CHAPTER XIII

“CAPTAIN” GRACE INVADES GERMANY

A jolt followed, then a series of them, and the Overton girl felt herself going down and down and down. After a little she summoned the courage to open her eyes and look down, but only for a second, then she pinched them shut.

“Shake yourself!” bellowed a voice above her.

Grace wondered at this marvel, for it was the voice of Major Colt. Once more she opened her eyes and, tilting back her head, looked up. She saw the pilot jumping up and down in the basket of the balloon only a few feet above her. Grace was going down only as fast as the rapidly collapsing balloon itself. The silk had fouled the long handling guys of the balloon and hung there, leaving the Overton girl suspended between sky and earth a little more than five thousand feet in the air.

Grace groaned when she discovered her predicament, but even then she did not lose possession of her faculties. It was characteristic of Grace to think calmly and clearly when facing an emergency. She did so now, but that clear thinking did not get her out of her terrible predicament.

“What shall I do?” she cried.

“Wiggle, woman, wiggle! Shake yourself loose and fall. You will be killed where you are, and so shall I if I don’t quickly get away.” He began jumping up and down again to assist in the operation of shaking her loose.

Obedient to his command Grace began to wiggle and twist, raising her arms and bringing them smartly down with a violent jerk, apparently as calm and collected as if she were standing on the ground.

“Great work!” approved the anxious watcher. “You’re getting loose. Keep it up.”

“There you go!” he yelled as the silk of the parachute released itself. Grace Harlowe shot downward half lying on her side, a black streak in the air. Almost at the same instant, Major Colt climbed over the edge of the basket, took a quick glance first up at the big gas bag, then at his lines, and let go.

This was no new operation for him. On several occasions he had been obliged to go home in this manner, but this time his mind had assumed a burden greater than any that had been on it in his previous experiences--he had the responsibility of a woman’s life. That is, he had had that responsibility. Just now Grace Harlowe was on her own responsibility, beyond the hope of assistance from any human being.

She seemed to have fallen miles and miles, when finally she sensed a gradual slackening of her speed. Grace had, on account of her light weight, taken a terrific plunge, but the parachute at last began to open. It did not bring her up with a jerk, but gradually, until her downward motion was reduced to about four hundred feet a minute, fast enough for a human being to fall.

Opening her eyes, Grace looked up and she breathed a sigh of relief as she saw the glistening silk of the huge parachute spread out high above her, slender lines running down from it, all centering in two ropes that looked reasonably safe. Up above, the lines looked cobwebby, too delicate for the purpose they were serving. Grace looked down, but raised her eyes quickly. The awful distance between her and the earth was too much for her ordinarily steady nerves to stand when she visualized it.

As she raised her eyes something suddenly floated into the range of her vision. It was a parachute and was coming down rather close to her.

“The major!” gasped the Overton girl. Then Grace Harlowe laughed. It was a hollow sort of a laugh, and sounded weak in her ears. The major’s arms and legs were sprawling as he leaned a little forward, and he looked for all the world like a great spider dangling from the end of a string, which so appealed to Grace Harlowe’s sense of humor that she forgot herself and laughed. Being much heavier than she he was rapidly gaining on her and would soon pass her at his present falling speed.

Grace, observing the ludicrousness of his position, quickly wrapped her ankles about each other, not desiring to make such a spectacle of herself as the balloon officer was doing.

Now they were abreast of each other and could look into each others’ faces. The Overton girl had been preparing herself for this very moment and at the instant the major came near enough to catch the full import of it, Grace smiled, and waved at him what ordinarily might have passed for a joyous hand.

The major waved back and shouted something at her, but she was unable to understand it. Voices up there sounded hollow, weak and far away. A few moments later she was looking down on the top of his swaying parachute, then Grace untangled herself and permitted her body to hang limply, which she found much easier than keeping herself under a strong physical strain.

“Hippy Wingate wouldn’t let me land his airplane. I wonder what he would say were he to see me making a landing in Germany from a parachute?” murmured the girl.

By this time objects began to grow out of the landscape in more or less detail. Houses appeared; the Rhine shimmered in the sunlight that had broken through the clouds, and here and there she thought she saw human beings, though she could not be positive as to this. Several villages came within her range of vision. Remarkable as it seemed to her, Grace realized that she had lost all fear. She was beginning to feel a great confidence in that filmy silk umbrella-shaped affair that was swaying far above her, that confidence having been born when she saw how easily it supported the major’s bulky figure.

