A girl's gauntlet, of soft grey leather, gave the first hint of the true nature of the affair. Pete Logan picked up the glove in this peculiar situation.
We had lost two pilots in two days; and they had been our best flyers. At ten o'clock, on Monday, Fred Selby had flown out to sea; and twenty minutes later, we found him under the wreck of his plane afloat on the ocean. At ten o'clock on Tuesday, Billy Kent had flown to the same place in the sky, when something Selby, and was killed.
We came upon Kent under the wreck of his plane in almost the identical position in which we had found Selby on the day before. It was off Cape May, about fifty miles at sea.
Pete and I, on this morning, had been flying separately when we sighted the wreckage and we both brought our machines down to the sea beside it.
Naturally, it gave us something of a start to see Billy Kent lying exactly where we had discovered Selby twenty-four hours earlier. Pete climbed aboard the wreck; and after making examination, he looked a bit white.
"What's doing this?" he asked me. "Selby yesterday; Billy today, at the same time, in the same place."
"Selby's wing crumpled from a structural weakness," I repeated, loyally, the report which had been officially rendered in regard to yesterday's accident. "Billy's must have been weak too."
"Are your wings weak? Or mine?" said Pete. We both had been flying seaplanes identical with Kent's. "You don't believe it; and neither do I. Structural weaknesses don't break wings in exactly the same place and at the same time in the morning on two days running. Something special happened to Selby out here yesterday and the same thing struck Billy half an hour ago."
He was repeating, with more positiveness, an opinion which he had voiced yesterday; this was, that Selby must have collided in the sky with another airplane or with an airship. The report, yesterday, disagreed with this opinion because no other aircraft had been damaged yesterday; none was missing. None had been seen in the vicinity. Moreover, Selby had been altogether too good a pilot to smash, midair, with another machine on a calm, clear morning. The same was true, today, of Billy Kent.
"You figure he ran into a rock up there?" I asked Pete.
"D'you remember," he put to me, "What Selby's altimeter showed yesterday?"
The altimeter was the recording device registering altitudes and it had given us Selby's height above the sea before he fell.
"Twelve thousand feet plus," I said.
"His gives twelve thousand slightly short," Pete told me. "That's where they both struck something hard enough to break off that wing." He pointed to the right wing of Kent's plane which floated a couple of hundred yards away.
"Let's look at it," I suggested; and Pete stood on my float while I started my engine and "taxi-ed" my plane on the sea toward the wing.
Half way there, Pete sighted the glove; he stooped from the pontoon and picked it up.
It was a girl's gauntlet, you could see at a glance. The shape of her hand was in it; for the grey leather, though soft, was heavy enough to hold the form of slender, pretty fingers.
I stopped and we searched for other flotsam; but there was nothing else on the sea.
"Well," said Pete, looking up from the glove in his hand and staring again into the sky. "How did this get here?"
"Somebody dropped it, of course."
"And just now. It's not soaked; it was floating with air in it. She couldn't have been by in a boat."
I nodded. Of course, in the half hour since Billy Kent had fallen, a boat could not have vanished. The glove had not been there before the crash; it was connected with the fall. Of that, Pete and I both felt sure.
"She was 'up'," said Pete.
Again I agreed. In half an hour, a person who had been 'up'—flying—might be a hundred and fifty miles away.
Pete folded the glove carefully and put it in his pocket.
Later, when we were on shore making report of the finding of Kent, Pete produced the gauntlet; but no one ashore made anything of it. They let Pete keep it; and the official report on Kent, as on Selby, discussed structural defects.
But on the next morning, at a few minutes before ten, Pete Logan put out to the east in his single-seater seaplane. I saw him, suspected that he was having a look at that patch of the sky fifty miles out and twelve thousand feet up; and I followed him, a minute and a quarter later.
At the speed he was flying, a minute and a quarter meant full six miles; for Pete took no stock in that report on structural defects. He pushed his plane to the limit. We were ten or twelve minutes from shore—fifty miles, roughly—when I lost sight of Pete, temporarily.
At best, he'd been merely a speck to me; for a monoplane racer, seen from the tail at six miles, makes no great mark on the sky. It's visible but you have to know exactly where to look for it and once you lose it, you can't pick it up again, except by chance. You have to search the sky not only from right to left but you have to look at so many levels for the speck.
Moreover, since it was morning, we were flying at the sun which swallows with invisibility everything caught in its glare. Pete, to me, had disappeared into the sun.
