“But Toby!” I objected. “I think I know the way--better than you do,
perhaps. Change places and let me take the machine.”
It was a false move.
“What?” he cried. “You think you know the way, do you? You think you
know the way beyond the stars?” He burst suddenly into a hideous laugh,
thin and cackling in the awesome silence of that upper air. “Then
you’ll never get there! I’ll see to that! Get out!” He gestured over
the side, into the blue abyss above which we circled. “_Quick!_”
* * * * *
I glanced at Sylvia. She was sitting numbed with horror, incapable of
speech. As I looked, she jerked forward in a gesture of wild protest
abruptly checked by the straps which held her in her seat. The airplane
rocked in its now tender equilibrium just as something went _crack_!
past my head. My eyes were back on Toby in the fraction of an instant.
Still twisted in his seat, he was leveling that automatic pistol at me.
I could see by his eyes that he was in the very act of pressing the
trigger for the second time.
Four years’ war-service in the air make a man pretty quick. In a flash
I had ducked, flung myself upon him over the slight partition between
us, wrenched at his wrist. Risky as it was, it was certain death to all
of us if this homicidal maniac was not dealt with. His awkward
half-turned position put him at a disadvantage, but he fought grimly,
with all a maniac’s strength, trying to point the muzzle of that pistol
at my body. Automatically, of course, he rose to face me, relinquished
the controls to use both hands. I felt the machine lurch and plunge
dizzily nose downward. I had one lightning-quick thought--thank God,
Sylvia was strapped!--and then I tumbled over the partition headfirst
into the cockpit.
It was not thought but instinct with which I clutched the
steering-stick,--one had not much time for thought when fighting the
nimble Fokker,--got into some sort of position on the seat. We were
vertically nose down, spinning horribly--but not once but many times in
the war I had shammed dead, gone rushing earthward in a realistic
twirling spin and then abruptly flattened out of it upside down and
come up like a rocket over the pursuing Hun. This was simpler. I had
only to pull her out of it--and only when I pulled her out of it,
circled her round once for a long steady glide, did I realize that I
was alone in that cockpit. There was no Toby!
I glanced back to Sylvia. She sagged in her seat against the
straps--fainted. Just as well, I thought grimly. I touched the engine
to a momentary activity to test it, shut it off again for a long
circling descent toward the cloud-floor far below. An exultation leaped
in me, the exultation of old days of peril in the air. I thought of
Toby, with whom I had shared so many, with a sudden warming of the
heart. Poor old Toby! He had died as after all he perhaps would have
wished to die, high up in the infinite blue--dead of shock long before
he reached the earth. I thrilled with the old-time sense of mastery
over a fine machine, delicately sensitive to the controls, as that
massed and pinnacled cloud landscape grew large again beneath me. My
one anxiety was whether it hid sea or land. Then, just as we drew near,
I saw a deep black gulf riven in its snowy mass--saw down through that
gulf a tiny model steamship trailing a long white wake....
The wedding? That was last year.
[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the March 1924 issue of
The Blue Book Magazine.]