Page:Flying Death.pdf/43

 plane, when piloted by the mechanism, always had been constricted; and the mechanism never had been independent. It could not fly solo; always a pilot had been beside it to lend a hand.

This mechanism, masked by the effigy of the girl, surely employed the same principle but had brought it to such perfection that only now had I realized it. Pete, I guessed, had realized it only a few moments earlier.

Now, of course, I comprehended the fate of Selby and of Kent and I knew what Pete had encountered. Each of them, flying, had come across a girl pilot—or what had appeared to be a girl in the cockpit—and she had dashed into each of them, in turn, before he could see she was a mechanism.

An automaton, controlled and commanded by whom? By the girl, whose effigy masked it? By the lovely, gentle girl herself who had talked to us on the sea?

The strange meaning of the circumstance that it was made in her likeness could not, I say, yet occur to me. I could not yet consider that this had meaning. I was applied to