Twenty miles east—twenty miles west, and the moonbeams flashed on the burnished wings as the DH swung the turns with a lazy dip.
Ten o’clock!
Twenty miles east—twenty miles west.
The moon rode high and the silver sea began to break into islands and headlands, with rifts of dusk between.
How much longer would the gas⸺
And then he saw it, the thing his weary eyes strained to catch! A scuttling black shadow it was that slipped out of a dusky channel, rode swiftly across the bright expanse of a fleecy headland, and disappeared back into the dusk again. That was it; the moon-cast silhouette of the XT-6 snoring through the night to Panama!
Billy looked up and saw her, a great gray-winged ghost shouldering down the meridians with the dim stars in the moon-bright sky winking off and on as she passed them.
The DH woke with a roar. Streamers of flame broke from the trailing manifolds. She set her nose to the moon and spurned five hundred feet beneath her in one leap.
Perhaps a minute passed. Perhaps two. Then she rolled in like a nuzzling whale calf alongside the XT-6 and dropped to the dogged pace of the larger ship.
Billy could see two pale spots peering out at him from the black cockpit in her snout, ten feet below. He guessed the amazement those faces must wear. And indeed, so bright was the light of the moon, intensified as it was by the reflected radiance from the clouds below, that he could almost make out the features of Norris and Crawley as they raised their eyes to question the import of his coming.