They were heavy clouds to which Laval had pointed, and Dennis steered straight for them, devouring the chart with his eyes. Far down below and ahead of them in the extreme distance was the blue line of the Vosges, and he thought he could distinguish the Ballon d'Alsace, but of that he was not sure. His pursuers would naturally imagine that he would make for the nearest point of the French frontier, but that was not in his mind. If he had to deal with the fast-rising Fokkers, his only chance he knew was to gain the cloud-bank and keep within its protecting folds. To fight with a wounded observer was out of the question, and already he had decided to steer north-west rather than due west, which would bring him, roughly, somewhere between Epinal and Nancy--always provided that he was not overtaken. There were a thousand risks to run, not only from the enemy fleet, but from the French guns when he should come in sight of them; but as they soared into the chill blanket of vapour his spirits rose, and for a moment he shut off the engines to listen. The whir and throb of their pursuers already seemed to come from every point of the compass--from below, from either side and, what was more alarming, from above; but banking sharply to the right he thrashed his course at topmost speed, praying that the cloud-bank might not cease. The baragraph showed him that he was already eight thousand feet above the earth, and, straightening out the machine, he wiped the mist from his goggles with the back of his glove and kept on. All at once the Aviatik shot out of the cloud with a clear stretch of sky in front of them, and, looking back and upwards, he saw the wicked nose of a Fokker emerge into view on their right beam a couple of hundred yards away and well above them. Already their own machine was approaching another cloud-bank, but the Fokker had seen them, and plunged downward in their direction. The instant the cloud swallowed them up Dennis concentrated all his efforts on the foot-bar which controlled the vertical rudder, and, grasping the wheel at the same time, swung sharply to the left, leaving their pursuer to dive down five hundred feet into space before he discovered that he had missed his mark. Neither of them knew that the nose of the Fokker had been within twelve inches of the Aviatik's tail-planes; and but for the fact that the German suspended his fire at the moment of diving, it would have been all over with the raiders.