For a few minutes they mounted skyward, climbing slowly, and the stout General tried to make his companion understand by much gesticulation that the blockhead was taking the wrong direction.
But the "blockhead" knew what he was about, and after a half circle to test the working of the engines, he opened the throttle and shot her upwards at a terrific speed.
Well might his two passengers cling desperately to the gun brackets and to each other, but their shriek of terror was drowned as the machine gained an altitude of fifteen hundred feet and deliberately looped the loop!
For a moment Dennis braced himself and clutched the wheel like a vice, but the strap held, the circle was completed, and the Aviatik, righting herself, skimmed over the pine-topped hill behind the hunting lodge, and planed majestically down towards the starting-point.
Dennis's face was as white as a sheet of paper as he turned and glanced back over his shoulder. He was alone!
"I hope it was playing the game," he muttered, as he brought the machine to a stand. "At any rate, it was the only game I could play under the circumstances."
He jumped down and ran towards the lodge, feeling shaken and trembly, wondering what he would find. It struck him as odd that the garrulous old forester had not returned. Was Laval dead or dying?
As he crossed the stream and mounted the slope he stopped, for the old man's voice was bellowing furiously, and the old woman screamed in concert.
"What on earth is going on?" thought the lad, and seeing that the shutters of the ground-floor room in which he had left his friend had been opened, and it being very nearly broad daylight, instead of entering the hall he sprang to the window and looked in.
Claude Laval, terribly weak from loss of blood, but with an odd, defiant smile on his face, was sitting upright in the carved chair, the sleeve of his wounded arm slit from shoulder to wrist, revealing the drenched blue-grey of his own French uniform beneath it. In front of him, his white moustache bristling with fury, and murder in every line of his wolf-like face, the old forester lifted a hatchet in both hands, while his wife, no longer the trembling servile old peasant of half an hour before, was tightening the knots of the rope she had thrown round Laval's body, binding him tightly to the chair!