And then he heard Freddy Farmer's excited voice coming into his earphones.
"Enemy aircraft sighted! Five more degrees northward. Just under the tip of that finger of the stuff on the left!"
Dave snapped his gaze in the direction indicated, and then suddenly saw the blurred dot curving upward and to the north. He grinned and gave a little shake of his head.
"Old Sharp Eyes Freddy Farmer!" he grunted. "Boy! How does he do it?"
"Simple!" the radio's earphones told him instantly. "I jolly well fly with my eyes open. Try it sometime, old bean. You'll be surprised at the difference."
Dave didn't make any comment. At that instant the moving dot moved right into the billowy clouds and was completely lost to view.
"Spread out, chaps!" came Barker's orders. "Don't think the beggar is turning back. Spread out and keep your eyes skinned. And bear northward."
As he was flying on the extreme left Dave cut around sharp north, and stuck his nose down for additional speed. The dot had entered the cloud bank at approximately the same altitude as that of his own Spitfire, but he had the sudden hunch that the Jerry pilot was going to stop climbing. That he was going to go down and try to sneak out from under the cloud bank while the lads of Eighty-Four fruitlessly hunted for him at high altitudes.
"Maybe I'm wrong," Dave murmured. "And that won't be anything new, and how. But if he sticks to those clouds it'll mean he isn't on photo reconnaissance. And if he goes down under the stuff it'll mean the same thing. Right! There's nothing down there that Goering's little dopes haven't taken a million pictures of since they started this cockeyed war. Yeah! It's my hunch that lad is over here on other business."
With a nod for emphasis he steepened the Spitfire's dive a bit and went cutting down across the English sky like a comet gone haywire. In less than practically nothing flat he was down below the altitude of the belly of the stuff. He pulled out and let the Mark 5 prop claw straight forward at an even keel. At the same time he threw back his head and raked the underside of the cloud bank with his eyes.