I rediscovered him, but not his plane, most suddenly and startlingly. There I was, rushing on at five miles a minute and imagining Pete was far ahead under the glare when, all at once, here he was in midair in front of me, suspended from a parachute. His seaplane had vanished; nothing else and nobody about; just Pete hanging there ten thousand feet above the sea and fifty miles out, with his white parachute ballooned over him.
He was turning slowly as he floated; and when he twisted toward me, he squirmed and pointed upward and eastward, straight into the sun. Of course I saw nothing but glare; but I knew that Pete Logan, our best pilot of all, had got "it" too. But Pete had managed to jump clear before the spinning fall of his biplane involved him. Pete, apparently, would survive and have something to tell.
I ran to the right of him, circled and gazed down. On the placid, sparkling blue of the sea was a white splash with a white circle swelling away from it. There, I knew, Pete's plane had plunged, as Kent's had crashed yesterday and Selby's before him.
Again I scanned the sky which was empty, except for Pete gently swinging on his cords as the morning breeze blew along his parachute. High up, much higher, at fifteen thousand feet drifted a few feathers of clouds; eastward, blindingly, glared the sun at which Pete gestured now and then.
While he blew along, he descended, of course; and I dropped, pointing my nose beyond the splash of Pete's plane in the direction he was being blown. My landing was easy upon the smooth sea of that mild June morning; and, looking up and taxi-ing slowly on the surface to keep below Pete, who was blowing steadily along, I managed to be close when he came down to his ducking. I had my float almost in his grasp as he came up, choking, with his huge white umbrella collapsed beside him.
"Dave!" he hailed me. "Did you see her?"
"Her? Who?"
My engine was shut off; Pete had a hand on the float and was pulling himself up, hindered by the harness on his back.
"That girl."
"What girl?"
"Who did it. She did it!"
"Did what?"
"Smashed me. What d'you suppose? D'you think I jumped for the fun of it?"
"You struck somebody."
"She struck me."
"How?"
"Rode for me; rode into me."
"Where?"
"Didn't you see anything?"
"Not till I found you coming down. I lost you a while. You got into the sun."
"She came at me out of the sun," he told me, swearing, and stood up on the float, shaking himself and catching breath. "And she got me; got me; and—near got me cold, too." Of course he was recollecting Selby and Kent. He couldn't see me, yet; he had to keep staring into the sky.
"It was a girl?" I repeated.
He gazed at me, four feet away from him, with eyes focused fifteen thousand. His goggles were off; I remembered that he had had them off when I met him, mid-air, pointing at the sun.
"She meant to get me cold, Dave, as she got—them."
"You think she got them?"
"Think?" He pulled at his pocket and produced the glove he had picked up near here yesterday, which he had showed at the inquiry, and which they had let him keep. "Remember this?"
"Of course."
"It's hers."
"Whose?"
"The girl piloting that plane."
"She was the pilot, was she?"
"She was the whole thing; nobody else aboard; she was alone."
He drew between his fingers the soft leather of the small, feminine gauntlet; he put a hand to his dripping hair and parted it with the habit of his of putting himself to rights.
"I had a glimpse of her first, Dave," he told me. "She's little, Dave; not too little; slim and young. it, Dave; I had a look at her and she's lovely. But she never looked at me till she rode me down."
"She couldn't have meant to ride you down," I objected.
"Oh, couldn't she? That's what I thought—till she hit me. That's why I couldn't dodge her."
"Where did she crash?"
"She didn't; she held the air. Flew off, cool as you like, after she knocked me spinning."
"She couldn't have counted on that," I insisted. Manifestly, any pilot intentionally riding down another must expect to fall, too.
"She counted on it," said Pete. "She'd done it with Selby and Kent. She had wings built to stand it."
"Stand what?"
"Smashing another and holding the air herself. She did it, anyway."
There was no arguing with him; what was done had been deliberate, he knew; and by the girl who had worn the gauntlet in his hand. He thrust it under his jacket and set to unbuckling his harness and collecting his parachute. He succeeded, I noticed, in holding his hands almost, but not quite, steady.
Overhead and behind us beat an airscrew and out from under the sun appeared a monoplane with pontoons for water landing. Pete ceased to haul at his parachute.
The monoplane was light blue, matching the morning sky. The leading edge of the wings was peculiar, making me imagine the possibility of individual design to survive a smash in midair. Otherwise the plane was trim and neat and narrow, modelled for quick as and speed.
Pete swore softly. "There she is."
The monoplane dropped out of the sky, levelled off at five hundred feet above us and circled, while the pilot looked down. It took the water a couple of hundred yards behind us and came skimming on the sea.
