Back and forth they roared through the sky, twisting and turning, until it became a real game. Then the roar of another motor came to Jane’s ears and she looked back to see Charlie dropping down on her. That was her cue to stop chasing the tri-motor and attempt to save herself.
She dropped her own plane into a quick, twisting dive, that caught Charlie unawares and he missed her the first time, but he came fighting back, his own machine gun spouting blanks. For twenty minutes they twisted and turned, first Charlie gaining the advantage and then Jane. Then she saw a red flag waving from the camera plane. It was the signal for the dive on which she was to release the smoke pot.
Charlie was well above her, diving again. Jane waited until his plane was almost on her. Then she spun her own ship into a twisting plunge and tripped the trigger of the smoke pot apparatus.
Almost instantly a cloud of thick, heavy smoke rolled out of the fuselage behind her and Charlie’s plane disappeared for a second in the smoke screen.
Jane watched the altimeter. She had been up 3,100 feet when she released the smoke pot. At a thousand feet above ground she was to level off and scoot back to the Cheyenne field.
She had been too busy warding off Charlie’s attack to watch just where they were and was surprised to find herself just north of the home field. For all Jane knew they might have been thirty miles away.
The biplane spun down dizzily, the speed increasing until the wing wires screamed in protest. But it was good action and Jane knew the movie cameras would catch every bit of it as the smoking plane thundered toward the ground.
She felt remarkably cool as the speed increased. She had every confidence in the sturdy old biplane and at 1,800 feet she pulled the stick back a bit to see how the plane responded. To her horror there was no lessening in the angle of the dive and she turned quickly. The controls had jammed and the tail of her plane was ablaze, set afire in some way by the smoke pot.