Throb, throb, throb—­pause—­throb, throb—­he set his teeth, his face into an involuntary grimace, and crash!  He struck it!  He struck upward beneath the nearer wing.

Very slowly the wing of his antagonist seemed to broaden as the impetus of his blow turned it up.  He saw the full breadth of it and then it slid downward out of his sight.

He felt his stem going down, his hands tightened on the levers, whirled and rammed the engine back.  He felt the jerk of a clearance, the nose of the machine jerked upward steeply, and for a moment he seemed to be lying on his back.  The machine was reeling and staggering, it seemed to be dancing on its screw.  He made a huge effort, hung for a moment on the levers, and slowly the engine came forward again.  He was driving upward but no longer so steeply.  He gasped for a moment and flung himself at the levers again.  The wind whistled about him.  One further effort and he was almost level.  He could breathe.  He turned his head for the first time to see what had become of his antagonists.  Turned back to the levers for a moment and looked again.  For a moment he could have believed they were annihilated.  And then he saw between the two stages to the east was a chasm, and down this something, a slender edge, fell swiftly and vanished, as a sixpence falls down a crack.

At first he did not understand, and then a wild joy possessed him.  He shouted at the top of his voice, an inarticulate shout, and drove higher and higher up the sky.  Throb, throb, throb, pause, throb, throb, throb.  “Where was the other?” he thought.  “They too—.”  As he looked round the empty heavens he had a momentary fear that this second machine had risen above him, and then he saw it alighting on the Norwood stage.  They had meant shooting.  To risk being rammed headlong two thousand feet in the air was beyond their latter-day courage....

For a little while he circled, then swooped in a steep descent towards the westward stage.  Throb throb throb, throb throb throb.  The twilight was creeping on apace, the smoke from the Streatham stage that had been so dense and dark, was now a pillar of fire, and all the laced curves of the moving ways and the translucent roofs and domes and the chasms between the buildings were glowing softly now, lit by the tempered radiance of the electric light that the glare of the day overpowered.  The three efficient stages that the Ostrogites held—­for Wimbledon Park was useless because of the fire from Roehampton, and Streatham was a furnace—­were glowing with guide lights for the coming aeroplanes.  As he swept over the Roehampton stage he saw the dark masses of the people thereon.  He heard a clap of frantic cheering, heard a bullet from the Wimbledon Park stage tweet through the air, and went beating up above the Surrey wastes.  He felt a breath of wind from the southwest, and lifted his westward wing as he had learnt to do, and so drove upward heeling into the rare swift upper air.  Whirr, whirr, whirr.