The motor roared, the blocks were knocked away, and the plane whizzed across the field and soared into the night sky. The great shout of the crowd seemed to rise with it.
Hal’s mood was as bright as the moonlit heavens he sailed across. A hundred miles! And still another hundred! He was speeding like some gigantic bird. His instruments marked a hundred and twenty miles an hour. He was fairly eating up space.
Before midnight he had crossed the Mississippi waters unwinding like a great ribbon below the lights of Vicksburg.
Then flying slowed down. A dense fog rolled up about him. The moon was smothered out above. Below him, disappeared the scattered lights that meant farm homes and the widespread glow of city illuminations. He was alone, shrouded in a gray, dripping world with only his instruments to guide him.
As for direction, he had little fear of going astray. He was well used to setting a course by his compass. The chief need was to hold to altitude so as to clear the loftiest peak that might be in his path. In the heights he hoped to find a lessening of the mist, but the damp grayness was here as everywhere else on this night.
As Hal Dane felt his way on into the night, eyes glued to the instrument board, there burst into his senses a sudden roar zooming through the fog.
The roar grew nearer. Another plane was riding high in the fog, and coming toward him like a shot out of a shell.
Hal’s first instinct was to rise higher to slip over and avoid collision. His hand was on the pressure, when a quick thought sped like lightning through his brain—to rise high, that was natural instinct, that was what the other flyer would do, of course. There’d be two riding high, straight to a head-on crash!
With a slip of wings, Hal began to drop. But his reasoning had played him wrong here. A sound rushing upon him told that the other flyer, disregarding instinct, had dived also.
Through a rent in the fog, Hal had a sudden awful glimpse of a dark, spreading mass riding him down. Like lightning, he shot to the left. In the other plane, another master hand veered the controls all that was humanly possible. Instead of crashing into a death grip, these two mechanical birds of the night slid by each other with a mere scraping of wings.