He was ahead of them all now, for his engines were running beautifully, and the "Bullet" raced through the next layer of clouds as a fish darts through the waters. It was becoming lighter also, for he could catch glimpses of the stars, and the remaining clouds were thinner than those below. Soon, he would be above them all, and perhaps above the raider. It was cold too, bitterly cold, but his young blood coursed madly through his veins, and his heart beat quicker and quicker. "Ten thousand. Eleven thousand," laughed the indicator, joining merrily in the hunt, for it seemed to Dastral now that he could hear those weird voices of the night, speaking to him and calling him up and up, ever higher and higher. Yes, the clouds and the stars were calling him, and the music and rhythm of that pulsating engine a few feet away, and the whir-r-r of those propellors just ahead, seemed to make him almost light-headed, so that he began to laugh and sing. He thought of crooked Tim far down below, and what he had said about the romance and the music, and from the pilot's lips there fell involuntarily the words: "Poor Tim! How he would like to be up here alone, and to listen to all these voices of the night!" As Dastral thought thus, he looked down, far down into the blackness, and he saw the flashes of the searchlights. Sometimes they reached up to him long extended arms that seemed to unite him to the earth, but he could scarcely believe that he had ever dwelt down there in that abyss of murky darkness. Yet always he swerved aside, and evaded those long stretching pillars of light, for he knew that if he crossed their beams but once, other eyes would see him, and the raider above would be warned of his near approach. Suddenly at twelve thousand feet the monoplane shook itself as though dashing the clinging moisture from its yellow wings, and leapt, like a fish out of the water, above the topmost layer of clouds. And now with keen searching eyes Dastral looked above and around for the presence of the raider, but she was nowhere to be seen. Below him rolled the clouds, like dark, monstrous billows. Here and there through an opening he still saw the flashes of the searchlights feeling for their prey. But above his head the sky was aflame with millions of stars. Right across from east to west, like a silvery pathway to heaven, shone the Milky Way, luminous with light, and along that trail of diamonds shone the bigger stars, in the constellations of Perseus, Cassiopeia and Aquila. And far down in the east, Orion the Hunter chased the dancing Pleiades, as he did thousands of years before aeroplanes were ever dreamt of. "But where is the Boche?" Dastral asked himself again and again. He was beginning to fear that he had lost him. Perhaps the Hun had caught sight of him as he came through the clouds, and had now departed unseen, as he came.