Chapter XIII: A Mad Gamble for Liberty

When Dennis Dashwood saw that terrible tableau through the window of Von Rudolfstein's hunting-lodge, his first thought was that he had arrived too late to save his friend; and, drawing his revolver from beneath Blumberger's flying coat, he raced for the front entrance.

"Scoundrel and pig! I will split your skull even as I ground that cross of yours beneath my heel!" Dennis heard the old man bellow. "I will be bound you know more about the destruction of that fine Zeppelin than you will admit. Come, have you not finished yet, thou clumsy old fool?"

"Clumsy old fool, indeed!" screamed the woman. "Who was it discovered that he was a Frenchman, I'd like to know? You will be taking the whole credit to yourself, worthless one!"

"No, I want some of the credit myself," said a stern young voice from the doorway. "Shame on you both to treat a wounded man thus!" And he fired at one of the huge hands that held the woodcutter's axe.

The formidable weapon fell with a clang on to the floor, and the forester gave a howl like a wounded beast.

"Quick, Gretchen, ring the alarm bell! They will hear it at the village!"

The old woman, who had sent up a piercing shriek, ran towards another door; but Dennis was too quick for her, and, putting out his foot, she pitched headlong on to the stone floor and lay quite still.

"Move your own length," he cried to the husband, laying his revolver by the side of the basin of hot water, "and I will shoot you like a dog! Courage, Laval! All is ready, and I'll have you out of this in a brace of shakes."

"_Ma foi!_ you must forgive me, my dear friend," said the wounded officer. "When I heard the machine rise, I thought for a moment that you had deemed it wiser to save yourself."

"I'll tell you all about that afterwards," said Dennis grimly. "I'm going to save you now." And, cutting the cord, he threw the knife into the basin and proceeded to make a slip-knot. "We must make this old ruffian secure first."

"Look out!" exclaimed Laval. And Dennis raised his eyes just in time, for the cunning German had made a spring for the table, and already his unwounded hand had clutched the knife-handle. It was a huge thing, such as a butcher might use, and sharp as a razor.

"You _will_ have it, will you?" said Dennis grimly, and he shot the man through the heart. "It has saved me the trouble of binding him, and that makes the third Boche I have accounted for this morning. By Jove, old chap! you've got it pretty badly. Whatever happens, I must stop that bleeding."

The knife with which the woman had cut the sleeve of the leather jacket had revealed a terrible jagged wound in the Frenchman's shoulder, from which the blood welled through his fingers as he grasped it; but Dennis, tearing some linen that the woman had brought into strips, improvised a couple of tourniquets, utilising the spindles of a chair which he smashed to pieces for the purpose, and to his intense satisfaction he found the haemorrhage considerably reduced.

"Now, do you think you can walk?" he said anxiously. And Laval got up, reeling from the enormous quantity of blood he had lost.

"Half a mo!" said Dennis quickly. "This noose I had meant for Karl there will make a first-rate sling for that arm of yours. Another pull at the flask--that's good--and now we absolutely _must_ make a move."

"One moment!" exclaimed Laval, pointing across the room. "There is a French flag yonder. Will you do me the goodness to tear it from the wall and bring it with you? I cannot leave that trophy in the hands of these hogs. Besides, it may be useful to us later on."

Dennis ran across the room and lifted the silk tricolour from the hooks on which it hung, reading as he did so an inscription in faded gold letters on the shot-riven folds.

Von Rudolfstein's father had captured that colour in the war of 1870 at the head of his Cuirassiers, and it had hung there ever since.

"Look at all that remains of my beloved decoration!" murmured Laval, pointing to the floor.

"They shall give you another for last night's work," said Dennis.

Leaning on the boy's strong arm, the _pilote aviateur_ set out gamely, crossed the entrance hall, and had almost gained the rustic bridge when the clanging notes of a deep-tongued bell broke out behind them.

"The old vixen has soon come to her senses. Let us hope the village is not too near, for it will take us ten minutes at this rate," said Laval, squeezing the arm that supported him as his companion looked back.

He had heard it at the same moment--a hoarse shout from many voices and the trample of hoofs at the hunting-lodge.

"By Jingo! Cavalry!" said the lad.

"You must leave me and run for it. Good luck, old fellow!" exclaimed Claude Laval. But Dennis gave an odd smile and stooped down.

"Put your arm round my neck!" he cried. "I'm not going without you, so argument is useless and will only waste time. It will give you a bit of a twisting, I know. Now, stick tight!" And he started to run with the wounded man on his shoulders.

