“Now what?” Scoot asked himself. “What should I do? I’ll keep right on this course, first of all. And I’ll just keep flying straight ahead as if I were minding my own business. Nothing much else I can do. That plane’s got three times the speed and ten times the fire power of this one!”
The pursuit was only a few hundred yards behind. It stayed there for a while, apparently awaiting some kind of signal from the seaplane. Then it came around to one side, and Scoot tried to hide his face.
“First and only time I ever wished I looked like a Jap,” Scoot said.
The fast plane flew alongside the other for a time, slowing down to keep pace with it, but still some distance to one side.
“What is this?” Scoot asked. “Are we just going out for a spin together? I wish he’d do something.”
The Jap flier obliged by cutting back and coming up on the other side, then speeding up and circling around in front. It was at this moment that he looked full into Scoot’s face. Scoot could even see the alarm that filled him, the wide eyes, the gasp of amazement, as he realized that an American was flying the Jap seaplane.
At that moment, Scoot pressed the trigger on his own machine gun, but it was too late. The Jap had darted out of range just in time. He was so fast that Scoot could not possibly maneuver his slow ship to battle him.
“There’s only one chance,” Scoot said to himself, “and I’m going to try it. If this monkey is the bad shot most of them are, he may miss on his first try, even with a set-up like me. If he does, that’s my chance.”
The fast pursuit was diving on the seaplane’s tail. Scoot heard the staccato rattling of the ship’s machine guns.
“Good!” he cried. “Firing while he’s still too far away, like all of them! Too anxious!”