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

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 sharp-shooting 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 from the

Valkyr to a vital point: there was the torn canvas overhead, there was

that hole through Vauquelin’s sleeve….

 

And then the barograph on the strut beside Lanyard disappeared as if by

magic. He was aware of a slight jar; the framework of the biplane

quivered as from a heavy blow; something that resembled a handful of

black crumbs sprayed out into the air ahead and vanished: and where the

instrument had been, nothing remained but an iron clamp gripping the

strut.

 

And even as any one of these bullets might have proved fatal, their

first successor might disable the aviator if it did not slay him

outright; in either case, the inevitable result would be death

following a fall from a height, as recorded on the barograph dial an

instant before its destruction, of more than four thousand feet.

 

They were still climbing….

 

Now the pursuer was losing some of the advantage of his superior speed;

the Parrott was perceptibly higher; the Valkyr must needs mount in a

more sweeping curve.

 

None the less, Lanyard, peering down, saw still another tongue of flame

spit out at him; and two bullet-holes appeared in the port-side wings

of the biplane, one in the lower, one in the upper spread of canvas.

 

White-lipped and trembling, the adventurer began to work at the

fastenings of his surtout. After a moment he plucked off one of his

gloves and cast it impatiently from him. A-sprawl, it sailed down the

wind like a wounded sparrow. He caught Vauquelin’s eye upon him, quick

with a curiosity which changed to a sudden gleam of comprehension as

Lanyard, thrusting his hand under the leather coat, groped for his

pocket and produced an automatic pistol which Ducroy had pressed upon

his acceptance.

 

They were now perhaps a hundred feet higher than the Valkyr, which was

soaring a quarter of a mile off to starboard. Under the guidance of the

Frenchman, the Parrott swooped round in a narrow circle until it hung

almost immediately above the other—a manoeuvre requiring, first and

last, something more than five minutes to effect.

 

Meanwhile, Lanyard rebuttoned his surtout and clutched the pistol,

trying hard not to think. But already his imagination was sick with

the thought of what would ensue when the time came for him to carry

out his purpose.

 

Vauquelin touched his arm with urgent pressure; but Lanyard only shook

his head, gulped, and without looking surrendered the weapon to the

aviator….

 

Bearing heavily against the chest-band, he commanded the broad white

spread of the Valkyr’s back and wings. Invisible beneath these hung

the motor and driver’s seat.

 

An instant more, and he was aware that Vauquelin was leaning forward

and looking down.

 

Aiming with what deliberation was possible, the aviator emptied the

clip of its eight cartridges in less than a minute.

 

The vicious reports rang out against the drum of the motor like the

cracking of a blacksnake-whip.

 

Momentarily, Lanyard doubted if any one bullet had taken effect. He

could not, with his swimming vision, detect sign of damage in the

canvas of the Valkyr.

 

He saw the empty automatic slip from Vauquelin’p numb and nerveless

fingers. It vanished….

 

A frightful fascination kept his gaze constant to the soaring Valkyr.

 

Beyond it, down, deep down a mile of emptiness, was that golden floor

of tumbled cloud, waiting …

 

He saw the monoplane check abruptly in its strong onward surge—as if

it had run, full-tilt, head-on, against an invisible obstacle—and for

what seemed a round minute it hung so, veering and wobbling, nuzzling

the wind. Then like a sounding whale it turned and dived headlong,

propeller spinning like a top.

 

Down through the eighth of a mile of space it plunged plummet-like;

then, perhaps caught in a flaw of wind, it turned sideways and began to

revolve, at first slowly, but with increasing rapidity in its fatally

swift descent.

 

Toward the beginning of its revolutions, something was thrown off,

something small, dark and sprawling … like that glove which Lanyard

had discarded. But this object dropped with a speed even greater than

that of the Valkyr, in a brace of seconds had diminished to the

proportions of a gnat, in another was engulfed in that vast sea of

golden vapour.

