No wonder the spectators in the hospital enclosure, of whom Belinda Melnotte was one, cried out in their horror as they beheld this duel to the death.
Sanderson whispered the name of the girl who was, by chance, watching him. Perhaps a woman's name was on the German aviator's lips. But neither man faltered.
The two machines interlocked and fell through the treetops. Sanderson kept his head, although expecting an instant and awful death. He unhooked his belt and was flung from his seat into the top of a low, well-branched evergreen. It was his salvation.
The wreck of the two aeroplanes reached the ground, his brave antagonist in the midst of the ruin. Flames sprang up and threatened to destroy the wreckage at once.
Wounded and bruised as he was, Sanderson hurried to reach the ground. He hoped to save the German aviator; but when he drew the man out of reach of the flames he was dead.
Night had fallen. No searchers came to the spot. Sanderson, far from friends and in the enemy's country, realized that he was in serious danger. In spite of a shoulder that pained him frightfully and his many bruises, he managed to disrobe, strip the dead man, and garb himself in the German's uniform. Then, with horror at the necessity for the act, he thrust the dead body and his own garments into the burning wreck of the two aeroplanes.
He could not travel. Indeed, it would aid him not at all to leave the vicinity of the fallen machines, for he could not pass the enemy's lines even in the borrowed uniform.
He sank, in the darkness, upon a bed of leaves. He had but a dim remembrance of that night, or of being found in the morning by the searchers and his transportation in the ambulance to the hospital station.
When he really awoke it was to a belief that he was again in the hospital back in New York. He opened his eyes to see the Herr Doktor Franz Herschall standing beside him and Belinda Melnotte leaning solicitously over his cot, saying in German:
"Doctor, here is one who has just been brought in. A very brave man, they say. He fell last night in a duel in which he destroyed his antagonist, a French flying-man."