“Yes!”
“I am going into a whip-stall. Be sure your belt is tight.”
He opened wide the throttle and nosed the plane down so that they attained a terrific speed; then he suddenly pulled it almost straight upward and shut off the engine. For a moment the ship seemed to stand still in the air in an upright position; then it whipped downward with tremendous force, sliding on the tail. Ted felt himself raised off his seat, but, thank heaven, the belt held, or he would have remained in mid-air while the plane hurtled away from beneath him. After falling some little distance Stanley again turned on the power and they swung out of the dive and levelled off gracefully.
But at that instant a burst of smoke was swept back by the blast of the propeller. The engine slackened its speed and a series of sharp, pistol-like reports came from the exhausts.
Ted was seized with consternation, for a thin streamer of flame shot back from under the hood; the plane was afire.
Stanley saw the danger at the same moment and dove in an attempt to put out the fire, but this manœuvre, frequently successful in such an emergency, proved to be the worst possible thing in this case. With a roar the flame struck him full in the face; he tried to pull the ship out of the dive, but the fiery blast stifled him; the ground below, the sky above, and even the wings on either side of him seemed wrapped in a haze, and in an instant he was enveloped in complete darkness.
Ted saw the wilting figure in front of him droop out of sight; at the same time the plane began to quiver and lurch from side to side. Without a guiding hand to direct it the heretofore graceful craft became converted into a mass of steel and wood and cloth hurtling through space to certain destruction. He realized the frightfulness of the situation in a flash; Stanley had either fainted or was dead.
“I must get him down; I must save him,” he gasped, frantically grasping the controls in his own cockpit. He thought little of his own danger; it was his companion who filled his mind. He must get him to the ground and save him if it was not already too late.
The blaze was sweeping back directly over the top of the twenty-gallon container resting between the engine and the front cockpit. “I must fan the flames to one side,” Ted thought. “If the gas catches, it will be the end.”
Responding to a savage turn of the wheel, the ship turned on edge and the streamer of fire darted out to one side. If only he could keep it there! Perhaps the rudder would help; he gave it a sharp kick, then felt that he had made a mistake, for he had pushed it in the direction opposite to the wheel. But the ship, tilted at a steep angle, started into a side-slip toward the ground, and that was exactly what he wanted. He must keep on slipping from side to side, like a falling leaf.