And at the same instant the far-off Fokker at which O'Malley had been firing realized that there was something wrong about this big, slow, black-crossed machine; the German swung upon it, his machine guns going. Gerry's engine went dead and he found himself automatically guiding the "bus" in a volplane which he was keeping as slow and as "flat" as possible as he glided below the battle and sought upon the ground for a place to land.
He examined his altimeter and learned that he was still up four thousand feet, and with the flat gliding angle of the wide-winged training biplane, he knew that he had a radius of more than two miles for the choice of his landing. The battle was still going on above Mannheim, as the allied bombers had swung back. A machine flashed into flame and started down, with its pilot evidently controlling it at first; then too much of the wing fabric was consumed and it dropped. Other machines, too, were leaving the battle; some of them seemed to be Germans damaged and withdrawing; others appeared to be all right—they had just spent their ammunition, perhaps. One got on the tail of Gerry's machine, looked him over, and then dropped past him.
Gerry was gliding north and west of the city, making for wide, open spaces shown on the map which he had been studying—the smooth spaces of the fields of the Schloss von Fallenbosch. Five hundred yards away through the moonlight, and at almost his same altitude, he saw another machine gliding, as he was, with engine shut off; the circle of their volplane swept them toward each other.
In the forward seat pit of the English machine—for
