Bill Barnes Air Adventurer, July 1935 — page 53: what you’re looking at

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

AIR ADVENTURER “Well, well,’ he gloated. “That’s more like it.” Cy Hawkins, in the other Snorter, was almost asleep. He kept his hand on the control column. Each time he went all the way to sleep it slipped off and he awoke with a start. Just at the moment he was dreaming about the din- ner he was going to order at Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo. IT WAS just four o’clock in the afternoon when Bill Barnes mounted to the bridge again, his eyes heavy with sleep. He yawned and told Sandy to go down in his cabin and get a few winks of sleep. As the words left his lips he suddenly stiffened. His mouth became a thin, straight line, his eyes mere slits as he. listened for a fraction of a second. Then he leaped for the mtercockpit telephone and roared forth orders. He didn’t bother to look out the windows. He knew the sudden roar of a half dozen attacking planes only too well. “Battle stations!” he barked. being attacked. Machine-gun bullets tore through the surfaces of the big transport. It reeled dangerously and shuddered like a bat- tleship that has been struck in a vital spot by a fifteen-inch shell. “Take the rapid-firer, Sandy!” he bel- lowed, grabbing the controls. “T’ll hold her straight on her course and hold her steady.”” He threw a switch on the radio panel and waited for Shorty, Cy and Red to check in, “Come back fast, Shorty,” “Keep ‘em off the transport. Sandy will help with the. rapid-firer!” The muscles in his bronzed cheeks bulged as he talked through clenched teeth. Martin, in the forward gunner’s cock- pit, scanned the air above him as old Charlie leaped to his station in the tail cockpit and Miles let himself down in the cylindrical turret beneath the belly of the ship. The guns poured a burst of “We're he said. 51 lead after the diving gray planes as they went by. As Shorty came streaking back in the Scarlet Stormer the two Snorters tossed their tails in the air and dove on the eight gray planes like thunderbolts. The Scarlet Stormer and the Snorters were like three wild bulls as they tore vi- ciously after the enemy. Tracer smoke, white and yellow, rose in the dull haze as the eight gray planes maneuvered to meet the three diving ships. Bill’s eyes glittered and his LL were so tightly fastened around the control wheel they appeared to. be blood- less as he watched Shorty whip the Stormer through the roaring heavens with the reckless abandon of a man gone berserk. Gray planes skidded crazily out of his path to escape his lightning acrobatics to bring them under his sights. A gray plane zoomed and went far over on its side with its rudder biting into the air to swing in a tight circle. But the first burst of fire from Shorty’s guns cut the rudder from the post. As the gray ship slipped, Shorty smashed its center, his fire raking forward. The pilot half leaped out of his seat, then collapsed over the stick as the ship fell into a spin and plunged toward the waters below. Two of the fast, gray ships hurtled down on the tail of Red Gleason’s plane as he leveled off to come out of his dive. As their bullets ripped the air above his head he kicked his Snorter enough sidewise to throw them off aim. He brought his Snorter around in a tight loop on the tail of one of the gray planes and around harder in a tight vertical. His guns drew a line like the track of a snake from rudder to engine. Smoke billowed from the engine a moment later as the pilot dived and went over the side. Up near the speeding transport, two of the rugged, gray biplanes were trying to get Cy Hawkins in a cross. fire. Their crisscrossing lines of tracers showed that he was outmaneuvering oO COmicloo S CO