The woman, speechless, followed his gaze.  Across the sky flashed here and there brilliant beams of search-lights, but far more numerous were the swiftly moving star-like tail-lights of the Japanese planes.

Now and again they heard the crackling of machine guns, occasionally the burr of a disordered propeller and once the faint call of a human voice.

“Look,” said Ethel, pointing to the southward.  “See that brilliant yellow light.  It’s the Japanese signal plane; they are all to fly in towards it, and then, soaring high will escape over the American lines.”

“The lines are a joke,” returned Winslow.  “It’s plane against plane.  And the Japs will get the best of it; or at least they’ll get away, which is all they want.  They are going to Dakota, where five train loads of gasolene will be setting on a siding waiting to be captured.  We printed the story ten days ago, though the administration papers hooted at the idea.”

As they walked back toward the culvert, Ethel stumbled over something in the roadway.  She asked for the light, and discovered to her horror that she was standing in the midst of the remnants of a man who had been spattered over the hard macadam of the turnpike.

“Ugh! take me away,” she shuddered, averting her eyes and running toward the stream,

“The gunner fell out of the plane when she lurched, I guess,” commented Winslow to himself, examining the shreds of clothing attached to the mangled remains beneath him.

For some reason Winslow did not immediately follow the girl but went back and looked over the wrecked plane again.

He removed the magazine pistol from the impaled man’s pocket and searched about in the locker until he found a supply of cartridges.

The sky was beginning to brighten from approaching dawn now, and the searchlight flashes were less brilliant.  Winslow stood gazing upward until the forms of the lower flying planes became visible.  Suddenly he saw a disabled plane come somersaulting out of the air and fall into a field quarter of a mile away.  Evidently there were explosives aboard, for a shower of flame, smoke and splinters arose where she fell.

The onlooking man hopped over the fence and ran toward the spot.  There was little to be seen—­a mere ragged hole in the sod.  As he unconcernedly walked back he passed at intervals a propeller blade sticking upright in the soil, a broken can of rice cakes and a woman’s hand.

The dawn had now so far progressed that the observer could see some order in the movement of the air craft.  He studied with fascination the last of the Japanese planes as they circled up toward their aerial guide-post and moved thence in a steady stream to the northward.

The American planes which had been harassing and firing on the Japanese as they circled for altitude, now turned and closed in on the rear of the enemy and the fighting was fast and furious.  Plane after plane tumbled sickeningly out of the sky.  But for Winslow the sight lasted only a few minutes, for the combatants were flying at full speed and soon became mere flitting insects against the gray light of the morning sky.