CHAPTER III

THE SPECTRE IN THE CLOUD

"There it is!----"

Chick's voice, shrill with terror, died away, and Don, startled for an instant, almost let the glide become a dive; but he caught his stick and gunned ahead, giving up the glide they had been in.

The radial engine, though of as silent a type as any, drowned any reply from Garry or Don until the youthful pilot, climbing, had gained a good thousand feet more of altitude. Then he cut the gun and let the glide begin, so that the Dart was quietly nose-low in a gentle glide.

"Don't go off at half-cock that way," he remonstrated.

"No!" Garry was a trifle annoyed by Chick's impetuous screeches. "If you insist on yelling 'wolf!' every time the sheet lightning flickers on the clouds, you'd better be put down--and stop trying to be an airlane guard."

"Was it sheet lightning?" Chick asked lamely.

"Yes. There's a storm brewing."

"Then we'd better go home!"

"Don't be so anxious." Garry spoke sharply. "The storm isn't here and won't be for an hour. We're going to stay aloft at least till the mail 'plane comes in. They 're inaugurating the new ship-to-shore service and you wouldn't want to be making a pass at the field just when that crate comes over, and make him lose ten minutes waiting for us to shoot the field and land and get the ship off the runway."

"No."

Don climbed again.

That cruise, however, began to be tedious. Already they had been for a good half hour aloft, cruising to and fro, mostly over the dismal, dark reaches of the salt marsh.

Don chose to stick quite closely over the area which had been the scene of one real mishap and several other narrowly averted crashes.

The spectre had always appeared over the swamp.

"I wish they'd start draining it," Don mused, thinking of the gloomy marsh below his trucks. "Those engineers spend so much time surveying! If they'd get their men out there, and start work, there'd soon be no dark place close to the airport, and the ghost would go away. Or--if anybody should be trying to ruin Uncle Bruce's new real estate development and the airport business, they'd see it was no use and quit!"

Having nothing to occupy his mind, as he kept the Dart almost automatically at flying speed and in level flight or climbing for a subsequent glide, the youth, depending on Garry and Chick for their first inkling of anything unusual, reviewed the strange mysteries which had upset the morale not only of the airport personnel and of the pilots, but of the residents of Port Washington and the vicinity, as well.

Four weeks before, to the day, just before the dedication of the new airport which had been opened in conjunction with the already established seaplane base and aircraft plant, an airplane had cracked up in the swamp. It had approached, down wind, over the morass that lay where the draining project would later bring airport expansion and a cottage community. Since the full night-landing light equipment had not been completed, at the newly dedicated field, no provision had been made at that time for night landings and so no one had been on watch for the free-lance airplane which had gone down.

Its pilot had not been badly hurt and had managed to attract rescuers by use of flares.

His story, told that night, and later persisted in at the Inquiry Board investigation of the smash, had been a weird one.

It had fired the superstitious air folks to hear him affirm that he had been making his approach to try out the new field, quietly, when a sudden glow of light in a cloud almost dead ahead of his nose, only a scant few feet higher, had startled him.

Almost at the same instant, as he maintained in his assertion, from within the glowing cloud he had seen the swift approach of a shape.

"It was an airplane, but it wasn't an airplane!" he had maintained, declaring that its shape was blurred, its outlines ghostly, its position seemingly also to shake up and down, as though either the ship was vibrating dreadfully or its very shape of terror made the moist cloud stuff shudder.

"It seemed to be coming down and straight at me!" the pilot had declared. "I got just the glimpse--then I dived, and of course my engine was full gun and I power-dived and only came out of it just above the marsh."

Then he had added the finishing, terrifying word.

"I looked up, to see what had become of that other 'bus, and--the sky was silent, deserted, dark!"

On each of the succeeding seventh days, as Don recalled, a pilot had set down, shaken and horrified, to report seeing a similar apparition of the skies, a very phantom coming out of clouds!

"It's all imagination!" Don murmured, reflectively. "One caught the scare from the other!----"

"Don!----"

"There!--side-slip! Quick!"

Don, catching the fright if not the sense of Chick's scream, and the surprise of Garry's order, kicked rudder to give the banked Dart, making a gentle circuit of the swamp, a chance to shift downward and sideways.

Then he glanced to his left: common sense told him that the bank with left wingtip elevated, causing the slip to the right, and Garry's consequent order meant that whatever gave rise to the order was to his left and slightly higher. He looked that way.

