"Let that teach you to stay home where you belong!" Dave shouted impulsively, and pulled up for more altitude.
"And you, too, my little Jerry!"
Freddy's words were drowned out by the yammer of his guns. Dave jerked his head around in time to see a second Messerschmitt appear to fly right into an invisible meat chopper. The left wing came off and broke up in a hundred pieces. The fuselage buckled just in back of the cockpit, and the right wing crumpled like so much tin foil. Never had Dave seen a plane come apart so completely in the air, and he gazed pop-eyed at the shower of debris slithering downward.
"Man, oh, man!" he gasped aloud. "What are you throwing at him, Freddy? Naval shells?"
"Wondering, myself!" the English youth called back in an awed voice. "Good grief, that ship must have been made of cardboard!"
"Or maybe china!" Dave added. "Gee, I never—"
The savage chatter of German Rheinmettal-Borsig aerial machine guns didn't give him a chance to finish. The third Messerschmitt One-Nine had cut around in a flash turn and was boring in with all guns blazing. A handful of death slammed into Dave's plane, and he felt the One-Ten shake and shiver under the savage impact of the shower or bullets. He jumped on the left rudder with every ounce of his strength and slammed the plane around in a turn that made a pinkish haze rise up before his eyes. Just the same he held the plane in the turn as long as he dared. Then, just before the terrific turning force would have rolled his eyes back and made him temporarily blind, he eased out and zoomed for altitude. Five hundred feet higher he flattened off at the top of the zoom, banked to the left and looked down and back for a sign of the Messerschmitt One-Nine.
It wasn't there, gun spewing up after him, however, and he swallowed in relief. That surprise attack had come much too close for comfort, and he was positive that had the German followed up his advantage one Dave Dawson, and one Freddy Farmer, would have been in a mighty bad fix right then. Then Freddy's hand rapped him on the shoulder.
"Don't look down, look west, Dave!" the English youth called out. "There he goes, and bad luck to him, I say. The blighter took twenty years off my life. I could have reached out and caught his bullets as they went by."
"Reach out?" Dave echoed, and watched the attacking plane race farther and farther westward. "Boy! If I hadn't ducked I would have caught them with my head! Well, it's nice the guy decided he'd had enough, anyway. Now, we can—"