“But Toby!” I objected. “I think I know the way—better than you do, perhaps. Change places and let me take the machine.”
It was a false move.
“What?” he cried. “You think you know the way, do you? You think you know the way beyond the stars?” He burst suddenly into a hideous laugh, thin and cackling in the awesome silence of that upper air. “Then you’ll never get there! I’ll see to that! Get out!” He gestured over the side, into the blue abyss above which we circled. “Quick!”
I glanced at Sylvia. She was sitting numbed with horror, incapable of speech. As I looked, she jerked forward in a gesture of wild protest abruptly checked by the straps which held her in her seat. The airplane rocked in its now tender equilibrium just as something went crack! past my head. My eyes were back on Toby in the fraction of an instant. Still twisted in his seat, he was leveling that automatic pistol at me. I could see by his eyes that he was in the very act of pressing the trigger for the second time.
Four years’ war-service in the air make a man pretty quick. In a flash I had ducked, flung myself upon him over the slight partition between us, wrenched at his wrist. Risky as it was, it was certain death to all of us if this homicidal maniac was not dealt with. His awkward half-turned position put him at a disadvantage, but he fought grimly, with all a maniac’s strength, trying to point the muzzle of that pistol at my body. Automatically, of course, he rose to face me, relinquished the controls to use both hands. I felt the machine lurch and plunge dizzily nose downward. I had one lightning-quick thought—thank God, Sylvia was strapped!—and then I tumbled over the partition headfirst into the cockpit.
It was not thought but instinct with which I clutched the steering-stick,—one had not much time for thought when fighting the nimble Fokker,—got into some sort of position on the seat. We were vertically nose down, spinning horribly—but not once but many times in the war I had shammed dead, gone rushing earthward in a realistic twirling spin and then abruptly flattened out of it upside down and come up like a rocket over the pursuing Hun. This was simpler. I had only to pull her out of it—and only when I pulled her out of it, circled her round once for a long steady glide, did I realize that I was alone in that cockpit. There was no Toby!
I glanced back to Sylvia. She sagged in her seat against the straps—fainted. Just as well, I thought grimly. I touched the engine to a momentary activity to test it, shut it off again for a long circling descent toward the cloud-floor far below. An exultation leaped in me, the exultation of old days of peril in the air. I thought of Toby, with whom I had shared so many, with a sudden warming of the heart. Poor old Toby! He had died as after all he perhaps would have wished to die, high up in the infinite blue—dead of shock long before he reached the earth. I thrilled with the old-time sense of mastery over a fine machine, delicately sensitive to the controls, as that massed and pinnacled cloud landscape grew large again beneath me. My one anxiety was whether it hid sea or land. Then, just as we drew near, I saw a deep black gulf riven in its snowy mass—saw down through that gulf a tiny model steamship trailing a long white wake....
The wedding? That was last year.
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the March 1924 issue of The Blue Book Magazine.