He dropped
headlong--dropped and missed again! As he rushed past he saw the face of
Ostrog's aeronaut confident and cool and in Ostrog's attitude a wincing
resolution. Ostrog was looking steadfastly away from him--to the south.
He realized with a gleam of wrath how bungling his flight must be. Below
he saw the Croydon hills. He jerked upward and once more he gained on
his enemy.
He glanced over his shoulder and his attention was arrested. The
eastward stage, the one on Shooter's Hill, appeared to lift; a flash
changing to a tall grey shape, a cowled figure of smoke and dust, jerked
into the air. For a moment this cowled figure stood motionless, dropping
huge masses of metal from its shoulders, and then it began to uncoil a
dense head of smoke. The people had blown it up, aeroplane and all! As
suddenly a second flash and grey shape sprang up from the Norwood stage.
And even as he stared at this came a dead report; and the air wave of the
first explosion struck him. He was flung up and sideways.
For a moment his monoplane fell nearly edgewise with her nose down, and
seemed to hesitate whether to overset altogether. He stood on his
wind-shield, wrenching the wheel that swayed up over his head. And then
the shock of the second explosion took his machine sideways.
He found himself clinging to one of the ribs of his machine, and the
air was blowing past him and _upward_. He seemed to be hanging quite
still in the air, with the wind blowing up past him.
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