I threw my ship around as the equally slow, but much smaller, Jenny banked and flew back at right angles to us for another shot, from above and behind. I spun the wheel desperately, to get the Bomber’s nose pointed toward the other ship. Subconsciously I realized that all my suspicions of Marston had been wrong. There was some gang trying to crab getting the Martins to Langham.
I was straightened around for them as the Jenny crossed above us, those wicked guns being sighted by the gunner in the rear. We were looking right up into their muzzles, a hundred feet away. Marston was on his knees, sighting too. If we were to get them, I must hold the ship in position for a moment more. It was shot for shot.
It was. I saw Marston’s hand, a mass of blood, pull the trigger of his Lewis as a terrific impact made me cry out and seemed to pin me to the seat. Something crashed through my chest, and I felt as if I had been torn apart. As if in a dream I saw the Jenny spinning downward. Then, through blurred eyes that could not transfer to my brain what they saw, I saw a huge bulk looming above me. It looked as big as all the world. I knew the Martin was diving like mad for the ground, but my nerveless, groping fingers could not find the wheel. And I didn’t care. In short, I went out like a light, my last remembrance being a torrent of blood flowing down over my body.
V
I came partly to, not entirely, in what looked like a hospital, and for two weeks I was so weak I couldn’t even talk. In another week I was out of danger, and by the end of a month I knew I was in a Cleveland hospital. Then Les Fernald and Jim Tolley—Jim had taken my place as a ferry pilot—were allowed to see me.
“So you’re going to get well! My, my!” grinned Fernald. “Can’t the Air Service ever get rid of you?”
“I’m trying my best,” I told him. “What happened after I passed out?”
“Marston got you out of the seat and took the wheel before your ship crashed. He was —— badly wounded himself, an artery severed, for one thing, but he flew the ship with one hand and held a handkerchief to your chest with another, flew back to Cleveland and landed. That Martin came in like a drunken duck, and he cracked the landing gear all to ——, then fainted in the ship.”
“Is he alive?”
“Sure. But he’d about bled to death when he got here, and you’d have been as dead as the free silver issue if he hadn’t——”