Dorothy reached beneath her seat, brought forth a pair of field-glasses and clapped them to her goggles. Focussed through the powerful lenses, there was no mistaking the Mystery Plane. And although at this distance it was impossible to see the pilot’s face, she could plainly distinguish the barrel of a machine gun that poked its wicked muzzle over the cockpit’s cowling.
“So the bearded aviator means mischief!” She returned the glasses to their case. “That guy must be a cold-blooded dog to try anything like that over a populated township. He’s likely to bite off more than he can chew if Bill and I have any luck. If he cracks up, I shan’t weep.”
At first sight of the smuggler’s plane, she brought Will-o’-the-Wisp back on an even keel, but now in order to get an unimpeded view directly below, she sent the plane into a steep bank.
Bill, in the Ryan, with an altitude of some twenty-five hundred feet and its nose slightly raised was streaking toward the smuggler.
Most air battles are fought in the higher ether, because combat flying often necessitates acrobatics and the ordinary pilot wants plenty of air below for such work. The smuggler being the aggressor in this case, naturally started to climb when he spotted the Ryan. He hoped, no doubt, not only to increase his altitude but to gain greater ascendency over Bill before diving at the monoplane with his machine gun going full blast.
It was time for Dorothy to act. As the smuggler’s plane began to ascend, she sent her amphibian diving toward him at a tremendous spurt of speed. The Mystery Plane nosed over and dove in turn at the Ryan, some five hundred feet below.
“Ha-ha!” Dorothy shut off her motor and brought Will-o’-the-Wisp’s nose gradually back to the horizontal. “Our scheme worked! That bird either doesn’t know his business or he’s lost his nerve!”
A fighting plane attacking has as its objective a position directly behind the hostile plane at close range. A position either above or below the tail is equally good. From these positions the enemy is directly in the line of fire, and in sighting no deflection is necessary.
The smuggler’s maneuver showed Dorothy that he was a novice; for instead of going into a climbing spiral which would have eluded her dive and made it possible for him to attain a superior position over both planes, he dove at the Ryan. This might have been a proper fighting maneuver if Bill’s plane had not been nosing upward toward him; and had the Ryan not been the faster of the two.
By this blunder he put himself in the direct line of fire from Bill’s machine gun. And had that young man been minded to use it the battle would have been over—almost before it started.