Ahead of them a half a mile or so was a winding road, a scar that twisted through the hills; and beside this trail a little field was snuggled. Too small for a normal landing--far too small--yet it was better than going down in a maze of brush and trees on a rocky hillside. Nick turned a little and headed for it. He throttled down a little, hoping that the con rods of his motor would stay with him half a minute more. The distance was cut to a quarter of a mile, and the metallic clinking of the motor grew in volume. It was seconds now. The motor dropped two hundred revs, and labored under protest to hold fourteen hundred. A blast of hot water spewed violently from the shortened overflow and trailed away in a white mist to the rear. Suddenly, with a chug of torment, the propeller stopped--vertical. “Of course it’d be straight up and down! ” Nick complained. “Wrap it into knots with the rest.” He dropped the nose and came in toward the field in a slow glide, the little Vought bouncing in the rough air. Nick yelled to Wilson again to get his goggles off. The little field lay in the lee of a high hill, and as the ship slipped down below the sweeping current of air that poured over the lip of this hill, the wind dropped it. It did just that--literally. Where the Vought had been gliding into a thirty-mile wind, almost standing motionless above the ground, it was suddenly gliding into no wind at all--and still hanging almost motionless above the ground. It dropped like a rock, barely clearing the edge of the brush. It came down fifty feet as nearly vertical as an airplane can come, and it hit on the remaining undamaged wheel, the bottom of the radiator and the right wingtip--a perfect “three-point landing.” [Illustration: It dropped like a rock--as nearly vertical as an airplane can come. The wings folded up like tissue paper.] The fuselage broke in two just behind the front cockpit, and Doctor Wilson, sprawling grotesquely, was hurled out of his seat, to be brought up abruptly sitting in shocked semiconsciousness on the ground, ten feet away. The wings folded up like tissue paper and the folds of fabric billowed up in the little currents of air that slipped down over the brow of the hill ahead. “Wentworth!” Wilson cried anxiously, when he realized fully what had happened. “Wentworth!” There was no answer. The Doctor plunged into the midst of the debris and pulled Nick out. He was not seriously hurt, although he was unconscious; an indentation on the leather-ringed cowling and a swelling welt on his chin showed Wilson what had happened to him. * * * * * Nick regained consciousness in the back seat of a battered touring-car that wound its way at great labor over the rocky, washed-out road half a mile from where the wreck occurred. He found Doctor Wilson sitting beside him holding a bottle of something by his mouth--something that made his nostrils burn and his eyes smart.