The Lone Wolf by Louis Joseph Vance

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XXV

WINGS OF THE MORNING

About half-past six Lanyard left the dressing-room assigned him in the
barracks at Port Aviation and, waddling quaintly in the heavy
wind-resisting garments supplied him at the instance of Ducroy, made
his way between two hangars toward the practice field.

Now the eastern skies were pulsing with fitful promise of the dawn; but
within the vast enclosure of the aerodrome the gloom of night lingered
so stubbornly that two huge search-lights had been pressed into the
service of those engaged in tuning up the motor of the Parrott biplane.

In the intense, white, concentrated glare--that rippled oddly upon the
wrinkled, oily garments of the dozen or so mechanics busy about the
machine--the under sides of those wide, motionless planes hung against
the dark with an effect of impermanence: as though they were already
afloat and needed but a breath to send them winging skyward....

To one side a number of young and keen-faced Frenchmen, officers of the
corps, were lounging and watching the preparations with alert and
intelligent interest.

To the other, all the majesty of Mars was incarnate in the person of
Monsieur Ducroy, posing valiantly in fur-lined coat and shining top-hat
while he chatted with an officer whose trim, athletic figure was well
set off by his aviating uniform.

As Lanyard drew near, this last brought his heels together smartly,
saluted the Minister of War, and strode off toward the flying-machine.

"Captain Vauquelin informs me he will be ready to start in five
minutes, monsieur," Ducroy announced. "You are in good time."

"And mademoiselle?" the adventurer asked, peering
anxiously round.

Almost immediately the girl came forward from the shadows, with a smile
apologetic for the strangeness of her attire.

She had donned, over her street dress, an ample leather garment which
enveloped her completely, buttoning tight at throat and wrists and
ankles. Her small hat had been replaced by a leather helmet which left
only her eyes, nose, mouth and chin exposed, and even these were soon
to be hidden by a heavy veil for protection against spattering oil.

"Mademoiselle is not nervous?" Ducroy enquired politely.

Lucy smiled brightly.

"I? Why should I be, monsieur?"

"I trust mademoiselle will permit me to commend her courage. But
pardon! I have one last word for the ear of Captain Vauquelin."

Lifting his hat, the Frenchman joined the group near the machine.

Lanyard stared unaffectedly at the girl, unable to disguise his wonder
at the high spirits advertised by her rekindled colour and brilliant
eyes.

"Well?" she demanded gaily. "Don't tell me I don't look like a fright!
I know I do!"

"I daren't tell you how you look to me," Lanyard replied soberly. "But
I will say this, that for sheer, down right pluck, you--"

"Thank you, monsieur! And you?"

He glanced with a deprecatory smile at the flimsy-looking contrivance
to which they were presently to entrust their lives.

"Somehow," said he doubtfully, "I don't feel in the least upset or
exhilarated. It seems little out of the average run of life--all in the
day's work!"

"I think," she said, judgmatical, "that you're very like the other lone
wolf, the fictitious one--Lupin, you know--a bit of a blagueur. If
you're not nervous, why keep glancing over there?--as if you were
rather expecting somebody--as if you wouldn't be surprised to see
Popinot or De Morbihan pop out of the ground--or Ekstrom!"

"Hum!" he said gravely. "I don't mind telling you now, that's precisely
what I am afraid of."

"Nonsense!" the girl cried in open contempt. "What could they do?"

"Please don't ask me," Lanyard begged seriously. "I might try to tell
you."

"But don't worry, my dear!" Fugitively her hand touched his. "We're
ready."

It was true enough: Ducroy was moving impressively back toward them.

"All is prepared," he announced in sonorous accents.

A bit sobered, in silence they approached the machine.

Vauquelin kept himself aloof while Lanyard and a young officer helped
the girl to the seat to the right of the pilot, and strapped her in.
When Lanyard had been similarly secured in the place on the left, the
two sat, imprisoned, some six feet above the ground.

Lanyard found his perch comfortable enough. A broad band of webbing
furnished support for his back; another crossed his chest by way of
provision against forward pitching; there were rests for his feet, and
for his hands cloth-wound grips fixed to struts on either side.

He smiled at Lucy across the empty seat, and was surprised at the
clearness with which her answering smile was visible. But he wasn't to
see it again for a long and weary time; almost immediately she began to
adjust her veil.

The morning had grown much lighter within the last few minutes.

A long wait ensued, during which the swarm of mechanics, assistants and
military aviators buzzed round their feet like bees.