 

Even so the monoplane itself, scarcely less precipitate, spun down

through the abyss and plunged to oblivion in the fog-rack….

 

And Lanyard was still hanging against the chest-band, limp and spent

and trying not to vomit, when, of a sudden and without any warning

whatever, the stentorian chant of the motor ceased and was blotted up

by that immense silence, by the terrible silence of those vast

solitudes of the upper air, where never a sound is heard save the

voices of the elements at war among themselves: a silence that rang

with an accent as dreadful as the crack of Doom in the ears of those

three suspended there, in the heart of that unimaginably pellucid and

immaculate radiance, in the vast hollow of the heavens, midway between

the deep blue of the eternal dome and the rose and golden welter of the

fog—that fog which, cloaking earth and sea, hid as well every vestige

of the tragedy they had wrought, every sign of the murder that they had

done that they themselves might not be murdered and cast down to

destruction.

 

And, its propeller no longer gripping the air, the aeroplane drifted on

at ever-lessening speed, until it had no way whatever and rested

without motion of any sort; as it might have been in the cup of some

mighty and invisible hand, held up to that stark and merciless light,

under the passionless eye of the Infinite, to await a Judgment….

 

Then, with a little shudder of hesitation, the planes dipped, inclined

slightly earthwards, and began slowly and as if reluctantly to slip

down the long and empty channels of the air.

 

At this, rousing, Lanyard became aware of his own voice yammering

wildly at Vauquelin:

 

“Good God, man! Why did you do that?”

 

Vauquelin answered only with a pale grimace and a barely perceptible

shrug.

 

Momentarily gathering momentum, the biplane sped downward with a

resistless rush, with the speed of a great wind—a speed so great that

when Lanyard again attempted speech, the breath was whipped from his

lips and he could utter no sound.

 

Thus from that awful height, from the still heart of that immeasurable

void, they swept down and ever down, in a long series of sickening

swoops, broken only by negligible pauses. And though they approached it

on a long slant, the floor of vapour rose to meet them like a mighty

rushing wave: in a trice the biplane was hovering instantaneously

before plunging on down into that cold, grey world of fog.

 

In that moment of hesitation, while still the adventurer gasped for

breath and pawed at his streaming eyes with an aching hand, pierced

through and through with cold, the fog showed itself as something less

substantial than it had seemed; blurs of colour glowed through its

folds of gauze, and with these the rounded summit of a brownish, knoll.

 

Then they plunged on, down out of the bleak, bright sunshine into cool

twilight depths of clinging vapours; and the good green earth lifted

its warm bosom to receive them.

 

Tilting its nose a trifle, fluttering as though undecided, the Parrott

settled gracefully, with scarcely a Jar, upon a wide sweep of untilled

land covered with short coarse grass.

 

For some time the three remained in their perches like petrified things,

quite moveless and—with the possible exception of the aviator—hardly

conscious.

 

But presently Lanyard became aware that he was regularly filling his

lungs with air sweet, damp, wholesome, and by comparison warm, and that

the blood was tingling painfully in his half-frozen hands and feet.

 

He sighed as one waking from a strange dream.

 

At the same time the aviator bestirred himself, and began a bit stiffly

to climb down.

 

Feeling the earth beneath his feet, he took a step or two away from the

machine, reeling and stumbling like a drunken man, then turned back.

 

“Come, my friend!” he urged Lanyard in a voice of strangely normal

intonation—“look alive—if you’re able—and lend me a hand with

mademoiselle. I’m afraid she has fainted.”

 

The girl was reclining inertly in the bands of webbing, her eyes closed,

her lips ajar, her limbs slackened.

 

“Small blame to her!” Lanyard commented, fumbling clumsily with the

chest-band. “That dive was enough to drive a body mad!”

 

“But I had to do it!” the aviator protested earnestly. “I dared not

remain longer up there. I have never before been afraid