Then he saw them. There were five of them, partially hidden, and they were still shooting. He could see the smoke from their rifles. Unseen and unheard above the whining wires, there were bullets zipping through the air around him.
There was two hundred feet of altitude left. With his usually boyish face suddenly grim and hard, Hemingwood swooped around and made the dive more steep. Might as well use that last little margin to teach those birds a lesson!
His finger was on the machine gun control as he pointed the ship at them. And at that second the gravity tank got working and the motor cut in. There was thirty minutes’ gas in that tank, plenty to get back to the field with.
Hemingwood came to himself. Even his unemotional soul revolted at the thought of pouring a hail of death on the five would-be murderers below. But he did dive down at them, carefully aiming a bit beyond them, and his machine guns spouted fire and a hail of bullets which ripped up the trees a few dozen yards away from them.
He barely brought the quivering, strained ship out of the dive in time to clear the treetops. He turned again, and for the next five minutes terrorized the hiding mountaineers with showers of lead all around them.
“Now let ’em see whether they’ve got any stomach to keep fiddling around,” he grinned, as he swept back toward the field.
His rancor was all gone, now that he was safe. It was something of a game to him.
They fixed the mainline by means of a spare rubber connection they had brought along, and got in a good five hours of work, landing shortly after two o’clock. Apperson, seemingly entirely unshaken by the events of the morning, had a suggestion to make. He led Hemingwood to one side, so that Mumford, there with the gas, could not overhear anything, and said: