So Disdained Read Free

for it. I reached out and took an electric torch from the dashboard pocket, and nudged him.
    "Come on," I said. "Get out. We're going to peg her down. Get on with it."
    He didn't move. I paused for a moment.
    He seemed to make something of an effort. "Look here, Moran," he said. "Let's get going to Under. That machine's all right where she is."
    "Leaving her loose?" I asked.
    He nodded. "That's right. Leave her loose. Look here, I don't want to bother about her. Just take me along to Under and drop me at the station."
    Well, drugs are the devil.
    "Can't do that, old boy," I said cheerfully. "She's on our land—Lord Arner's land. It might cost us a couple of pounds if she blew through a hedge, leaving her loose like that. More, perhaps."
    I shoved him towards the door. "Come on. Let's go and have a look at her."
    He shrugged his shoulders. "If you like."
    I had a couple of garden forks and a hank of cord in the back of the car, as luck would have it, that I'd got in Winchester for the house. There was a strap in the dickey, too. I took the lot out, wrapped my raincoat closely round me, swore a little, and set out with Lenden across the down.
    It was infernally dark. The lights of the car behind us gave us a direction and prevented us from wandering in circles on the slopes. Lenden didn't know where he had left the machine, but thought that he had walked for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour before it hit the road. We went stumbling on into the darkness for a bit, flashing my torch in every direction.
    Presently I stopped. It was pretty hopeless to go on groping for her that way on a night like that.
    "Did you land into wind?" I asked.
    He nodded. "It was pure guesswork, of course. The wind must have been a bit under the starboard wing, because she went down to port as I touched. Still, I got her up again, so [Pg 8] she can't have been far wrong."
    "Right," said I. "Now, did you land uphill or down?"
    He considered for a moment. "Uphill, by the feel of it," he said vaguely. "She pulled up pretty quickly. Yes, I'm sure it was uphill. Not much of a slope, though."
    "You had lights to land by?"
    "Wing-tip flares. They burnt out as soon as I was on the ground, so I couldn't see much." He hesitated. "I say, let's leave the ruddy thing."
    I disregarded that, and stood thinking about it for a minute. If he had landed uphill and into wind it localised the machine pretty well, especially as it was only ten minutes' walk from the road. I bore round to the right, and began to traverse the only uphill slope that faced into the wind.
    We found her at the top of the down, where the slope was gentle. I heard her before we got the light on her, a series of drumming crashes as the loose rudder flicked over from hard-a-port to hard-a-starboard, and then to port again. I switched the light in that direction, and there she was, facing more or less into wind with the controls slamming free. He hadn't even troubled to drop the belt around the stick.
    "Damn fine way to leave a machine," I muttered. If he heard, Lenden did not reply.
    That was a very big aeroplane. I hadn't flown myself since 1917, when I went down with a bullet through my chest to spend the remainder of the war in Germany. I thought that I had forgotten all about that game. But now I am inclined to regard it as one of those things that no man ever really forgets; an old pilot will always linger a little over the photographs of aeroplanes on the back page of the Daily Mail . That is the only way in which I can account for the fact that I knew that machine by sight. The French had been doing a number of record-breaking long-distance flights upon the type; I stood there in the rain for a minute playing the torch upon the wings and fuselage, and wondered what on earth Lenden was doing with a French high-speed bomber.
    "Where d'you get the Breguet from, Lenden?" I asked.
    [Pg 9] He hesitated for a moment. "I've been doing a job on her," he said vaguely.
    There was no point in standing