Several times he nearly stumbled, for the ground was sandy, but he had accomplished two-thirds of the distance when the alarm bell stopped, and there was a chorus of savage shouts from the house they had left.

"Hold on like grim death!" panted Dennis. "We'll do it yet!" And bracing himself for the last few yards, he doubled the pace and reached the shadow of the aeroplane as the leading files of a troop of Uhlans thundered across the bridge.

A stifled cry broke from Laval's lips, though he tried hard to repress it, as Dennis dragged him up by main force and tumbled him into the observer's cockpit.

"I know I've given the poor chap beans," he muttered to himself, as he handed him the captured tricolour. And, jumping down into the pilot's seat, he started the engines going for the second time that morning.

The officer at the head of the yelling horsemen was not thirty lengths away when the Aviatik began to move; and, roaring out an order to his men to draw their carbines, he emptied his own revolver at random.

Afterwards, when Dennis came to think calmly of that moment, he grew cold and shivered; but at the time itself his heart had given a mighty throb as the rubber-tyred wheels of the chassis left the ground, and they started on their long flight for home.

He knew perfectly well, as several bullets pierced the lifting planes and one starred on the stay he had tightened, that their troubles had by no means ceased when they left the Uhlans behind them. By that time keen eyes would be watching, not only the earth, but the sky, and he had only his wits to guide him.

There was the sun just rising to show him which was the east, and already far down below he saw the ribbon of the Rhine which they must cross; but sluing round to look back, he saw the thing he feared--an escadrille of German aircraft rising from the plain over which the smoke from the Zeppelin hangar still hung.

Already the enemy airmen were in pursuit!

Claude Laval had turned towards him at the same moment, and their eyes met. He had seen it too, but the blanched face of the wounded man shone with hope and confidence. His mouth opened, though the words were lost, but he made a gesture with his sound arm, and Dennis understood.

They were heavy clouds to which Laval had pointed, and Dennis steered straight for them, devouring the chart with his eyes.

Far down below and ahead of them in the extreme distance was the blue line of the Vosges, and he thought he could distinguish the Ballon d'Alsace, but of that he was not sure. His pursuers would naturally imagine that he would make for the nearest point of the French frontier, but that was not in his mind. If he had to deal with the fast-rising Fokkers, his only chance he knew was to gain the cloud-bank and keep within its protecting folds.

To fight with a wounded observer was out of the question, and already he had decided to steer north-west rather than due west, which would bring him, roughly, somewhere between Epinal and Nancy--always provided that he was not overtaken.

There were a thousand risks to run, not only from the enemy fleet, but from the French guns when he should come in sight of them; but as they soared into the chill blanket of vapour his spirits rose, and for a moment he shut off the engines to listen.

The whir and throb of their pursuers already seemed to come from every point of the compass--from below, from either side and, what was more alarming, from above; but banking sharply to the right he thrashed his course at topmost speed, praying that the cloud-bank might not cease.

The baragraph showed him that he was already eight thousand feet above the earth, and, straightening out the machine, he wiped the mist from his goggles with the back of his glove and kept on.

All at once the Aviatik shot out of the cloud with a clear stretch of sky in front of them, and, looking back and upwards, he saw the wicked nose of a Fokker emerge into view on their right beam a couple of hundred yards away and well above them.

Already their own machine was approaching another cloud-bank, but the Fokker had seen them, and plunged downward in their direction.

The instant the cloud swallowed them up Dennis concentrated all his efforts on the foot-bar which controlled the vertical rudder, and, grasping the wheel at the same time, swung sharply to the left, leaving their pursuer to dive down five hundred feet into space before he discovered that he had missed his mark.

Neither of them knew that the nose of the Fokker had been within twelve inches of the Aviatik's tail-planes; and but for the fact that the German suspended his fire at the moment of diving, it would have been all over with the raiders.

Dennis reverted to his old tactics when he found that they had escaped, and turning to the right again, with an anxious eye on the compass, saw no more of the enemy for nearly a quarter of an hour, until, emerging into a burst of bright sunshine and looking down, he found himself immediately over a fierce engagement on the eastern crest of the Vosges mountains. Shells were bursting below them, and though he did not know it, they were passing above the Col de la Schlucht, from which the French guns were bombarding Munster. He could see the enormous puffs of smoke--white, black, and some of them tinged with yellow--but what was of greater moment to them both was the presence of the enemy machines a few miles to the southward.

