"But in this bum light?" Dawson grated. "Not so good! If he reaches those clouds, we'll never find him. Five minutes more, and night will be here in earnest. And we'll—"
He never finished the rest. He didn't because at that moment it was his privilege to witness something that few war pilots ever see in their lifetime—in short, a perfect long range shot smacking home. Once in maybe a billion times a burst of aerial machine gun bullets hit their mark at the extreme end of their range. All the other times they fly wide, or spend themselves downward toward earth.
But this was one of those once in a billion times, and the burst of bullets came from the guns on Freddy Farmer's Messerschmitt. Dawson hadn't even rested his thumb on his trigger trip because of the seemingly hopeless distance to the target. However, Freddy Farmer had taken a bead, and his bit of perfect aerial shooting proved to be in a class all by itself. The "target" lurched off to the left, as though it had been sliding along an invisible greased pole, and had slid off. It dropped right down to the vertical, and then suddenly smoke and livid red flame belched out and up from its nose. Hardly daring to believe his eyes, Dawson watched the bit of blazing doom clear down to where it disappeared from view behind a ridge. And a split second later, a fountain of flashing orange and red told him that the plane had struck earth.
"Nope, it didn't happen!" he told himself in a dazed voice. "Things like that just don't happen. You only read about them in stories. Sweet tripe! How I love that guy, Freddy Farmer. Compared to him, am I a bum!"
With a vigorous nod for emphasis, he veered over closer to the English youth's plane and lifted his clasped hands high above his head in the gesture of a boxer saluting the crowd.
"You for me, sweetheart!" he shouted into the roar of his engine. "Now, let's go and pull off the last of the miracles!"
The words had no more than left his lips, however, when he happened to stare toward the east—and swallowed hard. Pitch black storm clouds were hurtling up out of the east, and swiftly blotting out the last fading tints of day much as a descending blanket blots out the flickering flame of a candle. In a matter of minutes, now, Freddy and he wouldn't be able to spot Nina's house in the darkness, much less make safe landings close by!