Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/176

 pulled them positively now; with his other hand, which held to the control stick, he had gathered the lanyard which governed his machine gun; he had adjusted it so that the slightest tug would get the guns going; he gave that tug and the reassuring, familiar jet-jet of his guns firing through his airscrew combined with the burst of his bombs below and behind.

His fingers went from his bomb levers to his throttle to open it wider; the detonations which had followed him, ceased; his hand flew back to his lever and the bursts began again. All the time his hand on the control stick kept tension on the gun lanyards; ceaselessly those jets from his machine gun projected through the whorl of his airscrew.

He was killing men. He could see them, not as he killed them, but some infinitesimal of a second before; very possibly, indeed, the bullets out of those jets of his machine guns already had pierced the white flashes under the helmets which were faces of Germans gazing up at him or had riddled through the gray bulks of their bodies. But blood had not time to spot to the surface; the shock of the bullets, even when they immediately killed, had not time to dissolve the tautness of those bodies and relax them and let them down before Gerry was flown over them and was gone. He had taken position, when high in the sky a few seconds earlier, so as to sweep the length of the waves of the Germans charging; and though the swiftness of this sweep forbade him from seeing the results, he knew that with his machine guns alone he was taking off many; and though he could not now look back at all, he knew that his bombs,