The sky was now pale to the western horizon. A fleet of heavy clouds
was drifting off into the south, leaving in their wake thin veils of
mist that promised soon to disappear before the rays of the sun. The
air seemed tolerably clear and not unseasonably cold.

The light grew stronger still: features of distant objects defined
themselves; traces of colour warmed the winter landscape.

At length their pilot, wearing his wind-mask, appeared and began to
climb to his perch. With a cool nod for Lanyard and a civil bow to his
woman passenger, he settled himself, adjusted several levers, and
flirted a gay hand to his brother-officers.

There was a warning cry. The crowd dropped back rapidly to either side.
Ducroy lifted his hat in parting salute, cried "Bon voyage!" and
scuttled clear like a startled rooster before a motor-car. And the
motor and propeller broke loose with a mighty roar comparable only, in
Lanyard's fancy, to the chant of ten thousand rivetting locusts.

He felt momentarily as if his ear-drums must burst with the incessant
and tremendous concussions registered upon them; but presently this
sensation passed, leaving him with that of permanent deafness.

Before he could recover and regain control of his startled wits the
aviator had thrown down a lever, and the great fabric was in motion.

It swept down the field like a frightened swan; and the wheels of its
chassis, registering every infinitesimal irregularity in the surface of
the ground, magnified them all a hundred-fold. It was like riding in a
tumbril driven at top-speed over the Giant's Causeway. Lanyard was
shaken violently to the very marrow of his bones; he believed that even
his eyes must be rattling in their sockets....

Then the Parrott began to ascend. Singularly enough, this change was
marked, at first, by no more than slight lessening of the vibration:
still the machine seemed to be dashing over a cobbled thoroughfare at
breakneck speed; and Lanyard found it difficult to appreciate that they
were afloat, even when he looked down and discovered a hundred feet of
space between himself and the practice-field.

In another breath they were soaring over housetops.

Momentarily, now, the shocks became less frequent. And presently they
ceased almost altogether, to be repeated only at rare intervals, when
the drift of air opposing the planes developed irregularities in its
velocity. There succeeded, in contrast, the sublimest peace; even the
roaring of the propeller dwindled to a sustained drone; the biplane
seemed to float without an effort upon a vast, still sea, flawed only
occasionally by inconsiderable ripples.

Still rising, they surprised the earliest rays of the sun; and in their
virgin light the aeroplane was transformed into a thing of gossamer gold.

Continually the air buffeted their faces like a flood of icy water.

Below, the scroll of the world unrolled like some vast and intricately
illuminated missal, or like some strange mosaic, marvellously minute....

Lanyard could see the dial of the compass, fixed to a strut on the
pilot's left. By that telltale their course lay nearly due northeast.
Already the weltering roofs of Paris were in sight, to the right,
the Eiffel Tower spearing up like a fairy pillar of gold lace-work,
the Seine looping the cluttered acres like a sleek brown serpent, the
Sacre-Coeur a dream-palace of opalescent walls.

Versailles broke the horizon to port and slipped astern. Paris closed
up, telescoped its panorama, became a mere blur, a smoky smudge. But
it was long before the distance eclipsed that admonitory finger of
the Eiffel.

Vauquelin manipulating the levers, the plane tilted its nose and swam
higher and yet higher. The song of the motor dropped an octave to a
richer tone. The speed was sensibly increased.

Lanyard contemplated with untempered wonder the fact of his equanimity:
there seemed nothing at all strange in this extraordinary experience;
he was by no means excited, remained merely if deeply interested. And
he could detect in his physical sensations no trace of that qualmish
dread he always experienced in high places: the sense he had of
security, of solidity, was and ever remained wholly unaccountable in
his understanding.

Of a sudden, surprised by a touch on his arm, he turned to see through
the mica windows of the wind-mask the eyes of the aviator informed with
importunate doubt. Infinitely mystified and so an easy prey to
sickening fear lest something were going wrong with the machine,
Lanyard shook his head to indicate lack of comprehension. With an
impatient gesture the aviator pointed downward. Appreciating the fact
that speech was impossible, Lanyard clutched the struts and bent
forward. But the pace was now so fast and their elevation so great that
the landscape swimming beneath his vision was no more than a brownish
plain fugitively maculated with blots of contrasting colour.

He looked up blankly, but only to be treated to the same gesture.

Piqued, he concentrated attention more closely upon the flat, streaming
landscape. And suddenly he recognized something oddly familiar in an
approaching bend of the Seine.

"St.-Germain-en-Laye!" he exclaimed with a start of alarm.

This was the danger point....

