Master Tales of Mystery Part 70

"Don't trouble your friends," he replied. "We can do without them.

Come up and fly with me right away. We'll toss a quarter to decide who steers."

"It would be madness!" exclaimed the count, and his jaw dropped.

"Then kindly mind your own business," said Monsieur Power, chewing again on his gra.s.s stem, and talking through his teeth. "Now, Ella, time's up! Am I to go?"

The girl bit her lip, and seemed to struggle vainly for a reply, but the look in her eyes would have withered any man less accustomed to strife than this iron-jawed young soldier of fortune from Wall Street.

In my turn, anger seized me as I saw her hesitate.

"You will pardon a further interruption, monsieur," I cried. "I can permit no such madness on my flying ground, and no such discourtesy to my pupils."

I beckoned the head mechanician.

"You will at once remove to a hangar the biplane of Monsieur Power," I told him, "and disconnect the ignition. Should he attempt to enter the nacelle again, you will cause him to evacuate it in march time and three movements!"

"And the first dago that tries it will get hurt," added Monsieur Power pleasantly.

"It's cowardly, Jack!" she cried hotly. "It's unworthy of you, a childish bluff like this!"

He must have been planning all the time how he would spring into his seat and start the motor, for when I looked round he was already there, and the great tractor screw was spinning as the exhaust spluttered viciously, making it impossible to reach him except from behind. With all my legs I ran round to the tail, calling upon the mechanicians to aid me.

Too late! The exhaust ripped out as he whipped his motor into her full horse power, and he leaped into the teeth of the wind with a swerve that almost tore off his lower plane against the ground.

"Imbecile!" I roared, but he no longer heard me. To save myself from a violent collision with his tail planes I was compelled to cling desperately to the frail wood and wire girder of the fuselage, and it was in this position that I was carried the length of the flying ground. The gale tore at my hair and distended my cheeks, the turf slipped away beneath me as smooth as green water in the speed of his mad attempt to force the machine into the air.

Slowly and with extreme care I edged my way inch by inch along the fuselage toward the main planes and the pilot's seat. Casting back a glance I saw the hangars, a mere white bar across the plain. A few spectators who had pursued us in a desultory, ineffectual manner stood now at long intervals in our wake, and gesticulated spasmodically.

The next moment we ran into a hollow, and they were lost to view behind the gra.s.sy slope.

It was then that the young American looked behind him for the first time, and realized that he had a pa.s.senger. Promptly he throttled down his engine into a slow splutter, and turned in his seat as the machine came to a standstill.

"I suppose you've had an uncomfortable minute or two," he grinned.

"But it really wasn't your affair. I am perfectly ent.i.tled to fly whenever I feel like it."

Pleading that the roar of the motor had deafened me, I climbed up onto the pa.s.senger seat.

"It is beyond doubt, monsieur, that you are sane," I said. "But it is equally certain that you propose the act of a madman. Fortunately I have accompanied you, and it is impossible to rise from the ground with my weight on the tail, and my grip upon the elevator wires."

"Meaning that you refuse to let me ascend?"

"Most categorically!"

"But why?" he demanded. "Do you want Miss Warren to think that I was only bluffing, after all? I promised to show her something startling, and I'm going ahead with it."

"To begin with, it would be suicide," I rejoined. "In addition, you would be inflicting gratuitous distress upon mademoiselle."

At this he rose from his seat with the first sign of emotion I had seen in his manner.

"And what is it that she has inflicted for months on me?" he demanded hotly. "And on her father, too, and on all her friends? We can't pick up a newspaper any day, without going cold with fear that we will read of her maimed or dead in some accident. After all, it's only her own medicine."

He took off the black leather helmet, placed it on the seat, and wiped the motor grease from his brow. When he spoke again, it was in the even tones of a man who issues an ultimatum against an intolerable situation.

"There has been altogether too much of this flying business. It's no game for a girl. There is getting to be too much of this count thing.

We don't want his sort around here. I've known Ella Warren since she was as big as a gla.s.s of milk! Do you think I am going to stand down for the first scented dago--forgive me if I speak disrespectfully of your countryman--whom she chooses to bring across the Atlantic at her heels? No, sir! It has to be stopped somewhere."

