In a month or two I
shall be again aloft.

I have often maintained that sooner or later a moment of emotion, of
sheer joy in the struggle and risk, will cause the soberest pilot to
throw discretion to the winds. It was so in this case.

_Parbleu!_ I leap, I dive, I twist in figures of eight, I fight my
way by inches against the wind, and, turning, I shoot back upon its
current with the speed of a projectile. I am shaken and buffeted until
I gasp for breath. I swerve, I dance, I caracole--I pirouette on a
wing tip, catching my side slips on the rudder as one plays cup and
ball. I dangle myself at the end of a single wire on the brink of
eternity, crying defiance to the winds! _C'etait de la folie_--the
madness of battle. Far below me I could see an occasional spectator
running like a rabbit, grotesquely waving his arms.

"Oh, yes, he is doubtless clever, this Power," I cry in my pride. "But
he is, after all, nothing but a buzzard. It is I, Lacroix, who am
alone veritable king of the air!"

_Coquin de sort!_ I do not know exactly when the wire controlling the
right _aileron_ parted. I became aware merely that that side of the
machine canted downward and refused to rise again in response to the
lever. Like a flash, I thrust forward the elevator, hoping to reach
the earth by a glide. But I arrived by a quicker maneuver--a whirling
gust, a _tourbillon_ of the most terrific, hurled the biplane sidelong
to destruction.

The man who has been accustomed to face death meets it at last with a
gentle sneer on his lip, as one who is vanquished by an enemy whom he
knows to be in reality his inferior.

"So here he is at last, then, this Death," I said to myself. "Well,
let us see what he will do!"

And in that instant the graceful biplane crashed into splinters, and I
lay pinned in the wreckage beneath a shroud of torn white canvas. In
the black casquette, later, they discovered a hole two inches wide,
torn by the jagged edge of a broken stay.

I found them at my bedside when I awoke some days later, my
Mademoiselle Warren and Monsieur Power. They leaned together, arm in
arm, upon the rail at the foot, and the lovely face of my dear pupil
was radiant with sympathy and happiness.

"Ha! What is it that it is, then?" I demand.

"Mr. Power won," said Miss Warren.

The young broker smiled with all his teeth.

"But he was unfairly abetted by a certain Monsieur Lacroix," went on
Miss Warren. "That was a terrible practical j