"And over there," he reminded himself--"to the left--that wide field
with a queer white thing in the middle that looks like a winged
grub--that must be De Morbiban's aerodrome and his Valkyr monoplane!
Are they bringing it out? Is that what Vauquelin means? And if so--what
of it? I don't see ..."

Suddenly doubt and wonder chilled the adventurer.

Temporarily Vauquelin returned entire attention to the management of
the biplane. The wind was now blowing more fitfully, creating
pockets--those holes in the air so dreaded by cloud pilots--and in
quest of more constant resistance the aviator was swinging his craft in
a wide northerly curve, climbing ever higher and more high.

The earth soon lost all semblance of design; even the twisted silver
wire of the Seine vanished, far over to the left; remained only the
effect of firm suspension in that high blue vault, of a continuous low
of iced water in the face, together with the tuneless chanting of the
motor.

After some forty minutes of this--it may have been an hour, for time
was then an incalculable thing--Lanyard, in a mood of abnormal
sensitiveness, began to divine additional disquiet in the mind of the
aviator, and stared until he caught his eye.

"What is it?" he screamed in futile effort to lift his voice above the
din.

But the Frenchman understood, and responded with a sweep of his arm
toward the horizon ahead. And seeing nothing but cloud in the quarter
indicated, Lanyard grasped the nature of a phenomenon which, from the
first, had been vaguely troubling him. The reason why he had been able
to perceive no real rim to the world was that the earth was all a-steam
from the recent heavy rains; all the more remote distances were veiled
with rising vapour. And now they were approaching the coast, to which,
it seemed, the mists clung closest; for all the world before them slept
beneath a blanket of dull grey.

Nor was it difficult now to understand why the aviator was ill at ease
facing the prospect of navigating a Channel fog.

Several minutes later, he startled Lanyard with another peremptory
touch on his arm followed by a significant glance over his shoulder.

Lanyard turned quickly.

Behind them, at a distance which he calculated roughly as two miles,
the silhouette of a monoplane hung against the brilliant firmament,
resembling, with its single spread of wings, more a solitary, soaring
gull than any man-directed mechanism.

Only an infrequent and almost imperceptible shifting of the wings
proved that it was moving.

He watched it for several seconds, in deepening perplexity and anxiety,
finding it impossible to guess whether it were gaining or losing in
that long chase, or who might be its pilot.

Yet he had little doubt but that the pursuing machine had risen from
the aerodrome of Count Remy de Morbihan at St.-Germain-en-Laye; that it
was nothing less, in fact, than De Morbihan's Valkyr, reputed the
fastest monoplane in Europe and winner of a dozen International events;
and that it was guided, if not by De Morbihan himself, by one of the
creatures of the Pack--quite possibly, even more probably, by Ekstrom!

But--assuming all this--what evil could such pursuit portend? In what
conceivable manner could the Pack reckon to further its ends by
commissioning the monoplane to overtake or distance the Parrott? They
could not hinder the escape of Lanyard and Lucy Shannon to England in
any way, by any means reasonably to be imagined.

Was this simply one more move to keep the pair under espionage? But
that might more readily have been accomplished by telegraphing or
telephoning the Pack's confreres, Wertheimer's associates in England!

Lanyard gave it up, admitting his inability to trump up any sane excuse
for such conduct; but the riddle continued to fret his mind without
respite.

From the first, from that moment when Lucy's disappearance had required
postponement of this flight, he had feared trouble; it hadn't seemed
reasonable to hope that the Parrott could be held in waiting on his
convenience for many days without the secret leaking out; but it was
trouble to develop before the start from Port Aviation that he had
anticipated. The possibility that the Pack would be able to work any
mischief to him, after that, had never entered his calculations. Even
now he found it difficult to give it serious consideration.

Again he glanced back. Now, in his judgment, the monoplane loomed
larger than before against the glowing sky, indicating that it was
overtaking them.

Beneath his breath Lanyard swore from a brimming heart.

The Parrott was capable of a speed of eighty miles an hour; and
unquestionably Vauquelin was wheedling every ounce of power out of its
willing motor. Since drawing Lanyard's attention to the pursuer he had
brought about appreciable acceleration.

But would even that pace serve to hold the Valkyr if not to distance it?

His next backward look reckoned the monoplane no nearer.

And another thirty minutes or go elapsed without the relative positions
of the two flying machines undergoing any perceptible change.

In the course of this period the Parrott rose to an altitude, indicated
by the barograph at Lanyard's elbow, of more than half a mile. Below,
the Channel fog spread itself out like a sea of milk, slowly churning.

