Even as he turned, the vast gliding monster that was a storm appeared to reach out a shrouded arm to grasp him, as if enraged by the sight of a victim escaping from its grasp.
Snow-fog gathered about him. Particles of sleet rattled like bird-shot against his fusilage.
Setting his teeth hard, he tilted the plane upward; but all in vain. The shrouded arm followed.
Abandoning these tactics, he righted his plane to shoot straight away toward the south. A hundred, a hundred and twenty-five, a hundred and forty miles an hour he sped on. But the storm rode on his tail. It set his struts singing. It fogged the glass before him. It set up a chill that no insulation could keep out, no heat from the exhaust dispel.
“I’ll beat it!” he told himself grimly. “I must! It will last for hours. No one could land safely in such a storm. And one may not stay up forever.”
Strangely enough, even in such a time of stress his mind went on little holidays, moments long, to wonder about many things. The “Gray Streak”? What could have happened to her? Had she gone right on through the storm and, coming out into the uncertain light of waning day, had she landed safely on the frozen surface of some lake or had she cracked up? If she had cracked up, would the wreck be discovered? If it were, what would it reveal? Once more he thought of master criminals, of Russian exiles and sporting young highbloods; but he found no answer.
At other times he thought of Johnny Thompson and his problems. Johnny had told him of the stolen films that might mean so much to the mineral hunting world. What would come of all this? Would the thief be discovered? Would the swift and sure punishment that belongs to this northland be meted out to him? Would the rival camps come together at last? And would there follow a bloody combat? For the sake of Joyce Mills and her heroic father, he hoped not.
So, with his mind one moment filled with the strain of battle, the next relieved by restful speculation, he raced the storm.
The brief Arctic day came to its close. He tried to imagine his friends seated by their fire, but succeeded only in bringing to his own consciousness a desire for warmth and food.
“Better the storm than that,” he told himself. At once his mind was filled with grim pictures of the gray specter that now followed him into the night. It was a monster spider weaving a web as great as the universe itself and at the same time reaching out one hairy leg to seize him. It was an octopus in a fathomless sea extending a tentacle to grasp him.