Adventure Magazine Cover — page 176: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

166 together that an ordinary banking turn was impossible. There was but one thing to do. He jerked back the stick and put on full rudder. Up went the D. H., and then over, nearly on its back. For a moment it hovered there, and then shot downward, the nose curving slowly upward. His right wing was almost scraping the trees on that side, and the floor of the valley rose to meet the uncontrollable downward rush. With the stick clamped back as far as it would go Hemingwood waited impassively. Either the ship would come out of the dive in time, or it wouldn’t. It finally did. Ten feet above the treetops it was straightened out, and sped like a bullet back over the trail it had come. “T must tell Thomason about this,”’ solilo- quized the calm Hemingwood as he ap- proached the spot where the mountaineers were still standing. Thomason, a balloonist, had actually been shot down somewhere in the mountains not so far from this very place, and had barely got out alive. There were two shots at him as he flashed by, and he waved a derisive arm at them. He was entering the thick mist now, for there was but one recourse left. That was to get altitude enough in the fog to clear the mountains that hemmed the valley in on all sides, and make for the river. It was a desperate situation, and the nerve-strain on any pilot but the Duke would have been a breaking one. He was as cool as a May morning. In a moment he was out of sight of the ground. He watched his speedmeter like a hawk. That was the only way to estimate whether he was close to a stall, or else div- ing. It crawled from 85 miles an hour to a hundred, and he pulled up sharply. At intervals he strained his eyes ahead, striving to pierce the smoky, opaque screen that made him as blind as a bat. Eight hundred feet—he must be high enough to clear any mountains. The world about him was one of mist—not a strip of ground or a glimpse of the sky could he get. At a hundred miles an hour, after Jeveling out as closely as he could estimate, the big ship roared through the fog. His eyes glued to the speedmeter, every faculty intent on keeping the ship on an even keel, he banked slightly until his com- pass read due north. He knew the Ohio silver came in sight. Adventure was within a few miles of him, but how was he to know when he reached it? He could not see the ground, and the hills extended close to the banks of the river. He flew for six minutes, and then decided to risk coming closer to the ground. He nosed down, and in a shallow dive felt his way toward the ground at ninety miles an hour. At five hundred feet a vaguely dark strip below him, seen too dimly to pick up details, showed him that he was not over the river. He came down a little farther, and saw the ground fall away in a steep slope. At the foot of the slope a fairly large plowed field was discernible, and then a streak of With an exultant roar the De Haviland dropped toward the river. He turned to follow the river, less than a hundred feet high. If the motor should cut out it would mean landing in the water, but Hemingwood felt blissfully safe. He could see for a considerable distance ahead now. He dropped down until he was less than ten feet from the surface of the water, and shot past Aurora, Indiana, at a hundred and twenty miles an hour. He zoomed by a vessel, the decks of which were black with waving, wondering men who watched him - flash by. A thin filter of sunlight struck the surface of the river as the Big Miami River, which he would follow into Dayton, came in sight five miles ahead. George heaved a sigh of relief. There were bridges over the Big Miami at Hamilton and Middletown, and ten feet off the water would not be possible flying altitude. He lifted his ship in a steep climb, and succeeded in getting seven hun- dred feet before the river grew vague in its outlines below him. The flat Ohio country was very comfort- ing after the miles of flying over mountains and water. The fog was breaking slowly, and finally he came in sight of Dayton, with McCook Field showing flat and green in the corner of the city. He looked back at Woodruff. The non- com’s face looked as if its owner had been dragged through a _ knot-hole. It was strained and white, and every muscle was tensed. . “A couple of the boys bumped off in the Transcontinental by running into moun- tains in a storm,” reflected Hemingwood as he dived for Wilbur Wright Field, where DOOLK C©@