His thoughts were interrupted. The moon having come out once more, he found himself above a Jap torpedo plane. Tilting his plane at a rakish angle he fired straight down. His shots were answered by a burst of fire from a small free machine gun. The slugs ripped into his motor. He caught his breath. Banking sharply, he swung away to the right, then started climbing. Up he went, a thousand—two thousand feet. He smelled smoke, saw a tiny flame play about his motor, and that was all. With care and speed born of much training, he dragged out his life raft, inflated it, looked to his parachute, threw back the hood, stood up, climbed upon the fuselage, jumped far and wide, then shot downward. Five seconds later he felt the pull of his parachute, then settled back to drift silently down toward a blue-black sea. “What luck!” he muttered. “What terrible luck!” In that moment all that he had hoped for seemed lost—his part in the big show of the morning, the rescue of his pals, the great attack on Mindanao. If he survived, where would he land? Would he be picked up? How soon? And by whom? To these questions he found no answers, so settling back he prayed for what he needed most—a bit of moonlight before he hit those black waters. And his simple prayer was answered. CHAPTER XII UP AT DAWN When Jack was still in grade school he had often visited his uncle’s farm. In summer he had stayed for weeks at a time. There were ghosts that haunted the lonely country roads at night. Old Jock Gordon, the hired hand, and Maggie MacPherson, the cook, often told weird tales about these ghosts as they sat by the kitchen fire at night. When he was out late playing with some neighbor boy and had to brave the dark roads alone, Jack had gone on tiptoe. But that didn’t always help, for more than once he saw weird white things moving in the hedge or the willows. “Ghosts!” he would think, scared to death. But he never ran. A ghost at your back is much more terrible than one you can see. Jack always walked straight toward the ghosts, and always they vanished into thin air. As he caught the hoarse whisper there on the lonely mysterious island, he thought of those ghosts, and it steadied his mind. He answered the hoarse whisper, then walked straight toward the spot from whence it came. He had gone a dozen paces when a low voice said: “Don’t come closer.” Gripping his gun, he stopped. Out of the brush and the shadows stepped a figure that even in the dim moonlight appeared familiar. “What are you doing here?” a woman’s voice asked. “How did you come? And why?” The woman was tall, and rather slender. She wore a broad hat that hid her face. It’s that slim queen of the island, was Jack’s thought. He had come to think of her as just that, but was astonished to discover that she spoke English fluently. “Who are you? And what are you doing here?” he countered, taking two steps.