This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

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;