Gripped by tremendous air forces, the amphibian was shot up and sideways, at a speed that burned Dorothy’s lungs. Tossed about like a rag doll, with her safety-belt almost cutting her body in two, she was thrown hither and yon with the plane, blind, and without the slightest idea as to her position.
Never in her wildest nightmares had she dreamed that a heavy plane, weighing close to four thousand pounds when empty, could be tossed about in such fashion by currents of the air.
For a space of time that seemed years, she was entirely away from the controls. But gradually, with infinite effort and in spite of the whirling jolts of her air steed, Dorothy managed to hook her heels under the seat. A second later she had caught the stick and was pushing it forward into the instrument board.
Will-o’-the-Wisp reared like an outlawed bronco, then dived until the airspeed indicator showed one hundred and sixty-five miles per hour. Still her downward speed was less than the rate of the upward draft, for the rate of climb indicator told the frenzied girl that the plane was being lifted fourteen hundred feet per minute.
Still diving at 45 degrees, the phenomenal force of the updraft carried the plane to the mushroom top of the cloud, where with a jar like an elevator hitting the ceiling, it was flung forth into the outer air.
Chapter V
HIDE AND SEEK
The strong air current which spread horizontally over the thunderhead blew Dorothy’s plane sideways and away from the cloud. An instant later it was roaring downward in the thin air, quite beyond her control, a self-propelled projectile rushing to its doom.
While shooting upward in the cloud, the violent and intensely rapid gyrations of the airship caused her safety belt to become unclasped, and had her parachute not caught in the cowling, she must have been flung clear of the plane to a horrible death far below.
With her heels still hooked beneath the pilot’s seat, she wrenched the parachute loose. Then she closed the throttle and half-suffocated by the force of the wind and lack of breathable oxygen, she commenced to pull the stick slowly backward.
A glance at the altimeter showed a height of eighteen thousand feet—three air miles above earth—and three thousand feet above Will-o’-the-Wisp’s service ceiling.