Bill Barnes Air Adventurer, July 1935 — page 86: what you’re looking at

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

84 BILL BARNES cled toward the front of the motorized column. Two bombs crashed to earth a couple of hundred feet away from the trucks bearing infantry in sky-blue. Bill cursed to himself and opened the throttle of the Scarlet Stormer. He wondered why the French didn’t have some military planes with them to pro- tect their trucks. They must have planes at Diego Suarez. Then he forgot the French army and the trucks below him. He forgot every- thing but the huge bomber bristling with machine guns. He waited until he was only a few hundred teet above the bomber before he clamped his fingers down on his gun trips. White streams of tracers danced out to meet those com- ing from the machine gun atop the bomber. He shoved his stick forward a little to correct his aim. Bullets tore through the tail of the Stormer as he went over the big plane at a terrific speed. The forward gunner raked it again as he pulled out of his dive and chandelled_ back. Four machine guns poured lead at him as he sped back to the attack. Bullets seemed to come from everywhere. He zoomed upward to escape that deadly hail of lead. The bomber circled back to renew its attack on the column below as Bill shoved the Stormer into a vertical dive. Air screamed and shrieked between his bracing struts as he opened his motor. Down a thousand feet, he eased up and came underneath the bomber. A belly gun poked its nose out of the fuselage and opened fire on him as he zoomed up- ward. The swivel guns along the sides added their tat-tat-tat to the stutter of the belly gun. He kicked the Stormer out of range again and climbed upward. To avoid being hit he had to maneuver at such a high rate of speed that his own shooting was inaccurate, while the gunners in the bomber were shooting with devastating accuracy. He glanced out at the gull wings of the Stormer and cursed bitterly. A ter- rible fury suddenly took possession of him. The blood drummed into his bronzed face and turned it a deep-red. First this crew of murderers had shot down one of his Snorters over the Mediterranean. Then they had kidnaped and perhaps killed his chief of staff, Shorty. Red Gleason’s Snorter had been perforated until it was useless. Sandy’s Eaglet could barely get off the ground to be stowed away inside the transport. Now they were methodically drilling the Stormer full of holes. How some of his men had escaped death was more than he could under- stand. It would cost him a small for- tune to replace the lost Snorter and re- pair the other one and the Eaglet—to say nothing of the Scarlet Stormer. Bill raised one huge fist and brought it down in the palm of his other hand with a resounding smack. Sandy gazed at him with eyes that were wide. He had never seen Bill Barnes in such a rage before. He had never seen his eyes gleam with such a wild, mad light. “T’ll knock their bomber from here into the Indian Ocean!” he roared into the telephone. “Then I’m going up and bomb their fort off the face of the earth. I'll get Shorty or I’ll kill all of them!” His lips twisted into a snarl as he stuck the nose of the Stormer up until he was a thousand feet above the bomber. Leveling off on an even keel he glanced down over the side. The bomber was going back to its business of bombing. “All right,” he said. “You asked for Now you get it!” His muscular hand pushed the control column forward until the nose of the Stormer pointed almost straight down. He yanked his throttle wide. He began firing long before he was within range, correcting his aim as he watched his tracers. A rail of lead came pouring back at him, but he kept straight on. If, oO mn CO Ghook CO