Page:Flying Death.pdf/183

 other; a third. None was near enough for quick aid; and I know that none had been summoned. If one blundered up, a bomb from a biplane would wreck it too. No aid could come from the water. I looked about the air.

A plane appeared from the direction of land and already, as I looked at it, I was jerked about to meet it. Kinvarra, behind me, swung his plane toward it, too, and we flew at it together. He sent me ahead of him, in the position in which I was most easily guided, and I flew for the approaching plane head on.

The strange airplane flew, curious only, not yet suspicious. He hardly had time to become suspicious, that pilot. Far away he had sighted a fleet of airplanes over a ship and he wondered what they were doing; then we were at him.

I was at him, first—I with no power to pilot, with no hand upon any control. For all purposes, I might have been an effigy in the pilot's pit with a machine-gun before me. I could do nothing to save the other plane—or myself, if we smashed.