“It was an airplane, but it wasn’t an airplane!” he had maintained, declaring that its shape was blurred, its outlines ghostly, its position seemingly also to shake up and down, as though either the ship was vibrating dreadfully or its very shape of terror made the moist cloud stuff shudder.
“It seemed to be coming down and straight at me!” the pilot had declared. “I got just the glimpse—then I dived, and of course my engine was full gun and I power-dived and only came out of it just above the marsh.”
Then he had added the finishing, terrifying word.
“I looked up, to see what had become of that other ’bus, and—the sky was silent, deserted, dark!”
On each of the succeeding seventh days, as Don recalled, a pilot had set down, shaken and horrified, to report seeing a similar apparition of the skies, a very phantom coming out of clouds!
“It’s all imagination!” Don murmured, reflectively. “One caught the scare from the other!——”
“Don!——”
“There!—side-slip! Quick!”
Don, catching the fright if not the sense of Chick’s scream, and the surprise of Garry’s order, kicked rudder to give the banked Dart, making a gentle circuit of the swamp, a chance to shift downward and sideways.
Then he glanced to his left: common sense told him that the bank with left wingtip elevated, causing the slip to the right, and Garry’s consequent order meant that whatever gave rise to the order was to his left and slightly higher. He looked that way.