He shook his head and opened out again, roaring with flaming manifolds head on into the black masses of piled-up cloud that towered now against the south, barring the road to Panama.
The storm closed in on him suddenly. It came with a stunning burst of blue-white light and a blast that drowned the shouting of the manifolds and the screaming of the wires. A giant hand reached down out of the gray cloud bluff ahead, clutched the DH in invisible tentacles and swept it irresistibly into the smother. The hand was the first cloud current. And there were more waiting. Billy knew them. The clouds are full of currents. They grapple with a ship. They hurl it back and forth from one to another. They thrust it up. They stamp it down. They fling it crazily from wing to wing. But there is no harm in them if you are not afraid. And Billy was no longer afraid. He let them have their frolic, fighting back with sweeping stick and swinging rudder bar.
Rain began to bite his face. It spewed back from the wind shield in a hissing sheet. He switched on the dash light and laid his course through the blackness of the clouds and the blinding of the lightning by compass and the bubble of the inclinometer. The engine yelled defiance through the turmoil as the DH tossed the spray of mist and raindrops over its heaving shoulders.
His head buried in the cockpit, Billy watched the inclinometer go mad. Between gusts he edged back on the stick, gaining fifty feet here, dropping twenty there when some spiteful gust thrust him down again. But the altimeter showed a steady average gain. And suddenly, on the crest of a mighty leaping spout of air, the DH shot dizzily up into the calm of the clear night and rode easily in the starlight above the roof of the storm, a sea of gray-white billows stretched about her, beyond the span of eye.
“Now where am I?” muttered Billy. “And where is John?”
He circled the two-thousand-foot level, peering along the sea of clouds and up into the star-sprinkled bowl of deepening blue. Nothing! Clouds below, stars above, and somewhere between a shadowy monster forging toward the equator with two men in its maw—and in Cristobal a pair of yawning graves!
Eight-thirty! An hour, perhaps a little more, to go. Above the roof of the storm a waxing moon rode up and turned the gray expanse of cloud to gleaming silver. Higher it drew. And looking down Billy saw the moon-cast shadow of his own ship skimming along the bright cloud sea.
That gave him an idea. He began to peer restlessly from side to side and downward. The thing he sought would be plain to see now if it crossed his course. But was his course the right one? There was no way of knowing to within fifty miles. The world lay veiled beneath. There was not a beacon or landmark visible this side of the North Star. He could only hope.
This much was certain, at least. He must be miles ahead of the XT-6. He could stop the southward rush, now, and cruise the course at right angles. Norris must pass him somewhere. And if he passed near enough⸺
Nine-thirty! The engine sang a soft lullaby of twelve hundred r. p. m. Billy was hoarding fuel as he tacked above the silver sea.