She staggered from her place, leaned for a space of seconds then, looking down, watched the fighter planes still battling their way upward. With shaking hands she reached for the machine gun. “This can’t be the journey’s end,” she murmured.
And then something strange happened. The foremost plane that had been straining to reach them, faltered in midair, seemed to hang there for a moment, then, dropping one wing, went into a spiral dive that increased in speed until it seemed a boy’s top, spinning in the sky.
Dragging her eyes from this fascinating and terrible sight, she looked for the other planes. They, too, were going down, but under control. They had given up the task assigned to them.
“It—it’s all over! Finished!” She sank down in her place beside Sparky. “That first plane,” she said after a time, “it went down in a spin. The pilot didn’t bale out. It just went down, down.”
“I’ve done a lot of duck hunting in my day,” Sparky replied quietly. “Sometimes I’d shoot at a flock of ducks in midair. They’d sail right on, but a mile away, one of them would drop behind, go into a spin and come plunging down.”
“You mean your bullets reached that plane?” Mary asked.
“They might have. Then again the fellow may have climbed too high.”
“Something on his plane froze up?”
“Yes, or he did. Whichever way it was, there’s one less of them for our boys over here to take care of. We won a bloodless battle.”
After that, maintaining their altitude, they flew on for a hundred miles in silence.