They, too, were just leaving the cloud-bank, which ended there, misled by the idea that their prey would make a bee-line for safety; but they saw the Aviatik at the same moment that Dennis saw them, and circled round to cut him off from home.

Dennis realised that he was now above French soil. His engines were working magnificently, and dropping to an altitude of two thousand metres, which gave him a clear view of towns and buildings, he consulted his chart, identified Nancy far away on his right front, and trusted all to Providence.

He had judged wisely, as it proved, and knew that he was out-distancing the enemy aircraft tearing in hot pursuit--all but one persistent Fokker that evidently meant business. He even found time to glance backward at his companion, who, with the folds of the French flag wrapped round his shattered shoulder to dull the force of the keen air, sat huddled up in his cockpit, apparently insensible.

Once a shell came up from the ground, and burst between pursuer and pursued, and a gleam of fierce hope shot through the lad's heart as he saw the French "75" making good practice against the vicious little gadfly.

Higher and higher mounted the Fokker to get out of range, and still Dennis kept on, remembering his appointment with the French Generalissimo, and glancing alternately from the chart to the little clock beside the aneroid barometer, whose registration was useless at that height.

"Twenty-five minutes! Great Scott! can I do it?" he muttered, clutching the control wheel with his frozen fingers.

* * * * *

"Well, messieurs, it is a pity, and I am afraid something must have happened to that young officer," said General Joffre, consulting his watch for the last time. "I must find another messenger to carry my reply to the Commander-in-Chief of our Allies."

And then he stopped as a murmured exclamation broke from the group of officers, and everyone looked up to the grey sky across which some rainclouds were drifting.

"It is an aerial combat, mon General," said one of them. "_Ma foi!_ I should not care to travel at that speed, let alone fight with nothing under one's feet!"

Two dots scarcely larger than flies on a window-pane had suddenly detached themselves from the rain clouds, and were manoeuvring curiously in the direction of the village. Larger and larger they grew, the smaller dot obviously trying to gain the advantage of height, and mingling with the throb of the engines they could now hear the rattle of a machine-gun.

"What is the meaning of this?" said the Generalissimo, fixing them with his glass. "These machines are German. I can see the Iron Cross painted upon them both. Send word to the battery yonder to make ready. It is a raid, and they are adopting those manoeuvres to deceive us."

By the wall of the restaurant the young French chauffeur, Martique, who had driven Dennis to that place, waited with a smile dancing in his eyes, hoping against hope that the thing of which he alone knew was the thing that was taking place up yonder!

He started when he heard the Generalissimo's order, for even yet he could not be sure, but the dots had now grown so large that it was possible to tell the make of the two machines, and somebody said: "The first one is an Aviatik; the other is a Fokker."

If the seeming chase were a piece of German stage management it was certainly being carried out with marvellous realism, for now Martique could distinctly see the puffs of the machine-gun, and that the bullets were ripping through the lifting planes of the Aviatik.

"Mon General!" he cried suddenly, "for the love of heaven order our battery not to fire! Look! The observer in that machine is waving a French flag. He has dropped it now, and he slues his gun into position--but with one arm only! He is wounded!"

"Do you know what you are talking about, young man?" said the Generalissimo sternly.

"Forgive me, mon General!" faltered Martique. "It was a little secret. Oh, look! The Fokker has got the top place, and is about to ram poor Laval and his English companion!"

Everyone held his breath, for indeed it was as Martique had cried. The Aviatik was volplaning down in a wide spiral now, and above it the relentless pursuer poised like a hawk. He was judging the circumference of those spiral curves, and even the Generalissimo himself tightened his lips under the huge white moustache.

Over the side of the fuselage there was no mistaking the glorious red, white and blue that fluttered wildly in the descent, and then the Aviatik's swivel-gun spoke three times. A German always speaks French badly, but that German gun rang out with a true accent that time, and the Fokker gave a strange quiver, burst into a sheet of flame, and dropped like a stone to death and destruction six thousand feet below!

The engines of the Aviatik ceased; the _nacelle_, pointing earthwards, curved suddenly up again, and floating for some distance like a tired bird, the machine dropped out of sight on the other side of the tall poplars.

There was an instant stampede to the spot, the Generalissimo himself following, unable to curb his curiosity; but as he reached the bank at the edge of the cornfield a running figure in leather jacket and flying helmet checked his pace and, throwing up his goggles, saluted smartly.

"Mon General, I hope you will accept my apology," said Dennis Dashwood. "I am five minutes behind my time, but I am here, and I have a good deal to tell you!"