CHAPTER XXXII
A heavy flying Voisin sank to the earth following theappareil de chasse. The bomb-thrower hopped out and ran to Sanderson to shake hands.
"You are a sight for sore eyes, Sandy!" he declared. "When Renaud brought back the news of your accident and that you were fooling theBoches, we voted you the palm. Butnow——"
The volatile fellow turned to make Belinda a sweeping bow.
"And your story is not unknown along this sector, Mademoiselle Melnotte. I pray you may have a safe voyage 'over the top,' as the boys say when they mount the trenches for a bayonet charge."
"Ah, Renaud! The top of the morning to you! Now, let's aboard. We'll have a gang ofBochesdown upon us if we don't."
He ran to take the extra seat upon the Nieuport, waving his hand cheerfully. His spirit of reckless courage seemed to inspire them all. Sanderson helped Belinda to mount into the Voisin, which was able to carry their weight besides that of the pilot and the machine gun.
Renaud remained behind as the aeroplanes ascended, one after the other. He still had work to do within the enemy's lines. In the gray dawn he stood, a dim figure in the clearing as the airplanes spiraled upward.
Yet somehow he seemed a dominating figure, too. It is by the work of such men as well as the bravery of the aviator-observers that the Allies are to conquer in this war.
The squadron of French airplanes had now drifted over the battleline while up from the German camps had sprungtaubenand Fokkers in swift pursuit.
The Voisin and its accompanying Nieuport rose higher in an attempt to escape the observation of these enemy craft. Both Sanderson and Belinda, unprepared for the aerial journey, soon began to suffer from the cold.
Renaud had, in the end, forced his farmer's smock upon the girl. She cowered under this, her teeth chattering, her extremities fast becoming numb. The pilot saw their suffering and made himself heard above the noise of the motor.
"Which shall it be, Monsieur and Mademoiselle? Frost or bullets?"
"It is a slim choice," groaned Sanderson. "But wemayescape shrapnel and mitrailleuse pellets. The cold takes her breath, Monsieur. I beg of you, descend!"
The great machine volplaned. It moved so slowly compared with the Nieuport, that the latter craft winged circles about the Voisin, ready to stave off attack.
They had, however, been discovered. Had not a fleet of battleplanes risen to meet the Germans from behind the French lines, the two tardy flying machines must have been swooped upon by a whole army ofBoches.
As it was, three of the enemy machines attacked the Voisin and accompanying Nieuport.
Sanderson left Belinda strapped to her seat and did good service with the machine gun. He almost immediately got one of the three enemy airplanes and the girl saw the aviator and his machine—the latter on fire—go spinning down the airways to a dreadful fall.
She was in the midst of battle and sudden, awful death. This was far worse than anything she had dreamed of in all her field hospital experience.
The thundering of the trench cannon, the bursting of shells, the results of the earth conflict, were dwarfed by what she now saw.
Men fighting, almost hand to hand, in the unstable air! It was the conflict of a nightmare—not reality! The Red Cross nurse, used as she had become to the horrors of warfare, had never seen anything like this.
The roaring of the motor drowned most other sounds. Yet there was an insistent whining in her ears that could not be the wind singing through the wires of the airplane.
A cable snapped, coiling in an ever-agitated, vibrating spiral. That was no mere incident of flying! She saw the pilot's cap suddenly torn open. A gory smear appeared along the side of his head above his exposed ear!
The bullets were flying like gnats about them.
She beheld Sanderson, working madly the crank of the machine gun, suddenly sway backward and clap his uninjured hand to his wounded shoulder.
Belinda shrieked: "You are hit! Frank, they have shot you!" and she flung herself along the seat to his side.
His lips moved:
"They've got me again, girl. But don't be alarmed. I could put that fellow out of business with a few more shots."
She sensed his meaning, if she did not hear all he said. The large enemy airplane was hovering overhead. Sanderson had aimed the gun at the tail of the German craft.
