Dick realised her plan. His own thought, as a fighting man, would have been to close at once and have it out. But Yvette had the radium in mind. If they smashed the stranger over the sea the priceless radium would inevitably be lost.
With the Mohawk gradually gaining, the chase drew near to the French coast. Cherbourg loomed ahead of them, drew near, and disappeared beneath them. They were over France.
Instantly Yvette began to coax the Mohawk to do its best. Splendidly the engines responded, the plane shot forward at a pace which surprised Dick, and a few minutes later they were directly above the fugitive. The battle was all but won. In vain their quarry sought, by diving and twisting, to shake them off. His position was hopeless.
Seeing a good landing-place ahead Dick fired a couple of shots as a signal. They could see the terrified face of the passenger in the plane below gazing upward at the strange shape of the Mohawk above them.
Then the signal of surrender came, and the fugitive dipped earthward. A couple of minutes later it came to land, and the two occupants stood holding up their hands while the Mohawk came gently to earth fifty yards away, dropping vertically from the sky in a fashion which caused the pilot of the foreign machine the wildest astonishment.
The radium was saved! But it enacted a fearful revenge. The unfortunate passenger, who they found out later was a well-known Spanish anarchist, had imprudently placed the two tubes in his pocket, apparently ignorant of their terrible power. Even in the short time he had them in his possession he was so terribly burned that he died a couple of days later in spite of the efforts made to save him, while the pilot, who had, of course, been near enough to the tubes to get some of the effects, was also so seriously injured that for weeks his life hung in the balance. It was found impossible to remove the tubes to England until Professor Fortescue, overjoyed at the good news, came bringing the leaden safe into which the precious tubes were placed.
The sequel came a week later. Not even the British War Office could ignore the fact that the Mohawk, single-handed, had achieved a feat at which the British Air Force had signally failed. A highly placed official sought Dick out. The result was that the plans of the Mohawk were sold jointly to England and France at the price of one hundred thousand pounds.
And Regnier lost his “star” combination. Dick had no longer before his eyes the fear that had haunted him for so long that in marrying Yvette he would be condemning her to a life of comparative poverty. And so the companionship born amid the stress and tumult of war came at last to perfect fruition in the marriage between the two lovers which took place in Paris just three months after their last air adventure.
The End.