He stood and watched her as Pegasus ambled along the moonlit road. Just before they entered the deep shadow of the trees she turned in the saddle and threw him a parting smile and waved. She seemed, at that moment, like some little goddess disappearing from mortal eyes into the impenetrable darkness of the forest.
He walked back to the ship slowly and sat in the cockpit. His Colt was ready to his hand, and the shadowed mountains clustering around him seemed doubly mysterious, even menacing, under the blanket of the night. They seemed to be whispering with all the bloody legends of the mountain country and to be vibrant with some of the passion and untamable wildness of the people whom they sheltered.
And yet George Arlington Hemingwood, a lonely watchman in the midst of all-pervading silence, was thinking, not of what might happen with his enemies, but rather of what the future might hold forth for himself and Gail Morgan.
CHAPTER IV
According to instructions, Apperson awakened him at eight o’clock. At nine they had consumed coffee and bread, and were ready to take off.
It was a delicate job on the rolling field, but again it was accomplished safely, and the ship cleared the surrounding trees by a good fifty feet. As it roared out over the forest Hemingwood held it low, pointing for the little schoolhouse where Gail presided. It was on the outskirts of the mountain settlement called “The Hollows.” As he passed over it he jazzed the throttle twice. He saw Gail thrust her head out of a window and wave her handkerchief. He returned the greeting with his free arm. There was a pleasant warmth in his heart as he circled back and left the schoolhouse behind.
The ship was barely three hundred feet high, so he nosed up in a steep climb. His right arm was draped carelessly over the side of the cockpit, and his eyes swept the ground idly.
Suddenly he felt a jerk at his ankle. He dropped his eyes, and in utter surprise saw a clean gash on the inner side of his right boot sole. He moved his foot slightly and saw a hole in the wooden flooring of the cockpit. The next second he saw gas jetting forth from a jagged hole in the small copper tube which was the gasoline feed line between main tank and carburetor. The Liberty’s roar died away into sputtering, and then silence. And down below there was nothing but impenetrable forest into which to crash.
Hemingwood reached automatically for the mainline petcock, and turned off the gas. Then he turned on the petcock which released the gas from the emergency tank, holding the ship in a dive to maintain flying speed.
For agonizing seconds the motor did not catch and the ship was diving like a comet for the earth. Hemingwood cursed steadily, fluently. He had been shot at from the ground and, by dumb luck, they had hit the fast moving target. There was nothing for it but to crash. What the hell was the matter with that gravity tank? If he could get his hands on the blankety-blank marksmen!