The Lone Wolf by Louis Joseph Vance (ebook reader browser txt) 📖

to either side.

Ducroy lifted his hat in parting salute, cried “Bon voyage!” and

scuttled clear like a startled rooster before a motor-car. And the

motor and propeller broke loose with a mighty roar comparable only, in

Lanyard’s fancy, to the chant of ten thousand rivetting locusts.

 

He felt momentarily as if his ear-drums must burst with the incessant

and tremendous concussions registered upon them; but presently this

sensation passed, leaving him with that of permanent deafness.

 

Before he could recover and regain control of his startled wits the

aviator had thrown down a lever, and the great fabric was in motion.

 

It swept down the field like a frightened swan; and the wheels of its

chassis, registering every infinitesimal irregularity in the surface of

the ground, magnified them all a hundred-fold. It was like riding in a

tumbril driven at top-speed over the Giant’s Causeway. Lanyard was

shaken violently to the very marrow of his bones; he believed that even

his eyes must be rattling in their sockets….

 

Then the Parrott began to ascend. Singularly enough, this change was

marked, at first, by no more than slight lessening of the vibration:

still the machine seemed to be dashing over a cobbled thoroughfare at

breakneck speed; and Lanyard found it difficult to appreciate that they

were afloat, even when he looked down and discovered a hundred feet of

space between himself and the practice-field.

 

In another breath they were soaring over housetops.

 

Momentarily, now, the shocks became less frequent. And presently they

ceased almost altogether, to be repeated only at rare intervals, when

the drift of air opposing the planes developed irregularities in its

velocity. There succeeded, in contrast, the sublimest peace; even the

roaring of the propeller dwindled to a sustained drone; the biplane

seemed to float without an effort upon a vast, still sea, flawed only

occasionally by inconsiderable ripples.

 

Still rising, they surprised the earliest rays of the sun; and in their

virgin light the aeroplane was transformed into a thing of gossamer gold.

 

Continually the air buffeted their faces like a flood of icy water.

 

Below, the scroll of the world unrolled like some vast and intricately

illuminated missal, or like some strange mosaic, marvellously minute….

 

Lanyard could see the dial of the compass, fixed to a strut on the

pilot’s left. By that telltale their course lay nearly due northeast.

Already the weltering roofs of Paris were in sight, to the right,

the Eiffel Tower spearing up like a fairy pillar of gold lace-work,

the Seine looping the cluttered acres like a sleek brown serpent, the

Sacr�-Coeur a dream-palace of opalescent walls.

 

Versailles broke the horizon to port and slipped astern. Paris closed

up, telescoped its panorama, became a mere blur, a smoky smudge. But

it was long before the distance eclipsed that admonitory finger of

the Eiffel.

 

Vauquelin manipulating the levers, the plane tilted its nose and swam

higher and yet higher. The song of the motor dropped an octave to a

richer tone. The speed was sensibly increased.

 

Lanyard contemplated with untempered wonder the fact of his equanimity:

there seemed nothing at all strange in this extraordinary experience;

he was by no means excited, remained merely if deeply interested. And

he could detect in his physical sensations no trace of that qualmish

dread he always experienced in high places: the sense he had of

security, of solidity, was and ever remained wholly unaccountable in

his understanding.

 

Of a sudden, surprised by a touch on his arm, he turned to see through

the mica windows of the wind-mask the eyes of the aviator informed with

importunate doubt. Infinitely mystified and so an easy prey to

sickening fear lest something were going wrong with the machine,

Lanyard shook his head to indicate lack of comprehension. With an

impatient gesture the aviator pointed downward. Appreciating the fact

that speech was impossible, Lanyard clutched the struts and bent

forward. But the pace was now so fast and their elevation so great that

the landscape swimming beneath his vision was no more than a brownish

plain fugitively maculated with blots of contrasting colour.

 

He looked up blankly, but only to be treated to the same gesture.

 

Piqued, he concentrated attention more closely upon the flat, streaming

landscape. And suddenly he recognized something oddly familiar in an

approaching bend of the Seine.