The pilot removed her goggles; her; for the pilot, as Pete had said, was a girl. She was alone. Gauntlets similar to the glove in Pete's possession garbed her slender hands. Pete stared at her and swore in whispers, repeating: "There she is."
At the same time, he brushed at his hair with his fingers, pressing the water out.
I doubt if he thought about what he was doing; it was wholly instinctive with Pete to appear his best before a girl. She might have knocked him from the sky, she might have sent to death Selby and Kent but she was feminine and young and unusually good looking; so Pete Logan would be personally presentable while he accused her.
Pete, tall and dark and debonair for all his dousing, stood on my pontoon brushing his hair back from his forehead as he watched her approach. There was always a good bit of the Celtic in Pete; it gave him dash and gallantry. The blue of his eyes always was dark under his black brows; but his eyes flashed when he was intent. He was very intent now. Pete, on that day, was not yet twenty-three.
The girl, I thought, was twenty. She brought up her plane with the water lapping at the pontoons; she pushed off her helmet, baring brown, glorious hair. Probably there in the sun and on the sea surface, she felt the hood unbearably hot; not impossibly, as she came close, she had an impulse to be at her best before Pete; and I realized that this might be irrespective of a fact as to whether or not, ten minutes ago, she deliberately had knocked him out of the sky.
"Is anyone hurt?" she inquired, addressing Pete and glancing away, for a second, at the wreck of his plane which flecked the smooth swells in the distance.
I left reply to Pete and he needed a moment to compose it. At last he said, curtly, "Nobody is hurt here this morning. Nobody was hurt here yesterday or Monday. They were killed."
He cast this at her with a fling which flicked deeper color in her cheek and, at the same time, appeared to puzzle her.
"Who was killed?" she asked.
"You mean you want their names?" returned Pete. "Well, the man on Monday was Frederic Selby; yesterday, it was Billy Kent."
"Oh!" she said and looked from Pete to me for more explanation, I thought. When I failed to extend it, she gazed at Pete again. He all the time was filling his eyes with her.
I wondered how he could hold to his accusation of her. I could not hold to it at all. She was scarcely a wing's length away from us, leaning forward a bit in the cockpit of her blue monoplane wondering about us, puzzled by us and concerned, if I could judge her fairly.
I realized that, probably, I could not; she was so lovely looking. She had clear, beautiful features, definite but gentle, too. Her cheeks just now were flushed from flying and also from the fling of Pete's imputation; but naturally she must have clear, lovely color. She had a flawless skin and large grey eyes of that grey which is warmer, in eyes, than any other hue.
The boyish jacket buttoned across her breast made her only more feminine; her slight shift of herself in her seat, the little motions of her hands, the hundred imperceptible trifles which tell personality all combined to make me like her. Like her? What is the word for it when, at sight of her, your heart hurries, you forget and want to forget everyone and everything else and wish nothing but increase and extension of the moment?
Pete, I was sure, had made some extraordinary mistake. I had never seen anyone less likely to have done, deliberately, what he accused her of. If there was any shadow of sense in what he said, it must be that accidentally, through lack of skill at flight, she had blundered into him. Indeed, Pete himself seemed almost able to contradict his recollection.
"You knew about them?" he asked, more mildly.
"I heard that they had fallen because there was some structural defect in their planes."
"They had no more structural defects," denied Pete, his tone hardening again, "than I had ten minutes ago."
"When you fell?" she asked in her clear, concerned voice. "You fell, didn't you?"
"Yes," admitted Pete, not knowing how to take that. "I fell. But I had the luck to be able to jump out."
"Why did you fall?"
I think that Pete was about to tell her when she brought her hands into plainer view and Pete and I saw again the grey gauntlets identical with the one under his jacket. He plucked it out.
"This your property?" he challenged her.
She looked at both her hands, which were gloved. "Why no," she said; but instantly corrected herself. "Yesterday I did lose a pair of gauntlets."
"Did you?" rejoined Pete, his recollections clear in his head again. "Sorry I can't return the pair to you; but we found only one." And he flung it to her.
She caught it and examined it, while we watched her. She recognized it immediately, I thought, and kept staring at it, not thinking about it but about something else.
"That yours?" demanded Pete.
She looked at Pete, at me, and at Pete again with her lovely, puzzled eyes. "It's my size and I lost a pair," she said. Suddenly she claimed it. "Yes; it's mine. How did you get it?"
"I found it here yesterday, about this time."
"Here?"
