I ran wildly to one side of the field, not daring to look back but only trying to reach a place of safety. The sound of the engines came crashing to my ears like the staccato roar of a hundred machine guns. My legs felt as if they were lead. I seemed to be standing still. One frightened glance over my shoulder showed the machine, like some monstrous vulture, bearing down on me. I could feel it gaining and gaining. The heavy drone of the engines seemed to fill the air with its noise. A pitiful sense of helplessness gripped me. I knew I was going to die like a rat in the jaws of a fox terrier. I screamed aloud in my terror and pitched headlong on the turf. With a roar, and a rush of wind that almost lifted me from the ground, the aeroplane passed over me, its wheels no more than four feet from my head. I am not sure to this day, whether Frank Woods tried to kill me or not. I don't know whether he was cheated of his game when I stumbled and the speed of his motor carried the plane off the ground, or whether he was just trying to put the fear of God in me. I will swear, however, that as the motor passed over my head, I heard Frank Woods' voice raised in a demoniacal laugh. As the drum of the motor passed and I knew that I was safe for the moment, I raised my head to see if the devil should be planning to come back. With joy I saw he had risen to the height of fifteen or twenty feet. Suddenly the plane swooped up as though Woods were trying to loop. For a second it tipped sidewise like a cat boat reeling over in the wind, and then there was the sound of splintering wood and tearing silk, and the plane crashed miserably to the ground. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN RED CAPITULATES We hurried over to the smashed plane, the coroner leading. Woods, in his effort to run me down, had forgotten the telegraph wires at the end of the field. Too late, he had seen them and vainly tried to lift his machine clear of them. The wires had caught a wing and sent him crashing to the earth. We found him underneath the engine, quite dead, the fall having killed him instantly. We made an improvised litter out of one of the wings and carried him to the nearest hangar. As we placed an overcoat over the shapeless form, I heard a sniffle behind me and found the red-haired mechanician at my side. "You didn't get him, you dirty cops. He got away from you, after all." "Yes, he's safe now," I murmured. "Sure! An' he would 'a' been always if he hadn't been daff' over women. He never had no luck when he played the women. His takin' that skirt out this afternoon was what give him the hoodoo." The coroner came over to him. "Now that we can't get him, will you tell us about the night Mr. Woods killed Mr. Felderson?" The mechanic showed himself distinctly hostile to the coroner. "Oh, no you don't, you fly cop! Think I'll spill the beans and get meself in Dutch? You can go to hell!"