 

“St.-Germain-en-Laye!” he exclaimed with a start of alarm.

 

This was the danger point….

 

“And over there,” he reminded himself—“to the left—that wide field

with a queer white thing in the middle that looks like a winged

grub—that must be De Morbiban’s aerodrome and his Valkyr monoplane!

Are they bringing it out? Is that what Vauquelin means? And if so—what

of it? I don’t see …”

 

Suddenly doubt and wonder chilled the adventurer.

 

Temporarily Vauquelin returned entire attention to the management of

the biplane. The wind was now blowing more fitfully, creating

pockets—those holes in the air so dreaded by cloud pilots—and in

quest of more constant resistance the aviator was swinging his craft in

a wide northerly curve, climbing ever higher and more high.

 

The earth soon lost all semblance of design; even the twisted silver

wire of the Seine vanished, far over to the left; remained only the

effect of firm suspension in that high blue vault, of a continuous low

of iced water in the face, together with the tuneless chanting of the

motor.

 

After some forty minutes of this—it may have been an hour, for time

was then an incalculable thing—Lanyard, in a mood of abnormal

sensitiveness, began to divine additional disquiet in the mind of the

aviator, and stared until he caught his eye.

 

“What is it?” he screamed in futile effort to lift his voice above the

din.

 

But the Frenchman understood, and responded with a sweep of his arm

toward the horizon ahead. And seeing nothing but cloud in the quarter

indicated, Lanyard grasped the nature of a phenomenon which, from the

first, had been vaguely troubling him. The reason why he had been able

to perceive no real rim to the world was that the earth was all a-steam

from the recent heavy rains; all the more remote distances were veiled

with rising vapour. And now they were approaching the coast, to which,

it seemed, the mists clung closest; for all the world before them slept

beneath a blanket of dull grey.

 

Nor was it difficult now to understand why the aviator was ill at ease

facing the prospect of navigating a Channel fog.

 

Several minutes later, he startled Lanyard with another peremptory

touch on his arm followed by a significant glance over his shoulder.

 

Lanyard turned quickly.

 

Behind them, at a distance which he calculated roughly as two miles,

the silhouette of a monoplane hung against the brilliant firmament,

resembling, with its single spread of wings, more a solitary, soaring

gull than any man-directed mechanism.

 

Only an infrequent and almost imperceptible shifting of the wings

proved that it was moving.

 

He watched it for several seconds, in deepening perplexity and anxiety,

finding it impossible to guess whether it were gaining or losing in

that long chase, or who might be its pilot.

 

Yet he had little doubt but that the pursuing machine had risen from

the aerodrome of Count Remy de Morbihan at St.-Germain-en-Laye; that it

was nothing less, in fact, than De Morbihan’s Valkyr, reputed the

fastest monoplane in Europe and winner of a dozen International events;

and that it was guided, if not by De Morbihan himself, by one of the

creatures of the Pack—quite possibly, even more probably, by Ekstrom!

 

But—assuming all this—what evil could such pursuit portend? In what

conceivable manner could the Pack reckon to further its ends by

commissioning the monoplane to overtake or distance the Parrott? They

could not hinder the escape of Lanyard and Lucy Shannon to England in

any way, by any means reasonably to be imagined.

 

Was this simply one more move to keep the pair under espionage? But

that might more readily have been accomplished by telegraphing or

telephoning the Pack’s confreres, Wertheimer’s associates in England!

 

Lanyard gave it up, admitting his inability to trump up any sane excuse

for such conduct; but the riddle continued to fret his mind without

respite.

 

From the first, from that moment when Lucy’s disappearance had required

postponement of this flight, he had feared trouble; it hadn’t seemed

reasonable to hope that the Parrott could be held in waiting on his

convenience for many days without the secret leaking out; but it was

trouble to develop before the start from Port Aviation that he had

anticipated. The possibility that the Pack would be able to work any

mischief to him, after that, had never entered his calculations. Even

now he found it difficult to give it serious consideration.

 

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