A gray stain on the giant map appeared. Atlantic City!
Billy looked at his clock and began to calculate. The XT-6 had left at four o’clock or thereabouts. She was rated for a speed of eighty miles. It was half past six now. She should be two hundred miles along her course, somewhere south of the Delaware Capes. He was pulling up on her at a hundred and twenty an hour. Mathematically he should overtake her two hundred and forty miles out, at seven o’clock. She should be in the neighborhood of Cape Charles when he sighted her. If happily luck and his calculations coincided there was an even chance that he could signal Norris and cut off across Chesapeake Bay in time to make Douglas Field by the last glimmer of twilight.
But if he missed her, which was something more than likely, for the sky is an infinite hunting ground⸺
He wouldn’t miss her! He would prowl her course until she showed up if it took the last whiff of gas in the tank. He dismissed Douglas Field from his mind.
The world below was going dim. Off in the west the haze-draped rim of the day still showed a pale yellow shot through with red and purple pencilings. Away to the east night already was screening off the edge of the ocean.
Stars began to show palely in the tenuous blue above as the DH thrust the capes of the Delaware behind her tail skid. And below there were more stars set in a gray-blue mosaic of vaguely hinted roads, fields and homesteads, with here and there a constellation of little luminaries that told of a shadowy town or hamlet beneath.
Steadily the mobile, twilit map of the East coast slipped northward, marching slowly under the speck that swung suspended between the fleeing day and the creeping night. Billy’s engine sang a full-voiced vesper and the wires, quivering in the back draft, took up the burden on a higher key. Whipping the air behind her, a mile to every thirty seconds, the DH bore down the trail of Norris and the XT-6 with all twelve plugs a-spark and a wake of red streaming spitefully along her flanks from the lips of the glowing manifolds.
Lower Delaware, the coast line of Maryland, and then the dim finger of Cape Charles!
Seven o’clock, the Chesapeake, and night drew on but not John Norris and the XT-6. Ten miles to the east or ten miles to the west they might be droning now, and still on their course. The highways of the air are something wider than the boulevards below. There is plenty of room to pass without a hail.
Off the tip of the Cape, Billy drew the throttle back. The XT-6 must be somewhere thereabouts and he knew at what altitude he ought to spy her. Two thousand feet, Norris had said the course would be. Billy coasted down to fifteen hundred and circled round a ten-mile radius. If Norris passed above, and within eyeshot, he would catch the silhouette against the sky where some of the brightness of the departed day still lingered. He waited half an hour. But the black outlines of a southing plane that he raked the heavens for did not show.