Staring down in fascination, Lanyard told himself gravely: "Blue water
below that, my friend!"

It seemed difficult to credit the fact that they had made the flight
from Paris in so short a time.

By his reckoning--a very rough one--the Parrott was then somewhere off
Dieppe: it ought to pick up England, in such case, not far from
Brighton. If only one could see...!

By bending forward a little and staring past the aviator Lanyard could
catch a glimpse of Lucy Shannon.

Though all her beauty and grace of person were lost in the clumsy
swaddling of her makeshift costume, she seemed to be comfortable
enough; and the rushing air, keen with the chill of that great
altitude, moulded her wind-veil precisely to the exquisite contours of
her face and stung her firm cheeks until they glowed with a rare fire
that even that thick dark mesh could not wholly quench.

The sun crept above the floor of mist, played upon it with iridescent
rays, shot it through and through with a warm, pulsating glow like that
of a fire opal, and suddenly turned it to a tumbled sea of gold which,
apparently boundless, baffled every effort to surmise their position,
whether they were above land or sea.

None the less Lanyard's rough and rapid calculations persuaded him that
they were then about Mid-Channel.

He had no more than arrived at this conclusion when a sharp, startled
movement, that rocked the planes, drew his attention to the man at
his side.

Glancing in alarm at the aviator's face, he saw it as white as
marble--what little of it was visible beyond and beneath the wind-mask.

Vauquelin was holding out an arm, and staring at it incredulously;
Lanyard's gaze was drawn to the same spot--a ragged perforation in the
sleeve of the pilot's leather surtout, just above the elbow.

"What is it?" he enquired stupidly, again forgetting that he could not
be heard.

The eyes of the aviator, lifting from the perforation to meet Lanyard's
stare, were clouded with consternation.

Then Vauquelin turned quickly and looked back. Simultaneously he ducked
his head and something slipped whining past Lanyard's cheek, touching
his flesh with a touch more chill than that of the icy air itself.

"Damnation!" he shrieked, almost hysterically. "That madman in the
Valkyr is firing at us!"

XXVI

THE FLYING DEATH

Steadying himself with a splendid display of self-control and sheer
courage, Captain Vauquelin concentrated upon the management of the
biplane.

The drone of its motor thickened again, its speed became greater, and
the machine began to rise still higher, tracing a long, graceful curve.

Lanyard glanced apprehensively toward the girl, but apparently she
remained unconscious of anything out of the ordinary. Her face was
still turned forward, and still the wind-veil trembled against her
glowing cheeks.

Thanks to the racket of the motor, no audible reports had accompanied
the sharp-shooting of the man in the monoplane; while Lanyard's cry of
horror and dismay had been audible to himself exclusively. Hearing
nothing, Lucy suspected nothing.

Again Lanyard looked back.

Now the Valkyr seemed to have crept up to within the quarter of a mile
of the biplane, and was boring on at a tremendous pace, its single
spread of wings on an approximate level with that of the lower plane of
the Parrott.

But this last was rising steadily....

The driver's seat of the Valkyr held a muffled, burly figure that might
be anybody--De Morbihan, Ekstrom, or any other homicidal maniac. At the
distance its actions were as illegible as their results were
unquestionable: Lanyard saw a little tongue of flame lick out from a
point close beside the head of the figure--he couldn't distinguish the
firearm itself--and, like Vauquelin, quite without premeditation, he
ducked.

At the same time there sounded a harsh, ripping noise immediately above
his head; and he found himself staring up at a long ragged tear in the
canvas, caused by the bullet striking it aslant.

"What's to be done?" he screamed passionately at Vauquelin.

The aviator shook his head impatiently; and they continued to ascend;
already the web of gold that cloaked earth and sea seemed thrice as far
beneath their feet as it had when Vauquelin made the appalling
discovery of his bullet-punctured sleeve.

But the monoplane was doggedly following suit; as the Parrott rose, so
did the Valkyr, if a trace more slowly and less flexibly.

Lanyard had read somewhere, or heard it said, that monoplanes were poor
machines for climbing. He told himself that, if this were true,
Vauquelin knew his business; and from this reflection drew what comfort
he might.

And he was glad, very glad of the dark wind-veil that shrouded his face,
which he believed to be nothing less than a mask of panic terror.

He was, in fact, quite rigid with fright and horror. It were idle to
argue that only unlikely chance would wing one of the bullets from the
Valkyr to a vital point: there was the torn canvas overhead, there was
that hole through Vauquelin's sleeve....

