e Master's enslaved secretaries kept the record of his victims.
* * * * *
The earth flung back the roaring of the little plane's motor. Bell had
but little time to act before other planes would dart upward to seek
him out. He dived, and the wing tip landing lights went on, sending
fierce glares downward. Twin disks of light appeared upon the earth.
Sheds, houses, a long row of shacks as if for laborers. A drying
field, on which were spread out plants with their leaves turning
brown. A wall about it....
"The damned stuff," said Bell grimly.
He swept on. Jungle, only jungle. He banked steeply as lights flicked
on and off below and as--once--the wing tip lights showed men running
frantically two hundred feet below.
Then a stream of fire shot earthward, and Bell held up his hand and
arm into the blast of the slip stream. It blew out the blaze that had
licked at his flesh. He stared down. The gas can had left a trailing
stream of fluid behind it as it went spinning down to earth. All that
stream of inflammable stuff was aflame. The can itself struck earth
and seemed to explode, and the trailing mass of fire was borne onward
by the wind and lay across a row of thatch-roofed buildings. An
incredible sheet of fire spread out. The stuff in the drying yard was
burning.
Bell laughed shortly, and flung over another of his flaming bombs, and
another, and the fourth....
* * * * *
He climbed for the skies, then, as rectangles of light showed below
and planes were thrust out of their lighted hangars. Four huge
conflagrations were begun. One was close by a monster rounded tank,
and Bell watched with glistening eyes as it crept closer. Suddenly--it
seemed suddenly, but it must have been minutes later--flame rushed up
the sides of that tank, there was a sudden hollow booming, and fire
was flung broadcast in a blazing, pouring flood.
"Their fuel tank!" said Bell, his eyes gleaming in the ruddy light
from below. He shut off his landing lights and went upward, steeply.
"I've played hell with them now!"
A thousand feet up. Two thousand. Two thousand five hundred.... And
suddenly Bell felt cold all over. The instrument board! The motor was
hot. Hot! Burning!
He shut it off before it could burst into flames, but he heard the
squealing of tortured, unlubricated metal grinding to a stop. He
leveled out. It was strangely, terribly silent in the high darkness,
d
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