Just before a brightening shimmer of Summer lightning blotted out the spectacle, Don saw what made his flesh crawl.

Apparently lighting up a large, fluffy, steamy-white cloud with its own spectral glow, some phantom ship came fleetly forth through that misty, white screen.

Dark, almost black, yet not distinct and sharp, because of the mist he supposed, that mystical, phantasmic craft grew large--and was blotted from view by the bright flash of the distant storm.

Gone! Absolutely vanished! Once seen, for a bare instant, the strange and ghostly mirage had disappeared when the blaze of the lightning faded.

Immediately Garry, cool and self-contained, sent over the side a parachute-flare, self-igniting with the jerk as the 'chute opened to sustain the vivid, unearthly light in mid-sky, slowly dropping.

Chick cowered. Garry remained erect, calm, poised, staring swiftly above, to either side, and below.

He saw nothing. Slightly blinded by the recent flash of Summer electricity, and still being a little dazzled by the green of the flare that had ignited almost in front of him, he could not make out any distinct object in any direction.

Don, who had been looking down at his inclinometer to gauge his bank as he glided, just when the cries first came, was not dazzled: he sent a swift, questing look in every direction.

The sky was blank, except for the after-flare of the dying electrical discharge and the growing glare of the green light.

"But--was that still the shadow of the spook 'plane, that I just saw?" he muttered, inquiring of his straining eyes. If so, the barely discerned shadow was gone.

"I don't see Scott!" he shouted back to Chick. "Do you?"

Chick, speechless, shook his head.

"He's probably up above the clouds by this time!" called Garry; he knew how fast was the Dart. Probably, as he reasoned it, the watching pilot had seen the light in the clouds before the green flare had gone over the side. Its blaze had prevented their dimmed light from discerning the Dart, that was all.

"There comes the mail 'plane!" cried Don, waving an arm toward the North. Down the Sound, bringing the mail from a vessel still a hundred miles from land, the swift 'plane was seeking to prove the commercial advisability of lopping off delays in getting trans-oceanic mail to its destination.

They watched the fleet approach of the small ship that had been catapulted from a huge liner's cabin deck.

"Look!" Chick's voice was shrill.

Garry even, caught his breath. Unexpectedly, like the vision of a fantastic nightmare, Don also saw the catastrophe.

Sharply, parallel with their own course, the mail 'plane tipped down its nose.

Before it, a luminous cloud seemed to glow with a weird, unearthly light.

Down went the mail craft--into darkness--into the bay.

Sharply Don slapped his stick sidewise, kicking rudder. On wingtip he banked around, straightened, gave his engine full gun, elevating the nose, darting straight for that cloud. Still it seemed to glow!

On a full-gun climb Don made his ship climb at that cloud.

The glow disappeared.

Straight through the cloud he drove--and came out!

Except for their ship, immersed in that humid, wet mist for an instant, the cloud had been devoid of any tangible object. No other ship, hiding by some miracle of skilful piloting, had been there to dodge, to reveal itself in escaping Don's intrepid charge.

Out of the cloud they sped.

Don cast his eyes backward. The fluff, hardly disturbed except for a swirl of fleecy smoke where their propeller had moiled up the edge of the filmy drapery, lay at the tail.

"Oh-h-h!" Again, almost inarticulate, Chick screamed.

"Dive!"

As he cried out, Garry realized that his call was useless--late!

Straight ahead of the Dragonfly's speeding, climbing nose, in one more of those horrible, mistily glowing banks of Summer moisture, lit as if with a phantom's phosphorescent fire, their horrified eyes saw a vision, dreadful, inescapable!

Two misty, shadowy airplanes, appearing as though silhouetted in shuddering brown against the gleaming of some infernal light, came at one another.

Don knew that his ship could not avoid adding its own crash to that cataclysmic impact.

There was not time to dive.

Already the propeller was within a hundred feet of the others!

Don closed his eyes, braced.

Mechanically he had depressed the nose by throwing forward the stick.

But there was no rip and rend of wings stripped off as they went under the trucks of those other airplanes.

There was nothing--neither impact nor blow, crash nor other sound.

Don looked swiftly upward.

The cloud was around them--dim--silent--ghostly! And dark!

And the other ships--had they dived, fallen? Or, were they but the phantoms of over-stimulated imagination?

They had come together--but Don realized that he had heard no crash.

Hastily he pulled out of the dive. Soberly he turned the nose toward Mystery Airport--baffled--not knowing what to think, what to believe!