"The neighborhood was furnished a little differently yesterday," said Pete. "Kent's plane—the wreck of it—was floating over there just about as mine lies this morning; but yesterday there was a pilot under it. Over there was a wing of Kent's plane—which hadn't broken off from structural defects. The third item of interest was the glove which we found floating half way between. It's yours, you say?"
Her grey eyes, gazing at Pete, were less puzzled; they were more something else. More frightened, it seemed. She seemed, at that second, to have caught some idea which frightened her. Her jacket collapsed with the emptying of her breast and then filled with her breathing.
"Yes; it's mine," she gasped.
"Did you drop the other here on Monday?" Pete was at her again. "If you did, we missed it."
"Monday!"
"I mean when Selby crashed—not from structural defects."
"What made them fall?" she put to Pete, directly.
"The same thing, I have no doubt," he returned as squarely, "that sent me down."
"And that was?"
He laughed at her. Of course it was not really a laugh; but there is no other word for it.
She looked at him, at me, at him; then suddenly she sat straight; suddenly she acted. She flung at Pete the glove. He stooped to catch it and she started her engine and moved away.
"Wait!" commanded Pete.
She paid no attention to him. He yelled to me to stay with her and he stepped out of the way of my propellor. But with him on the pontoon, I had to give her a long start. He had cast off his parachute harness but it entangled the float and had to be cleared. So she was rising into the air before we moved.
Pete yelled at me that there was no doubt she did it and to keep her in sight. He climbed on my right lower wing, lying as close to the center as possible to avoid throwing me off balance as I climbed.
The blue monoplane swept above us and I slanted up steeply as I could. I did not feel the certainty which filled Pete, but my muscles drew with doubt of her. Something was strange about her. What suddenly had frightened her when she had identified the glove; what so quickly had transformed her when he laughed?
She was steering for the sun with the idea, I thought, of vanishing in its glare. Perhaps she supposed that she had succeeded at this when she swung to the right, still climbing, and circled landward.
I swung about, copying her curve, two miles behind her and five thousand feet lower. Higher than she, perhaps a mile above her, spread a thin, tenuous ceiling; the feather clouds of a few minutes ago had widened to white patches half covering the western sky.
On the sea, far below, slipped purple shadows split by gleaming streaks of the sun which struck through the rifts in the cloud ceiling; on the sea stretched a long, black tendril of smoke trailing a boat bound for Bermuda, probably; on the sea, shoreward, showed a sharp, narrow seed—a steamer, properly stoked, bearing along the coast. In the shimmering sea behind us, the speck of Pete's plane was swallowed.
I thought of it falling twelve thousand feet and Pete in the air under his parachute; I thought of Kent sent down, yesterday, with one wing cracked off; of Selby spinning into the sea on the morning before; I thought of the girl who just now had been in the sun beside us on the sea; and I could not picture her deliberately flying at Selby and Kent to send them down. But I could not picture her sending down Pete, either; and he had said she had done it.
Of Pete now I could see only his heels. My seat was aft the wings; and Pete lay on his face upon the lower wing, clinging to the leading edge, with his heels out behind. The upper wing screened him from me but for his feet. He lifted them quickly in a kick, as though he knew I was looking and he meant to tell me he was all right and I was to go on. But I thought again, as I glanced at his heels, that he must have made some monstrous mistake. Why would that girl have tried to kill him? Yet, if she had not, why would he have said so? How had her glove happened to be, yesterday, beside Kent?
My idea that she might, from lack of skill, have blundered into Pete's plane no longer was tenable. She evidenced no lack of skill at flying. Higher than we and far ahead of us, she continued to climb until at last she touched the ceiling and went through.
She vanished. No; here she was again, diving, pointed not away from us but toward us. I heard a yell and Pete's heels kicked violently. He had seen her, returning. I put to the right and she put to the left and was at us.
No doubt at all, whatever had been my previous idea, that she flew at me. She flew differently from before; she dashed at me in short, sudden stabs of flight, sharply shifting direction as I avoided her.
There is character in flight, as there is in every human action; every pilot has a style of his own, corresponding to his character; and her style and character, in those few seconds she had been above the clouds, completely had changed. She had been flying swiftly but smoothly with long, graceful sweeps through the sky. Now she darted in short, ugly, sudden strikes at me to send me down as she had sent down Pete half an hour ago; and as she had dropped Selby and Kent. No longer did I question that. Hot blood beat in the back of my head. I knew, as I met her, I must manoeuver for my life and for Pete's. For she, if she could, would send us down.