"Poor Tim! How he would like to be up here alone, and to listen to all these voices of the night!"
As Dastral thought thus, he looked down, far down into the blackness, and he saw the flashes of the searchlights. Sometimes they reached up to him long extended arms that seemed to unite him to the earth, but he could scarcely believe that he had ever dwelt down there in that abyss of murky darkness. Yet always he swerved aside, and evaded those long stretching pillars of light, for he knew that if he crossed their beams but once, other eyes would see him, and the raider above would be warned of his near approach.
Suddenly at twelve thousand feet the monoplane shook itself as though dashing the clinging moisture from its yellow wings, and leapt, like a fish out of the water, above the topmost layer of clouds.
And now with keen searching eyes Dastral looked above and around for the presence of the raider, but she was nowhere to be seen. Below him rolled the clouds, like dark, monstrous billows. Here and there through an opening he still saw the flashes of the searchlights feeling for their prey. But above his head the sky was aflame with millions of stars. Right across from east to west, like a silvery pathway to heaven, shone the Milky Way, luminous with light, and along that trail of diamonds shone the bigger stars, in the constellations of Perseus, Cassiopeia and Aquila. And far down in the east, Orion the Hunter chased the dancing Pleiades, as he did thousands of years before aeroplanes were ever dreamt of.
"But where is the Boche?" Dastral asked himself again and again.
He was beginning to fear that he had lost him. Perhaps the Hun had caught sight of him as he came through the clouds, and had now departed unseen, as he came.
"Great Scott, have I missed him after all?" he cried. "For months and months I have been longing to fight with a Zeppelin, and now he's slipped me."
And for ten minutes he circled about, stopping his engines once or twice to listen for the roar of the invader's engines and propellors. Suddenly something whizzed past him and burst into a jet of flame. It was a shrapnel with a time fuse. Then another and another. They were firing again, then, down below, and they must have picked up the airship once more.
"Good!" he exclaimed. "She must be somewhere near me too, for I am almost in the line of fire."
Looking down he saw what had happened. The clouds in which the Zeppelin had been hiding were breaking up and drifting away, for a fresh, cold wind had sprung up from the east.