“Couldn’t be anything else, because we’re thousands of feet away from ground,” Jack admitted; and somehow it gave his chum a feeling of relief to notice how his voice showed no signs of sudden alarm.
“As haow would yeou make it eout to be—some bewildered air-mail pilot loose in his bearin’s, and shootin’ ahead, thinkin’ he could get somewhere right speedy, so’s to find his course agin?”
“Not any, Perk; and you’ll realize that much if you figure things out in a matter-of-fact way. They don’t have greenhorns in the air-mail service, or carrying passengers on the big lines—every applicant for a job has got to have a thousand hours at least in the air, and even at that he isn’t reckoned to have won his spurs. If such an experienced flier got balled up in this fog blanket he’d do just what we’re carrying out—depend utterly on his instruments. His compass would tell him he could never regain his course by flying due east!”
“That’s what he’s adoin’ then, yeou figger, eh, Jack?”
“Sure thing, boy—he’s directly behind us, and getting closer right along, for the sounds keep growing louder.”
“Guess that’s so, partner—I kinder had an idee he was on aour tail. What’s the answer, Jack?”
“Another dive, maybe two in fact, so as to leave him this ceiling to himself. We can climb again, buddy, after he’s passed us, and pushes further on his way. That’s the only sensible thing to do.”
Perk had been allowing his mind to picture a battle royal up there in cloudland, amidst the fog mists, where machine-guns might rattle just as years ago they always did when bitter foes over on the French border came in contact, while bent on forays that took them on long air voyages, to bomb forbidding ammunition dumps, and thickly manned trenches back of No Man’s Land.
In imagination he had already heard the terrible long roll being sounded by the chattering quick-firing guns; with a hail of missiles sweeping all around them, like a swarm of enraged hornets as experienced in his own boyhood days.
But Jack, who kept his imagination under better control, did not look at things in the same way—his idea was not to accept the gage of battle when diplomacy and clever tactics could shift it on to some future date, when the chances might be more in their favor.