And then the barograph on the strut beside Lanyard disappeared as if by
magic. He was aware of a slight jar; the framework of the biplane
quivered as from a heavy blow; something that resembled a handful of
black crumbs sprayed out into the air ahead and vanished: and where the
instrument had been, nothing remained but an iron clamp gripping the
strut.

And even as any one of these bullets might have proved fatal, their
first successor might disable the aviator if it did not slay him
outright; in either case, the inevitable result would be death
following a fall from a height, as recorded on the barograph dial an
instant before its destruction, of more than four thousand feet.

They were still climbing....

Now the pursuer was losing some of the advantage of his superior speed;
the Parrott was perceptibly higher; the Valkyr must needs mount in a
more sweeping curve.

None the less, Lanyard, peering down, saw still another tongue of flame
spit out at him; and two bullet-holes appeared in the port-side wings
of the biplane, one in the lower, one in the upper spread of canvas.

White-lipped and trembling, the adventurer began to work at the
fastenings of his surtout. After a moment he plucked off one of his
gloves and cast it impatiently from him. A-sprawl, it sailed down the
wind like a wounded sparrow. He caught Vauquelin's eye upon him, quick
with a curiosity which changed to a sudden gleam of comprehension as
Lanyard, thrusting his hand under the leather coat, groped for his
pocket and produced an automatic pistol which Ducroy had pressed upon
his acceptance.

They were now perhaps a hundred feet higher than the Valkyr, which was
soaring a quarter of a mile off to starboard. Under the guidance of the
Frenchman, the Parrott swooped round in a narrow circle until it hung
almost immediately above the other--a manoeuvre requiring, first and
last, something more than five minutes to effect.

Meanwhile, Lanyard rebuttoned his surtout and clutched the pistol,
trying hard not to think. But already his imagination was sick with
the thought of what would ensue when the time came for him to carry
out his purpose.

Vauquelin touched his arm with urgent pressure; but Lanyard only shook
his head, gulped, and without looking surrendered the weapon to the
aviator....

Bearing heavily against the chest-band, he commanded the broad white
spread of the Valkyr's back and wings. Invisible beneath these hung
the motor and driver's seat.

An instant more, and he was aware that Vauquelin was leaning forward
and looking down.

Aiming with what deliberation was possible, the aviator emptied the
clip of its eight cartridges in less than a minute.

The vicious reports rang out against the drum of the motor like the
cracking of a blacksnake-whip.

Momentarily, Lanyard doubted if any one bullet had taken effect. He
could not, with his swimming vision, detect sign of damage in the
canvas of the Valkyr.

He saw the empty automatic slip from Vauquelin'p numb and nerveless
fingers. It vanished....

A frightful fascination kept his gaze constant to the soaring Valkyr.

Beyond it, down, deep down a mile of emptiness, was that golden floor
of tumbled cloud, waiting ...

He saw the monoplane check abruptly in its strong onward surge--as if
it had run, full-tilt, head-on, against an invisible obstacle--and for
what seemed a round minute it hung so, veering and wobbling, nuzzling
the wind. Then like a sounding whale it turned and dived headlong,
propeller spinning like a top.

Down through the eighth of a mile of space it plunged plummet-like;
then, perhaps caught in a flaw of wind, it turned sideways and began to
revolve, at first slowly, but with increasing rapidity in its fatally
swift descent.

Toward the beginning of its revolutions, something was thrown off,
something small, dark and sprawling ... like that glove which Lanyard
had discarded. But this object dropped with a speed even greater than
that of the Valkyr, in a brace of seconds had diminished to the
proportions of a gnat, in another was engulfed in that vast sea of
golden vapour.

Even so the monoplane itself, scarcely less precipitate, spun down
through the abyss and plunged to oblivion in the fog-rack....

And Lanyard was still hanging against the chest-band, limp and spent
and trying not to vomit, when, of a sudden and without any warning
whatever, the stentorian chant of the motor ceased and was blotted up
by that immense silence, by the terrible silence of those vast
solitudes of the upper air, where never a sound is heard save the
voices of the elements at war among themselves: a silence that rang
with an accent as dreadful as the crack of Doom in the ears of those
three suspended there, in the heart of that unimaginably pellucid and
immaculate radiance, in the vast hollow of the heavens, midway between
the deep blue of the eternal dome and the rose and golden welter of the
fog--that fog which, cloaking earth and sea, hid as well every vestige
of the tragedy they had wrought, every sign of the murder that they had
done that they themselves might not be murdered and cast down to
destruction.

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