Yet his hand on the lever was steady, his brain was as cool as if he had been sitting in the Wolf Patrol club room in New York. He knew that the dip of a wing a foot lower than he intended might send them both into the blazing forest below. He was afraid, but not with a shrinking, physical fear, but afraid because he understood the peril he was in—because he knew that upon his efforts depended the lives of the heroes in the heated hell below.
“We’ve got to go into that mess of smoke, I suppose?” shouted Frank.
“There is no other way,” Ned called back. “We’ve got to dip down low enough to see the line of fire and take our chances on landing where the fighters are. You understand that they are farther to the east than when we left them?”
“Of course they have been driven back,” Frank said. “I never thought of that. We may not be able to find them at all.”
Ned shut his teeth and settled his jaw.
“We’ve got to find them,” he said.
A long, sullen roaring, like the beating of waves on a beach in a storm, now reached the boys’ ears, even shutting out the chattering of the motors. It came from the west, and passed along, as it seemed, below the level held by the aeroplane, now high up in the air.
“If we don’t get down there pretty soon,” Ned said, shouting, “we will be too late. That wind will join the different fires and make one roaring mass of the whole northwest. I wish I knew just how far the foresters have been driven back.”
“Do you know where to look for them, north or south?” asked Frank.
“There is a peak to the west and one to the east,” was the reply. “They are on a line with the two. But the trouble is that we can’t see the peaks after we drop down into the smoke.”