Page:Gibbs--The yellow dove.djvu/326

 Hammersley only laughed at him.

“We’ll see about that.” He took a stride to the canvas curtain and had a quick look outside. And then to the girl: “Crank her, Doris! The compressed air—the button to the left beside the wheel!”

There was a long pause when Doris reached forward in her seat. A pause filled with meanings for Hammersley, in which his fate and hers, was hanging in the balance. Von Stromberg seemed to read his thoughts, and the wolfish smile spread again over his face.

“It is just possible,” he said blandly, “that someone may have been tinkering with the machinery.”

There was another long silence—a moment of agony for Hammersley.

“Yes, I have,” roared Hammersley exultantly.

For just then there was a violent explosion, deafening in the enclosed space, like the roar of a giant cracker would have been—another—and then more rapidly another, followed by a number of concussions, like a pack of giant crackers catching intermittently and then in quick succession.

General von Stromberg’s smile faded—then vanished in a look of inefficacy and dismay. He was senile. Hammersley’s grin derided him. Speech was impossible, but the muzzle of the automatic was as eloquent as before. One more explosion or six, for that matter, would add little to the din. Von Stromberg’s life hung by a hair at that moment and he knew it. Still covering His Excellency, who was now glancing at the slit in the curtain beside him, Hammersley climbed up to the seat in front of Doris in the cockpit of the machine. And just as he was putting a leg over, His Excellency took a quick glance upward, which had in it a world of expression—and bolted.