It was a delicate job on the rolling field, but again it was accomplished safely, and the ship cleared the surrounding trees by a good fifty feet. As it roared out over the forest Hemingwood held it low, pointing for the little schoolhouse where Gail presided. It was on the outskirts of the mountain settlement called “The Hollows.” As he passed over it he jazzed the throttle twice. He saw Gail thrust her head out of a window and wave her handkerchief. He returned the greeting with his free arm. There was a pleasant warmth in his heart as he circled back and left the schoolhouse behind. The ship was barely three hundred feet high, so he nosed up in a steep climb. His right arm was draped carelessly over the side of the cockpit, and his eyes swept the ground idly. Suddenly he felt a jerk at his ankle. He dropped his eyes, and in utter surprise saw a clean gash on the inner side of his right boot sole. He moved his foot slightly and saw a hole in the wooden flooring of the cockpit. The next second he saw gas jetting forth from a jagged hole in the small copper tube which was the gasoline feed line between main tank and carburetor. The Liberty’s roar died away into sputtering, and then silence. And down below there was nothing but impenetrable forest into which to crash. Hemingwood reached automatically for the mainline petcock, and turned off the gas. Then he turned on the petcock which released the gas from the emergency tank, holding the ship in a dive to maintain flying speed. For agonizing seconds the motor did not catch and the ship was diving like a comet for the earth. Hemingwood cursed steadily, fluently. He had been shot at from the ground and, by dumb luck, they had hit the fast moving target. There was nothing for it but to crash. What the hell was the matter with that gravity tank? If he could get his hands on the blankety-blank marksmen! Then he saw them. There were five of them, partially hidden, and they were still shooting. He could see the smoke from their rifles. Unseen and unheard above the whining wires, there were bullets zipping through the air around him. There was two hundred feet of altitude left. With his usually boyish face suddenly grim and hard, Hemingwood swooped around and made the dive more steep. Might as well use that last little margin to teach _those_ birds a lesson! His finger was on the machine gun control as he pointed the ship at them. And at that second the gravity tank got working and the motor cut in. There was thirty minutes’ gas in that tank, plenty to get back to the field with. Hemingwood came to himself. Even his unemotional soul revolted at the thought of pouring a hail of death on the five would-be murderers below. But he did dive down at them, carefully aiming a bit beyond them, and his machine guns spouted fire and a hail of bullets which ripped up the trees a few dozen yards away from them.