“If the thing only will let me out without cutting up, I shall be well pleased,” Grace told herself. “I wonder what has become of the major?” He had passed out of her sight. Had the Overton girl looked for him further to the westward, she might have discovered the silk parachute settling down on the Rhine and, soon afterwards, the doughty major floundering in its waters.

His weight had carried him down in nearly a straight line, while Grace, being light, had drifted down the wind and was headed for a vineyard. She eyed the terraced hillside dubiously.

“If I land there they surely will have to replant their vineyard. I shall certainly leave a trail of devastation,” she chuckled. “In any event it will have been accomplishing something to lay waste even a small patch of enemy territory. Let me see, what am I to do? Oh, yes, I am to cut the strings the instant I feel my feet touching the ground.”

Grace removed the knife-lanyard from her neck and gripped the handle of the knife. Glancing up she fixed upon a point for cutting the rope, and even reached up to it with the knife hand.

“I wish Elfreda might see me now,” she chuckled. “Instead of a ‘balloonatic’ she would call me a ‘parachutic.’ I never heard of such an animal, but I must be it. Get ready, Grace Harlowe, and watch your step,” she reminded herself. “Upon second thought I think I am just as well satisfied that J. Elfreda is not to be a spectator of my landing. I have a growing suspicion that I am about to make an exhibition of myself. My, but that earth does look good!”

She could see human beings running up the terraces toward the point at which she might confidently be expected to alight. Grace did not approve of this, and wished they would all go away about their business. Among them she discovered some men in German uniforms. Her eyes narrowed.

“Boches! Too bad they couldn’t have had this opportunity of catching me a few weeks ago. Here we are. I am now about to show the natives what an American girl can do in piloting a parachute to earth.”

What the Overton girl had not taken into her reckoning was a tree that stood directly in her downward path. She went through its outer branches, but the parachute, relieved of a little of its weight, swayed forward and missed the tree, straightening up as her weight was once more thrown on the ropes.

The wind filled the parachute again, and it began to drift on, parallel with the rows of terraces. In going through the tree, Grace had lost the knife, but she did not miss it as yet, being concerned with her landing and the raking that the branches of the tree had given her. She discovered the loss when, upon reaching up to cut the rope, she found she had nothing with which to cut.

It was at that instant that her feet touched the ground. Up to this time the parachute had behaved very well indeed. As she already had expressed it to herself, the animal proved to be “thoroughly halter-broken.” However, the instant it felt that it was free, the thing began to cut up. It lurched and bucked and Grace went through half a dozen rows of vines, boring a path for herself with her head, bowling over two women and a boy in her mad drive.

“Catch me!” she gasped, but if her plea was heard it was not heeded. None of the spectators appeared to be eager to get within striking distance of the bird-woman who was first being whipped in the air, then on the vines of the Rhine vineyard. Her feet were in the air about as much as they were on the ground, for the parachute had now changed its course and was headed for the Rhine.

Ahead of her Grace espied a stone wall, and an idea came to her, for her mind was working even if, up to that point, her body had been unable to perform any functions of self-preservation.

“If I can get my feet against that wall as we go over, I may be able to brace myself for a few seconds until something rips. Surely the silk ought to tear in those circumstances.”

Her monologue was cut short by a dive into a thick hedge that divided two vineyards. It seemed to Grace as if the raking she got was literally tearing her to pieces. Her clothing, when she came through, was in tatters, her body bore many deep scratches and cuts, and blood from a scalp wound was trickling down her face. There was one side of Grace Harlowe, though, that no amount of mauling could subdue--her spirit of pluck.

“I’ll win yet,” she gritted, coming to her feet, which were jerked from the ground, while she kept her gaze fastened on the stone fence at the bottom of the rows of terraces.

There was, of course, the possibility of bumping her head against the stone wall, as the major had once done, instead of striking it feet first. If the former were her luck the result would be serious, so the Overton girl tried to jockey the parachute, but with little more success than had she been trying the same tactics on an outlaw mustang.

The wind down between the hills in the Rhine Valley was a variable wind, that hurled her first in one direction, then in another. Just now she was headed for the river--and the stone wall.

Grace met the wall feet first, as she had hoped to do. The shock to her nervous system was terrific, and it seemed to the girl as if her limbs were being driven up through her body. The parachute merely hesitated. It took a mighty lunge with the assistance of a favoring blast of wind, and jumped up a few feet into the air, taking Grace Harlowe with it, then dived for the railroad tracks at the base of the bluff.

Grace went down the bank on her stomach, keeping her head up as well as she could. She was suddenly yanked to her feet and slammed viciously down on the roadbed, while the parachute wrapped itself about a telegraph pole and went to sleep, a heap of torn silk, fit only for souvenir neckties.