Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/338

 upon the vibrating surface—the grounds and wood von Fallenbosch and also the speck of the schloss.

The feeling of boundless power, limitless recklessness to dare and do, which flight had first brought to him as a cadet years before, reclaimed him. Flight, that miraculous endowment, was his again. He passed to O'Malley the German pilot's hood; he protected his own eyes with the goggles, and, watching the ground to estimate the wind drift, he set his course by compass for Mannheim. What he was to do there he did not know; and he no longer attempted to form any plan. The event—inevitable and yet unforseeable—which had brought him this ship had taught him tonight to cease to plan. He was flying, and content to let fate guide him. Somehow he had no idea at all of how—but somehow this night he would find Ruth Alden and take her with him. Destiny—the confidence in the guidance of fate which comes to every soldier and, more than to any other, to the flying fighter of the sky—set him secure and happy in the certainty of this.

He had climbed above the clouds and was flying smoothly and serenely in the silver moonlight. He was flying solitarily, too; for if alarm had spread upon the ground to tell that escaped prisoners had taken a German machine, it had not yet communicated itself to a pilot in position to pursue. Behind him lay only the moonlight and the stars; below, the sheen of cloud tops, unearthly, divine; the sheen split and gaped in great chasms, through which the moonlight slanted down, lighting great spots of darkness separated by the glinting path of the Rhine. The river made his piloting simple; he had only to sight it