dered on valorously. Far below was a vast expanse of
thick jungle, intercepted but nowhere broken by occasional small
streams and now and then the tiny, angular things which might be
houses. But houses were very infrequent. In the first ten miles--with
a view of twenty miles in every direction--Bell picked out no more
than four small groups of buildings which might be the unspeakably
isolated _fazendas_ of the folk of this region.

"Ribiera was coming this way," he muttered.

He fumbled the headphone of the radio set into place. The set seemed
to be already arbitrarily tuned. He turned it on. There was a
monotonous series of flashes, with the singing note of a buzzer in
them. A radio direction signal.

"Ribiera's on the way."

Bell stared far ahead, without reason. And it seemed to him that just
then, against that far distant guiding peak, he saw a black speck
floating in mid-air.

* * * * *

He pulled back the joy stick. Detached, feathery clouds spread across
the sky, and he was climbing for them. Paula looked behind at him, and
he pointed. He saw her seem to stiffen upon sight of the other
aircraft.

In minutes Bell's plane was tearing madly through sunlit fleecy
monsters which looked soft and warm and alluring, and were cold and
damp and blinding in their depths. Bell kept on his course. The two
planes were approaching each other at a rate of nearly two hundred
miles an hour.

And then, while the harsh, discordant notes of the radio signal
sounded monotonously in his ears, Bell stared down and, through a rift
between two clouds, saw the other plane for an instant, a thousand
feet below.

The sun shone upon it fiercely. Its propeller was a shimmering,
cobwebby disk before it. It seemed to hang motionless--so short was
Bell's view of it--between earth and sky: a fat glistening body as of
a monstrous insect. Bell could even see figures in its cockpits.

Then it was gone, but Bell felt a curious hatred of the thing. Ribiera
was almost certainly in it, headed for the place to which he had
spoken the night before. And Bell was no longer able to think of
Ribiera with any calmness. He felt a personal, gusty hatred for the
man and all he stood for.

* * * * *

His face was grim and savage as his own plane sped through the clouds.
But just as the two aircraft had approached each other with the
combined speed of both, so they separated. It seemed on