Now he was one hundred feet nearer the earth—one hundred feet nearer the clutch of his enemies—and, with the smoothness of a toboggan, the machine was still gliding downward. Yes, the journey would soon be over! He began to think of what the boys of the escadrille would say. In his mind he pictured them sitting around the supper table, speculating as to his unhappy fate.
How strange—how remarkable it seemed to be right there among the enemy! Still held in the grip of an unnatural calmness, he gazed indifferently at those gray-clad figures whose upturned eyes were fastened upon the descending machine.
Now only seventy-five feet separated him from the ground. He would be glad when all was over.
“There won’t even be any chance to set fire to the machine,” he groaned, aloud. “The Germans will capture it intact. And who knows to what use the crafty Boches may put it! But they’ll hear no ‘Kamerad, kamerad!’ from me.”
Suddenly a revulsion of feeling swept over the boy. The sight of the Germans crowding around seemed to fill him with an anger he could not repress. He gritted his teeth and clenched his fists in impotent wrath. And with this fierce rebellion against the cruel fate that awaited him his thoughts flashed back to Captain Baron Von Richtofen and his scarlet planes. How little he had thought when hearing about them in the Café Rochambeau that that selfsame Squadron of Death was destined to play a part in his own career!
For hardly a moment had Don ceased his efforts to get the engine running, and though it seemed useless—a futile task—he renewed them once again. And just as he was about concluding that nothing remained to be done but make a landing on a field toward which he had been heading, his ears caught a sound which fairly electrified him.
“At last!” he gasped.
With a preliminary cough, one of the cylinders of the motor started to work. Could it actually be possible?
A fierce, wild hope, painful in its intensity, seized upon Don Hale. It was an agonizing moment—a moment in which he suffered all the torture of a mind agitated by the most violent conflict between hope and fear.
And while the combat pilot was vaguely wondering if he had received just another cruel stab the old familiar, deafening roar, with startling abruptness, began to resound.