pleasure in smoothly squeezing the trigger when suddenly a strange noise clattered in his head. It sounded like the threshing machine at the farm at the Matawan Asylum for the Criminally Insane, where his enemies had locked him up for shooting his chauffeur at the country club.
The bughouse had been worse than the most monstrous orphanage in his memory. Powerful politicians and high-priced lawyers claimed credit for springing him. But it was only right to let him out. The chauffeur had been romancing his first wife.
Unbelievably, it was happening again with his new bride. He could see it written on their faces every time Josephine hit him up for more dough to pay for Marco’s inventions. Now she was begging him to buy the Italian’s latest flying machine back from his creditors so she could win the Atlantic – Pacific Cross-Country Air Race and claim the fifty-thousand-dollar Whiteway Cup.
Wouldn’t that be swell? Winning the biggest air race in the world would make his aviatrix wife and her inventor boyfriend famous. Preston Whiteway – the snoot-in-the-air, born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth San Francisco newspaper publisher who was sponsoring the race – would make them stars, and sell fifty million newspapers in the process. The chump husband would be famous, too – a famously cuckolded, fat old rich husband – the laughingstock of all who despised him.
Rich he was, one of the richest men in America, every damned dollar earned himself. But Harry Frost wasn’t old yet. A little over forty wasn’t that old. And anyone who said he was more fat than muscle hadn’t seen him kill a horse with a single punch – a trick he had performed famously in his youth and lately had made a birthday ritual.
Unlike the treachery with the chauffeur, this time they wouldn’t catch him. No more flying off the handle. He had planned this one down to the last detail. Savoring revenge, going about it like a business, he had resurrected his formidable talents for management and deception to lure the unsuspecting Celere on a bear hunt. Bears couldn’t talk. There’d be no witnesses deep in the North Country woods.
Convinced he had shot higher than he meant to, Frost aimed low and fired again.
– -
JOSEPHINE SAW CELERE whiplashed from the cliff by the force of the bullet.
“Marco!”
THE CLATTER IN HARRY FROST’S SKULL GREW LOUD. Still peering down the barrel of his rifle at the wonderful empty space where Marco Celere had been, he suddenly realized that the noise was not a memory of the Matawan farm but real as the 405-grain lead bullet that had just blown the bride thief into the gorge. He looked up. Josephine was flying over him in her damned biplane. She had seen him shoot her aeroplane inventor.
Frost had three cartridges left in his magazine.
He raised the rifle.
But he didn’t want to kill
Frost whipped the rifle skyward and fired twice.
He misjudged her speed. At least one shot passed behind her. With only a single bullet left, he gathered his wits, settled his nerves, and led the biplane like a pheasant.
Bull’s-eye!
He had scored a hit, for sure. Her flying machine lurched into a wide, clumsy turn. He waited for it to fall. But it kept turning, wobbling back in the direction of the camp. It was too high to hit with a pistol, but Frost jerked one from his belt anyway. Bracing the barrel on his powerful forearm, he fired until it was empty. Eyes bugging with rage, he flicked a snub-nosed derringer out of his sleeve. He emptied its two shots futilely in her direction and pawed at his hunting knife, to cut her heart out when she smashed into the trees.
The clatter grew fainter and fainter and fainter, and Harry Frost could do nothing but watch helplessly as his treacherous wife disappeared beyond the tree line and escaped his righteous wrath.
At least he had blown her lover into the gorge.
He lumbered across the meadow, hoping for a glimpse of Celere’s body smashed on the river rocks. But halfway to the rim of the cliff, he stopped dead, poleaxed by a horrible realization. He had to run before they locked him back in the bughouse.
JOSEPHINE FOUGHT WITH ALL HER SKILL to guide her machine safely to the ground.
Harry had hit it twice. One bullet had nicked the two-gallon gasoline tank behind her. The second was worse. It had jammed the link between her control lever and the wire that twisted the shape of her wings. Unable to warp them to bank the machine into a turn, she was dependent entirely on its rudder. But trying to turn without banking was like flying a glider before the Wright brothers invented wing warping – god-awful awkward and likely to slide her sideways into a deadly flat spin.
Lips tight, she worked the rudder like a surgeon’s scalpel, taking measured slices of the wind. Her mother, a frantic woman unable to cope with the simplest task, used to accuse her of having “ice water in her veins.” But wasn’t ice water handy on a crippled flying machine, Mother? Slowly, she brought the biplane back on course.
When the wind gusted from behind, she smelled gasoline. She looked for the source and saw it dripping from the fuel tank. Harry’s bullet had punctured it.
Which would happen first? she wondered coolly. Would the gasoline all leak out and stop her motor before she could alight on Harry’s lawn? Or would sparks from the engine and chains ignite the gasoline? Fire was deadly on a flying machine. The varnish of nitrate fabric dope that stiffened and sealed the cotton canvas covering her wings was as flammable as flash powder.
The only field nearer was the meadow. But if she alighted there, Harry would kill her. She had no choice. She had to land the machine at the camp, if she had enough gasoline to reach it.
“Come on, Elsie. Take us home.”
The forest inched slowly beneath her. Updrafts buffeted her wings and rolled the airship. Unable to warp them to counteract, she tried to keep the machine on an even keel using her elevators and rudder.
At last she saw the lake beside Harry’s camp.
Just as she got close enough to see the main house and the dairy barns, her motor sputtered on the last fumes of gasoline. The propellers stopped turning. The pusher biplane went silent but for the wind whispering through the wire stays.
She had to volplane – to glide – all the way to the lawn.
But the propellers, which had been pushing her, were dragging in the air. They held her back, reducing her speed. In moments she would be gliding too slowly to stay aloft.
She reached behind her and jerked the cable that opened the engine’s compression valve so the pistons would move freely and allow the propellers to spin. The difference was immediate. The aeroplane felt lighter, more like a glider.
Now she could see the dairy pasture. Speckled with cows and crisscrossed with fences, it offered no room to come down safely. There was the house, an elaborate log mansion, and behind it the sloping lawn of mowed grass from which she had earlier taken to the air. But first she had to clear the house, and she was dropping fast. She threaded a path between the tall chimneys, skimmed the roof, and then coaxed the rudder to turn into the wind, taking great care not to slide into a spin.
Eight feet above the grass, she saw that she was moving too fast. Air squeezed between the wings and the ground had the effect of holding her up. The biplane was refusing to stop flying. Ahead loomed a wall of trees.
The gasoline that had soaked into the varnished canvas ignited in a sheet of orange flame.
Trailing fire, unable to slant her wings sharply to slow enough to touch her wheels to the grass, Josephine reached back and jerked the compression cable. Closing the valve locked the eight-foot propellers. They grabbed the air like two fists, and her wheels and skids banged hard on the grass.
The burning biplane slid for fifty yards. As it slowed, the fire spread, scattering flame. When she felt it singe the back of her helmet, Josephine jumped. She hit the ground and threw herself flat to let the machine roll
