It was only a thirty minute flight to Carana, but it took an eternity of time. Twenty miles out the wind seemed to rise, shrieking its resentment at the puny mortals who were defying it. The D.H. was like an outlaw bronco, bucking and pitching in a mad effort to throw its rider. Moran, heavy jaw out-thrust, was suddenly aware of a sort of ferocious joy in fighting it. A lone rider of the storm, he yelled a blasphemous challenge which he could not hear himself, above the devil’s song of motor and wind and screaming wires.
Carana, a small collection of lights on the bank of the river, lay ahead only two miles. Dumpy was a mile south, the flames from his motor’s exhaust pipes like two fiery red tongues. Moran was looking for Crosby’s flashlight signal. Three flashes, and the alien runners were over; four, they were on their way; five, no action as yet and to land on the field, which Dumpy knew, but which Moran did not.
Dumpy was diving for the river now, and Moran, flying in a dream, turned south into the teeth of the storm and labored toward the Rio Grande. Had Scarth seen something below? If he had, it was the job of one ship, at least, to hold the smugglers with its machine guns.
The other one would land, conserving its gasoline supply for the time when the first ship ran low on fuel.
Dumpy was low over the river, a mile west of the settlement. Lights were winking on as Moran, five hundred feet high, looked down at Scarth’s ship. The full moon had emerged temporarily from the clouds, and Moran saw what was happening as clearly as if it had been noonday.
Dumpy’s ship seemed to stand still in the air, for a moment, as a tremendous gust of wind threw Moran’s own plane on its side. As if slapped by the hand of some invisible giant, the left wing of Scarth’s D.H. flipped high in the air.
Half on its back, the lower ship plunged into the river in a short upside down dive, and a shower of spray hid it momentarily from the stunned Moran’s straining eyes.
It came into view as the water fell. It floated, apparently, in tragic quiet, the motor submerged and the tail high in the air.
Automatically Moran shoved the stick forward. There was no movement below—not an extra ripple on the smooth, turgid water of the river. Dumpy had been knocked out and was helpless beneath the water.
At that second, something within Moran seemed to break. Each taut nerve snapped, and the reaction left him quiet, almost weak, but with his mind clear. He was like a man who has just awakened from a nightmare into reality still more horrible. So much so that the climax of terror left him calm, fatalistic, hopeless.