Jukes sat down, bottle in hand. Outside the wind wailed drearily. The cold rain hissed. His Adam’s apple rose and fell again. The boarding master entered the forecastle, the crimp at his heels. Jukes turned and leaped to his feet. Lifting the bottle to hurl it, he swayed uncertainly. The crimp was laughing. Jukes clutched at the bulkhead. The lamp was grown suddenly dim. The boarding master and the crimp had disappeared. Someone struck Alf Jukes just behind the ear. Someone laughed near by. Stars whirled in a pitch-black sky. The boarding master knelt over Jukes. Everything was dark. FEAR BY JAMES WARNER BELLAH From _Saturday Evening Post_ It was a little spot, that fear, but it had ached in his heart for months--ever since his first solo flight at Upavon Airdrome. It had come suddenly one morning like the clean pink hole of a steel-jacketed bullet--a wound to be ashamed of--a wound to fight against--a wound that never quite healed. Always it was there to throb and to pinch like the first faint gnawing of cancer. It came with him to the theatre and rankled his mind: “Enjoy this--it may be your last play.” It crept into his throat at meals, sometimes, and took away the poor savour that was left to the foods of wartime. The fear of the men who fly. Sometimes he pictured it as an imp--an imp that sat eternally on his top plane and questioned him on the strength of rudder wires, pointed to imaginary flaws in struts, suggested that the petrol was low in the tank, that the engine would die on the next climbing turn. It was with him now as the tender that was to take him up to his squadron jolted and bounced its way across the _pavé_ on the outskirts of Amiens. The squadron was the last place he had to go to. All the months that were gone had led up to this. These were the wars at last. This was the place he would cop it, if he was to cop it at all. He shrugged. Anyway, he had had his four days in London and his ten days idling at Pilot’s Pool before the squadron sent for him. He braced one shoulder against the rattling seat and reached in his tunic pocket for a cigarette. Mechanically he offered one to the driver. The man took it with a grubby finger. “Thankee, sor-r.” He nodded and lighted both cigarettes with the smudge of his pocket lighter. Anyway, he was not flying up to 44. That was one flight saved. Funny, that fear--how it came and went like the throb of a nerve in an open tooth. Sometimes the spot was large, and filled his whole being; then again it would shrink to a dull ache, just enough to take the edge from the beauty of the sunrise and the sparkle from the wine of the moon.