“Yes. And if I do?”
“What! A price?”
“Yes!”
“It is right. Well—when the barograph marks twenty thousand feet, I will come and sit at your knees!”
“It is what I had on the tip of my tongue to ask,” he shouted, wild with exaltation. “Good; and block the rudder-bar! We will go down on the warp alone—a proper finish. Down twenty thousand feet, with the rudder blocked!”
“Yes. Is it a bargain?”
“A bargain!” he shouted, and turned his face up into the candent dome of sky and laughed aloud. His arms jerked the yoke of the elevator back until the wheel touched his breast; the machine leaped upward like a diver, soared, poised trembling. He threw back the lever that cut out the muffler. The exhaust broke out in a weird salvo like sharpened rifle-shots. He eased off the precipitate angle until they had gained way once more, and again threw the elevator up to its highest limit. They bounded upward, swaying, clattering, whistling through the knife-edged wind. And all the while she smiled into his face.
He no longer noticed the barograph; he saw only her untroubled gaze of inspiration and allurement. A thin trickle of scarlet started from both his nostrils; his blackened lips gaped for breath; his bulging, bloodshot eyes left her only to glare over the powers at his command. He was all resolve and eagerness; he was determination incarnate. He shot one hand forward, ungloved, to adjust the carbureter, which was beginning to fail for lack of air. He threw back and forth the lever that put extra pressure on the gasolene tank. With demoniacal abandon he worked the hand-pump that jetted oil on the flying bearings of the engine.
“Do-er! Accomplisher!” He started at her voice. The reflection of his own exaltation was on her; her face quivered, yearned toward him. With a steady, sinuous movement she drew herself backward over the low back-rest of her seat, and crept back under the curved yoke that held the warping-wheel. She sat up, sidewise, near him, lifted her face slowly until it curved backward like a flower on the fair, white stem of her throat, and offered him the curved, scarlet miracle of her lips.
As he bent toward her the sky became black. As from the depths of a dream he heard her voice chanting: