Don felt that he must rise still higher. Every gleam filled him with a strange foreboding; it seemed as though, no matter which way he traveled, there was no possibility of escaping the gravest danger. The pilot was having difficulty, too, in navigating the Nieuport in the sweeping gusts of wind. Sometimes it was carried rapidly aloft like a chip on a rising wave, to drop, a moment later, with a suddenness that almost took away his breath.
His altimeter began to register an increasing height, and at length the boy, in an icy region, was looking down upon far-off masses of clouds.
If the young combat pilot of the Lafayette Escadrille had not been so intensely lonely or so worn out with excitement and fatigue, he would positively have enjoyed the strange and unique experience. But now he most ardently hoped that the fury of the tempest would soon abate.
Over what part of the country was he? Perhaps he had gone miles and miles out of his course. There was no way to tell.
And what if anything should happen to his engine, as it had done before?
Now and again his thoughts involuntarily became fixed upon such an eventuality, causing, anew, chilling tremors to sweep through his frame. As important, now, as the beating of his heart were the pulsations of the motor. It filled him with a sense of awe, and his keenly-listening ears were attuned to catch the slightest change in the never-ceasing roar of the engine.
“By this time the boys must think I’m a goner,” he communed to himself, aloud. “Poor George Glenn! I’ll bet no one dreams that I’m away up here, condemned to sail around in great circles until warring nature gets over its tempestuous fury. And, oh boy, but it’s cold! Even with these heavy gloves, my hands are becoming numb. I’m beginning to realize now just how an icicle feels. I don’t know where I am, but I certainly wish I were somewhere else!”
Time began to drag out interminably. Anxiously, he kept glancing down upon that glorious, shimmering, white expanse in the hope that he might discover signs of the clouds beginning to break away—of some little ragged opening through which he might get a glimpse of the earth. But it always presented the same monotonous expanse.
“Not yet! Not yet!” he sighed.
Like a rider driving a fractious steed, he was obliged to pay the closest attention to the navigation of the speedy Nieuport; and as the unruly horse may sometimes take the bit in its mouth, defying the will of its master, so the airplane, aided and abetted by the gale of wind, often gave him cause for the greatest anxiety.