The crash siren was going!
Don, from their high point, looking alertly around the horizon, had observed that the midnight mail ’plane, behind schedule, was coming, low and fast, over the swamp.
It all happened in a few instants.
On came the mail ’plane.
Up above the clouds, hidden from the mail ship by vapor, Chick cranked his projector.
As the mail ship approached, near the edge of the swamp, out on the cloud leaped the glow that suffused it, went through it, made of it a weird, terrifying set of illuminated atoms of moisture. Onto that plane of light leaped the black silhouette of an oncoming ship. The swing Don tried to make, to turn the vision away from its screen, did not help, since they had no forward speed to cause the rudder to work.
Hideous terrors gripped the young pilot. He knew what was about to happen. The pilot of the mail ship, already superstitious, and aware of the ghostly stories that had been flung far and wide, would look toward that cloud as he dropped the nose toward the airport approaches.
It couldn’t be helped. The spectre in the clouds was flying right at him as his ship disappeared from Don’s sight under the cloud over which they hovered.
Swiftly he cut the speed of the upper blades. They began to settle.
“What will we find on the ground?” Don muttered.