He halted a moment, and regarded me carefully. I could see that he was measuring with his eye the distance between us.

"I'm going to scare her stiff," he said, nodding. "Get down off this plane, Monsieur Lacroix!"

"Pardon me," I replied, with a low bow. "But that is for you to do."

And before he could seize me, with one blow of the foot planted suddenly in his chest I shot the young Monsieur Power squarely off his biplane onto the gra.s.s. Even as he measured his long length on the ground, I had seized the controls, and the aeroplane spurted fifty yards ahead of him. Ever since he had removed the black casquette, a wild idea, of a dramatic quality irresistible, had formed itself in my brain. I now seized the helmet and thrust it down upon my own head.

"It shall be finished as you wish," I cried. "But it is I, Lacroix, who am best qualified for the task!"

For I had seen, during that wild flight over the ground as I clung to the frail framework of the tail, a figure that I loved--a figure in brown, tall and graceful before the white hangars, a figure that clasped its hands in terror. And some instinct told me that the life of this Monsieur Power was necessary to the happiness of my beloved mademoiselle. I knew also that I alone without undue risk might break down the barrier of iron pride that had arisen between these two autocratic young people.

_Qu'est-ce que tu veux que je te dise?_ I might have paid more heavily for the mad intoxication of that last flight. In a month or two I shall be again aloft.

I have often maintained that sooner or later a moment of emotion, of sheer joy in the struggle and risk, will cause the soberest pilot to throw discretion to the winds. It was so in this case.

_Parbleu!_ I leap, I dive, I twist in figures of eight, I fight my way by inches against the wind, and, turning, I shoot back upon its current with the speed of a projectile. I am shaken and buffeted until I gasp for breath. I swerve, I dance, I caracole--I pirouette on a wing tip, catching my side slips on the rudder as one plays cup and ball. I dangle myself at the end of a single wire on the brink of eternity, crying defiance to the winds! _C'etait de la folie_--the madness of battle. Far below me I could see an occasional spectator running like a rabbit, grotesquely waving his arms.

"Oh, yes, he is doubtless clever, this Power," I cry in my pride. "But he is, after all, nothing but a buzzard. It is I, Lacroix, who am alone veritable king of the air!"

_Coquin de sort!_ I do not know exactly when the wire controlling the right _aileron_ parted. I became aware merely that that side of the machine canted downward and refused to rise again in response to the lever. Like a flash, I thrust forward the elevator, hoping to reach the earth by a glide. But I arrived by a quicker maneuver--a whirling gust, a _tourbillon_ of the most terrific, hurled the biplane sidelong to destruction.

The man who has been accustomed to face death meets it at last with a gentle sneer on his lip, as one who is vanquished by an enemy whom he knows to be in reality his inferior.

"So here he is at last, then, this Death," I said to myself. "Well, let us see what he will do!"

And in that instant the graceful biplane crashed into splinters, and I lay pinned in the wreckage beneath a shroud of torn white canvas. In the black casquette, later, they discovered a hole two inches wide, torn by the jagged edge of a broken stay.

I found them at my bedside when I awoke some days later, my Mademoiselle Warren and Monsieur Power. They leaned together, arm in arm, upon the rail at the foot, and the lovely face of my dear pupil was radiant with sympathy and happiness.

"Ha! What is it that it is, then?" I demand.

"Mr. Power won," said Miss Warren.

The young broker smiled with all his teeth.

"But he was unfairly abetted by a certain Monsieur Lacroix," went on Miss Warren. "That was a terrible practical joke you played on me with the black casquette, you know. They carried us away in the same auto, and they tell me that I looked as lifeless as you."

"And now I have lost my pupil!" I exclaimed ruefully.

"Dear Monsieur Lacroix, I had no choice," she responded, and moved to the bedside and held my hand. "I cannot oppose the wishes of all the people I love. Besides, it is a fair bargain. We have promised each other, Mr. Power and I, never to fly again."