"Ah! Ah! I shall see her soon. She cannot escape me now. I shall find her in a few minutes."
"Whiz! Puff!" came another time fuse, and burst not fifty feet away, several pieces of which pierced the left wing of the monoplane.
"By Jove, but that was close!" he cried, throwing out three balls, which burst into red flame as they fell towards the earth, and was the signal for the Archies to stop firing.
"Ah, there she is!" exclaimed the daring pilot, as, out of the clouds, a thousand feet below him, he saw a black mass emerge against the lighter background of the thinning clouds. At the same instant the searchlights found her, and a dozen long arms of streaming light focussed their united rays upon her.
"Gemini! What a target!" cried Dastral, as he pulled the joy-stick over and dived to the attack, without a second's hesitation.
His gun, already cocked and ready to fire through the whirling propellor, and loaded with the new flaming bullet, was brought to bear.
Down, down he went, firing rapidly all the while. Then underneath and alongside her he raced, pumping his second and third drum into the huge looming mass.
Far below his friends saw the whirling monoplane, in the glare of the searchlight, for now it was as bright as day. The A.A. guns had ceased their fire in response to his signals, but the men on the doomed Zeppelin brought three or four of their eleven machine guns to bear upon him, but it was too late. They knew the deadly peril they were in, and it was impossible for them with their unsteady nerves to hit any vital part of that waspish little fiend, which circled round, above and below them at a truly terrific rate.
Dastral, in his rapid nose-dive, had dipped five hundred feet below the monster and flattened out to return to the attack, but, as he commenced his climb again he saw that the silvery glare of the Zeppelin, as it had appeared to him but twenty seconds before in the lure of the searchlights, had taken on a ruby glow, which, as he mounted up, became a ruddy glare.
"Heavens! She is on fire already!" he gasped.