Again he glanced back. Now, in his judgment, the monoplane loomed larger than before against the glowing sky, indicating that it was overtaking them.
Beneath his breath Lanyard swore from a brimming heart.
The Parrott was capable of a speed of eighty miles an hour; and unquestionably Vauquelin was wheedling every ounce of power out of its willing motor. Since drawing Lanyard’s attention to the pursuer he had brought about appreciable acceleration.
But would even that pace serve to hold the Valkyr if not to distance it?
His next backward look reckoned the monoplane no nearer.
And another thirty minutes or go elapsed without the relative positions of the two flying machines undergoing any perceptible change.
In the course of this period the Parrott rose to an altitude, indicated by the barograph at Lanyard’s elbow, of more than half a mile. Below, the Channel fog spread itself out like a sea of milk, slowly churning.
Staring down in fascination, Lanyard told himself gravely:
“Blue water below that, my friend!”
It seemed difficult to credit the fact that they had made the flight from Paris in so short a time.
By his reckoning—a very rough one—the Parrott was then somewhere off Dieppe: it ought to pick up England, in such case, not far from Brighton. If only one could see … !
By bending forward a little and staring past the aviator Lanyard could catch a glimpse of Lucy Shannon.
Though all her beauty and grace of person were lost in the clumsy swaddling of her makeshift costume, she seemed to be comfortable enough; and the rushing air, keen with the chill of that great altitude, moulded her wind-veil precisely to the exquisite contours of her face and stung her firm cheeks until they glowed with a rare fire that even that thick dark mesh could not wholly quench.
The sun crept above the floor of mist, played upon it with iridescent rays, shot it through and through with a warm, pulsating glow like that of a fire opal, and suddenly turned it to a tumbled sea of gold which, apparently boundless, baffled every effort to surmise their position, whether they were above land or sea.
None the less Lanyard’s rough and rapid calculations persuaded him that they were then about Mid-Channel.
He had no more than arrived at this conclusion when a sharp, startled movement, that rocked the planes, drew his attention to the man at his side.
Glancing in alarm at the aviator’s face, he saw it as white as marble—what little of it was visible beyond and beneath the wind-mask.
Vauquelin was holding out an arm, and staring at it incredulously; Lanyard’s gaze was drawn to the same spot—a ragged perforation in the sleeve of the pilot’s leather surtout, just above the elbow.
“What is it?” he enquired stupidly, again forgetting that he could not be heard.
The eyes of the aviator, lifting from the perforation to meet Lanyard’s stare, were clouded with consternation.
Then Vauquelin turned quickly and looked back. Simultaneously he ducked his head and something slipped whining past Lanyard’s cheek, touching his flesh with a touch more chill than that of the icy air itself.
“Damnation!” he shrieked, almost hysterically. “That madman in the Valkyr is firing at us!”
XXVI
The Flying Death
Steadying himself with a splendid display of self-control and sheer courage, Captain Vauquelin concentrated upon the management of the biplane.
The drone of its motor thickened again, its speed became greater, and the machine began to rise still higher, tracing a long, graceful curve.
Lanyard glanced apprehensively toward the girl, but apparently she remained unconscious of anything out of the ordinary. Her face was still turned forward, and still the wind-veil trembled against her glowing cheeks.
Thanks to the racket of the motor, no audible reports had accompanied the sharpshooting of the man in the monoplane; while Lanyard’s cry of horror and dismay had been audible to himself exclusively. Hearing nothing, Lucy suspected nothing.
Again Lanyard looked back.
Now the Valkyr seemed to have crept up to within the quarter of a mile of the biplane, and was boring on at a tremendous pace, its single spread of wings on an approximate level with that of the lower plane of the Parrott.
But this last was rising steadily. …
The driver’s seat of the Valkyr held a muffled, burly figure that might be anybody—De Morbihan, Ekstrom, or any other homicidal maniac. At the distance its actions were as illegible as their results were unquestionable: Lanyard saw a little tongue of flame lick out from a point close beside the head of the figure—he couldn’t distinguish the firearm itself—and, like Vauquelin, quite without premeditation, he ducked.
At the same time there sounded a harsh, ripping noise immediately above his head; and he found himself staring up at a long ragged tear in the canvas, caused by the bullet striking it aslant.
“What’s to be done?” he screamed passionately at Vauquelin.
The aviator shook his head impatiently; and they continued to ascend; already the web of gold that cloaked earth and sea seemed thrice as far beneath their feet as it had when Vauquelin made the appalling discovery of his bullet-punctured sleeve.
But the monoplane was doggedly following suit; as the Parrott rose, so did the Valkyr, if a trace more slowly and less flexibly.
Lanyard had read somewhere, or heard it said, that monoplanes were poor machines for climbing. He told himself that, if this were true, Vauquelin knew his business; and from this reflection drew what comfort he might.
And he was glad, very glad of the dark wind-veil that shrouded his face, which he believed to be nothing less than a mask of panic terror.
He was, in fact, quite rigid with fright and horror. It were idle to argue that only unlikely chance would wing one of the bullets
