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
Sacré-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 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!”
CHAPTER 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.
The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales Page 111
