voice said.

Jack turned. A boy of ten stood there, hands shoved in his pockets, eyes wide.

“Were you really a pilot?” the boy asked. He stared at the name painted under the canopy—Lt. J. Reynolds. “Did you really fly one of these?”

Jack smiled.

“Yeah,” he said. “I did.”

The boy looked at the Mustang, then back at him.

“Was it… were you scared?” he blurted.

“Sometimes,” Jack said. “Sometimes I was too busy to be scared. Sometimes I was too tired. But yeah. Anyone who tells you they weren’t scared up there is lying.”

The boy chewed his lip.

“Did it really… did it really win the war?” he asked, gesturing at the Mustang. “My teacher said this plane was important.”

Jack looked at the machine, at the way its wings still seemed ready to fly even on jacks.

“No plane wins a war by itself,” he said. “But this one? It helped a lot of young men like me and your grandpa make it home.”

He rapped his knuckles gently on the wing.

“You know,” he added, “when they first built this thing, a lot of smart people said it was useless. Couldn’t climb, couldn’t fight where it mattered. We almost threw it away.”

“What changed?” the boy asked.

“Somebody had an idea,” Jack said. “Somebody looked at this airframe and said, ‘It deserves a better engine.’ They took a chance. They swapped out what didn’t work. They didn’t give up on it just because it wasn’t perfect the first time.”

He glanced at the boy.

“That’s something to remember,” he said. “Doesn’t matter if it’s a machine, or a plan, or a person. Sometimes, you don’t need to throw the whole thing away. You just need to find the right heart for it.”

The boy nodded, his gaze going distant in that way kids have when something sinks a little deeper than just “cool plane.”

“Could I be a pilot someday?” he asked.

“If you want it badly enough,” Jack said. “And if you’re willing to learn and change when things don’t work the first time.”

He put his hand back on the Mustang’s wing, feeling cold metal under warm palm.

Out in the world, nations that had once hurled machines and men at each other now shared the sky. German airliners and American jets crossed the Atlantic daily, following great circle routes that ignored old battlefields.

Up there, at thirty-five thousand feet, the air was still thin and cold. The physics that Harker and the Rolls-Royce engineers and the North American draftsmen had wrestled with still ruled.

Lift. Drag. Thrust. Weight.

And, just maybe, a little bit of history humming quietly in the bloodstream of every aircraft that climbed high and didn’t have to worry about making it home alone.

The Mustang hadn’t just rewritten the playbook of air warfare. It had given thousands of people a chance to live long enough to write the books, tell the stories, and bring their kids to see a squat little fighter sitting quietly in a museum and say:

“That one made a difference.”

 

The End.