Belinda seized the crank. Somehow she managed to throw in the clutch and immediately began turning the crank steadily. She was cool despite the roar and rattle of the spiteful gun.
"There! There!" shouted Sanderson. "Brave girl!We've got him!"
The enemy airplane "went off on the wing." As it passed the Voisin the German pilot turned his pistol upon the three in the French machine.
Fearfully Frank turned to the girl as her head sank upon his shoulder. Through the sleeve of the smock she wore he saw the spreading crimson stain.
"Belinda! You are wounded!"
She sighed. Her eyes opened drowsily. He saw her lips move and read the words they formed:
"I—love—you. Whatever comes, we have—each—other, dear."
He held her tightly, forgetting the sharp pain of his own wound. The crippled Voisin drifted over the battleline and the pilot finally made a safe landing within French territory.
"By Hannah!" exploded Captain Raphael Dexter. "We'll do it to-morrow—at the American embassy—the two couples of us! I'll stand up with you, Frank, and you can stand up with me."
This was some days after the shipmaster had found the wounded couple and had moved heaven and earth to bring them back to Paris on the nearest thing to a special train that money and influence could buy in the French Republic.
Captain Raphael Dexter had just come back to the hotel to Sanderson from one of his frequent calls at the furnished apartment on the Rue di Rivoli, where Miss Roberta Melnotte reigned supreme. For Belinda was resting and recuperating and the small maid had little to do but watch "Mam'selle" do the work.
"She's a mighty tidy craft," Captain Dexter pursued, in the honesty of his heart. "And no Quaker, by Hannah! She just fizzes when she gets on the subject of these Germans. I declare I do like a woman with spunk in her.
"It's hard lines when a man has to go outside his own family and home for excitement. I've always, Frank, been hampered by milk-and-watery womenfolk. My wife and my darters—Prudence, Patience and Penelope—never had enough life in 'em to keep a man awake.
"Now," went on the shipmaster, "if a man had such a wife as this here Mam'selle Roberta would make, by Hannah! he wouldn't have to hunt distraction all over the earth—not by a jugful!"
"If Mademoiselle Roberta and Belinda agree," said the aviator, "I don't see why we can't do as you say, Skipper."
The old fellow grinned at him like a boy.
"That girl Belinda," he said, "would marry you in her cap and apron if you said the word. By Hannah! boy, you don't realize yet what sort of a woman you've got in her."
"Oh,don'tI?" the young man returned. "Don't you fool yourself, Captain."
Captain Dexter's plan was carried out. The embassy was American soil. They needed no special marriage license.
Even Aunt Roberta did not demand conformance with French custom. To tell the truth, since Belinda and Frank had decided, because of their wounds, to spend the furloughs granted them in New York, Aunt Roberta had been only too anxious to depart from that "so-dear Paris." She did not talk of it much, but after ten years in America, Paris had been a distinct disappointment to the taut little Frenchwoman.
"Besides," she confessed to her niece, "I am anxious to see that dear Old Saybrook—a spottrès charmant, I am sure.Ma foi, oui!Le capitainewrote long ago to his three daughters, Mesdames Prudence, Patience and Penelope, to tell them he would marry me. Though for my part I do not see how he could knowthat, when at the time he had not yet asked me," she added innocently. "Butle CapitaineDexter is so masterful.
"And so the Mesdames Prudence, Patience and Penelope have all written to me asking me to visit them.Ma foi!In marryingle capitaineI marry a family, do I not?"
To Belinda Frank said:
"I presume my brother Jim will rake me over the coals for enticing you into matrimony. To be an airman's wife——"
"But you fly for our country, Frank—for America! She needs you, as she needs me. We Americans have entered this war with noble intent. As our forefathers fought for freedom and democracy for us in seventy-six, so we must now fight for the same good gifts for all the world."
"I believe youarean American, Belinda—the best of us all!" Frank rejoined, gazing upon her earnest face tenderly.
THE END