Puffs of vapor shot out.
Something spat through the wall beside Bell. But the roaring of the
motors kept up, and the pounding of the waves against the curved bow
of the boat-body grew more and more violent.... Sweat came out on
Bell's face. The ship was not lifting....

* * * * *

But it did lift. Slowly, very slowly, carrying every pound with which
it could have risen from the water. It swept past the police launch at
ninety miles an hour, but no more than five feet above the waves. A
big, clumsy tramp flying the Norwegian flag splashed up river with its
propeller half out of water. Bell dared to rise a little so he could
bank and dodge it. He could not rise above it.

He had one glimpse of blonde, astonished beards staring over the stern
of the tramp as he swept by it, his wing tips level with its rail and
barely twenty feet away. And then he went on and on, out to sea.

He began to spiral for height fully four miles offshore, and looked
back at the sprawling city. Down by the waterfront a thick, curling
mass of smoke was rising from one spot abutting on the water. It
swayed aside and Bell saw the rectangular opening out of which the
plane had come.

"Ortiz's in there," he said, sick at heart. "Dying as he planned."

But there was a sudden upheaval of timbers and roof. A colossal burst
of smoke. A long time later the concussion of a vast explosion. There
was nothing left where the warehouse had been.

Bell looked, and swore softly to himself, and felt a fresh surge of
the hatred he bore to The Master and all his works. And then filmy
clouds loomed up but a little above the rising plane, and Bell shot
into them and straightened out for the south.

* * * * *

For many long hours the plane floated on to southward, high above a
gray ocean which seemed deceptively placid beneath a canopy of thin
clouds. The motors roared steadily in the main, though once Bell
instructed Jamison briefly in the maintenance of a proper course and
height, and swung out into the terrific blast of air that swept past
the wings. He clung to struts and handholds and made his way out on
the catwalk to make some fine adjustment in one motor, with six
thousand feet of empty space below the swaying wing.

"Carburetter wrong," he explained when he had closed the cabin window
behind him again and the motors' roar was once more dulled. "It was
likely to make a lot of carbon in the