Life — May 3, 1929 — page 11: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Life Short Stories of Life Flaming Skies By Farley Marks O'Brien, Jr. HE plane had hung motion- | less in mid-air for ten minutes now! It was a Spad, piloted by none other than Ace Donald Dalton, flying fool of the gggth Aero Suicide Squadron, and as good a birdman as ever waggled his wings in delight over a falling Hun ship. On the terra firma below this stationary Spad were scattered the wrecks of eighty-two Boche crates which he had placed hors-de-combat in the past hour. “Fly to Berlin,” the Major had snorted, “and bring back the Kaiser.” Ace fear nor hesitation. with the about him he crap-shooting jacket and donned his flying togs. Then he vaulted lightly into the cockpit of his neat lit- tle ship and yelled “Con- tact” so forcibly that the propeller spun of its own accord. The motor roared, as all good mo- tors should, and the Spad_scooted across the field. With the throt- tle wide open Dal- ton zoomed for the _ zenith, Out of sheer joy at being alive and free in the great wide open spaces of the sky Dalton cavort- ed playfully. He banked and bumped, side slippedand skidded, 2 went into power spins, nose dives, falling leaves and barrel rolls. Not for a second did he © deign to Ay in the conventional man- ner of right side up and straight ahead. Dalton: knew not Joking admiring _ boys doffed his Then suddenly, without warning, he found himself in the midst of a screaming swarm of Fokkers. The air was filled with them, the sun darkened. Dalton stood up in his cockpit and yelled at the pilot of the nearest ship, “How many of you guys is there, anyhow?” “Eighty -t w 0,” the Boche called back. “Laugh that off,” and he squirted tracer bullets out at the Ameri- can, Dalton, nothing perturbed, caught a dha “How many of you guys is there, anyhow?” handful of the yellow stuff and flung it back at the sneering face of his ad- versary. He had the satisfaction of seeing the Fokker burst into flame and plunge carthward. “Only cighty- one now,” to himself. sottling back into the cockpit. “That's more like it.” The Germans had all climbed above him. They split into two groups and were placing themselves one above the other, in vertical rows. Dal- ton understood the plan perfectly. No matter how many of them he sank now there would always be two others right above him. Trapped, by Gad! But no—a daring scheme occurred to him. He plunged downward in a power dive, the two tiers of Fokkers fall- ing after him. Then sud- denly, still standing on his nose, Dalton threw her into re: verse and began climbing back- ward, tail first. Straight up through the rows of enemy planes he zoomed in this crablike manner, his machine gun screaming its message of death and destruction. The Boches, too astonished by this outlandish piece of airmanship to offer resistance, fell like flies as he roared past them. When the Spad reached its ceiling all that was left of the enemy planes was a jumbled mass of smoke and flames, plunging toward the far away terrain. Dalton flattened his Spad out and headed for Berlin. Suddenly his en- gine went dead, Conked—conked by Gad! And then the Spad hung mo- tionless in air. Five minutes it re- mained there—six—seven—eight—nine —ten minutes. “Hell,” said Samuel S. Simpson, popular writer of thrilling air stories, as he tore the sheet of paper from his typewriter, “guess I'll start the damn story over again.” comicbooks.com