They were all the same to her as far as overlapping the seams with the doped strips was concerned. Nevertheless, in this machine that seemed suddenly to have appeared out of nowhere, there struck her something that was quite unfamiliar. Never before had she seen that little blade-shaped drag from the tips of the wings. It gave to this machine the look of a flying pigeon.... She had only noticed it for a moment, as the monoplane had lurched, as it were, into view over the edge of their own lower plane. Then it lurched out of sight again.
Again their engine was shut off; and again she heard Paul's voice, excited, curt.
"Can you get him, do you think?"
Get him? Bewilderingly she wondered what Paul could mean. Then came another staccato rush of sound. Then another silence, and Paul's voice through it.
"All right. I'll get above him; and you can shoot through the floor."
The engine brayed again, this time continuously.
"Shoot!" gasped Gwenna.
Shoot at that machine through the hole in the floor of this one? It was a German craft, then? And Paul meant Mr. Ryan to shoot whoever was in that machine. And she, Gwenna, who had never had a gun in her hands before in her life, found herself in the midst of War, told to shoot——
Hardly knowing one end of the thing from the other, she grasped the carbine. She guessed that the flyer in the other machine must have realised what Paul meant to do.
They were rising; he was rising too.