When Hemminge saw it, it was still so far as to only be a faint winged speck against the white ground haze, but Hemminge had very good eyes, and Hemminge had been watching for it, for any plane. He circled with great care, his heart pounding. He did not think the Cessna could see him, but he was going to make certain. He circled slowly to the east, making sure that he would come down on the Cessna from out of the sun.

It was a magnificent day for flying. The air was clear in all directions over the black hills, clear and still. The ground haze was thick and white, but that was all the better; it drowned the land in a soft steamy ocean, blotting out everything but Hemminge and the Cessna and the mountains which rose up out of the mist in great black wedges. Hemminge went into his dive, his heart beating violently, but his hands steady and his mind clear. Nerves of iron, Hemminge thought, you must keep nerves of iron. The hand mustn’t tremble now like it did the other time, when you nearly botched the job and missed and almost let him get away. No. This time you must be clear, and calm, Hemminge thought, as Sunday morning, Easter Sunday. He was picking up speed now, swiftly, easily, gliding down the sky in one long silent swoop, boring down on the Cessna like a sleek, silent arrow. Remember, Hemminge told himself, keep the mind clear and the hand steady, remember the plane will kick to the right when you fire and correct for that, remember that you are faster than he is and must guard against overshooting, and remember to recover quickly, because he must not have time to use his radio—but now the Cessna was rising up toward him with exploding suddenness, and he centered it in his sights in the last instant and began firing from a long way off. The bullets reached out in gleaming streams and went into the Cessna, exactly into the cabin, exactly between the wings where he had aimed them. And then they had time to stitch forward quickly across the motor cowling and chew at the propeller before he had to lift his own plane slightly to keep from collision, diving on past the Cessna in a roaring split second, but even so he could see it beginning to wobble.

He pulled out of his own dive in time to see the Cessna begin to fall. It was smoking, but not yet really burning. It fell leaving a long slow smudge in the sky and Hemminge swung to follow it down, his heart beating even more wildly now with the joy, the exultant joy of the kill. He did not think that there was anybody alive in the plane, but decided to make sure. He bored in once more on the Cessna and gave it a long burst, the coupe de grace. He pulled up then and circled and watched it fall, beginning to burn at last. And when it went in, he circled sadly and gave it a grave, proud, tender salute, the victorious airman to his fallen enemy. He turned off at last and opened his plane up wide, heading for home. He felt very fine. It had been a good clean kill.

“At least they were dead before it hit the ground,” Harry Ball said.

Captain Lockwood had nothing to say.

“Isn’t it about time they got the bodies out?” Ball said.

Lockwood shook his head. “Need a torch for that. Have to wait until tomorrow.”

Ball stared up into the sky. Night was coming, but more than that, there was wind and heavy rain. Off in the west, black clouds were rising; he could see lightning flashing and heard the rolling growl of thunder. He looked down again into the mangled cabin and said, “One of them was a woman.”

Captain Lockwood looked at him. There was no expression on Ball’s face. He was a young man. He had been a State Trooper for less than five years, but he had long since learned the law officer’s quiet, calm, silent look, and nothing showed on his face, but what he wanted there. Yet Lockwood could tell that he was moved.

“They must have been just going off on a vacation,” Ball said.

The plane had come down in a box canyon about thirty miles due east of Cedar Creek. It had been sighted early that afternoon, but there was no road into the canyon. Army helicopters had to be flown down from the air base upstate. There had been a doctor in the first copter, but he turned out not to be necessary. The other copters had carried men from the Sheriff’s Department and the State Police, and a man from the Civil Aeronautics Authority. They were gathered now on the floor of the canyon in the growing dark. Nobody was saying much and two of the army men had made a fire out of brushwood, and the light of it flickered weirdly across the jagged wreckage of the plane. The army men wanted to get out of here before the approaching storm came down, but nobody else was in a hurry. They were all looking at the plane.

The plane was no longer a plane, but only big ripped shards of silver metal spread all over the canyon floor. The Cessna had been entirely metal; it had not burned very much, but it had come down into the rocks like a bomb. There was nothing recognizable except here and there the flat surface of a piece of wing, or tail, and it was these that bore the bullet holes. An army man had been the first to notice the bullet holes. Nobody else quite believed him until they saw the holes themselves. The main evidence was one door of the plane, the right door, which had been hurled away from the wreck only slightly damaged. There was no doubt that the holes in the door were bullet holes.

The door was lying now at the feet of Harry Ball. He was staring at it rather than into the crushed bloody mass of the cabin. Ball had seen many an auto wreck and some even worse than this, but still, this one jarred him. He did not yet know why. Afterwards he would figure that it was probably because he was a pilot himself, in his spare time. He was a tall man with a slightly bent nose in a rugged, patient face. There was that about him, the tall, blue-eyed look, that had made some of his buddies give him the nickname “High Noon.” He towered over Captain Lockwood. He stood without saying anything, feeling a weird, peculiar disgust. Lockwood did not say anything either, and after awhile they were joined by Jack Biancoli of the CAA.

“They’re bullet holes all right,” Biancoli muttered, still stunned.

“What are you going to do?” Lockwood said quietly.

Biancoli shook his head. “Listen,” he said earnestly, “you think it was murder? Or do you think somebody’s just gone nuts?”

Lockwood shrugged. “Can’t tell yet. We’re checking on the two in the plane. But I don’t think we’ll come up with anything. It figures to be a nut. It has the feel of a nut. You know what I mean?”

“It sure does,” Ball said.

“Well,” Biancoli gestured vaguely with his hands. “What can you do for me?”
Lockwood remained silent. He was a slow, thorough man and he had not yet had time to focus on the problem. After a moment he said:

“You ground everybody in the state. We’ll get help from the Air Force, help search for the guy.”

“Can’t do that,” Biancoli insisted grimly. “Can’t ground everybody; businessmen would raise hell. And how do we even know he’s from this state? Might be registered anywhere, even Canada. I can’t even guess what make plane he’s flying. Could be anything from a Cub to a converted pursuit—”

“No,” Harry Ball interrupted. “The killer must have been flying a light plane.”

“Why?” Lockwood asked.

“Well, trying to shoot down a little plane like this from a real fast plane like a converted army job is harder than it looks. A regular fighter’s much too fast, it couldn’t turn with a real small plane. It’d have one sweet time trying to get a shot at any little plane if the little plane had warning—”

“If the little plane had warning,” Biancoli muttered.

“It still figures to be another light plane,” Ball said, “for other reasons. First, those were thirty caliber bullet holes—”

“You fly, Harry, don’t you?” Lockwood said suddenly.

Ball nodded.

“Got your own plane?”

Ball shook his head.

Lockwood went on looking at him thoughtfully, then said, unexpectedly, “Good,” and turned back to Biancoli.

“First we check the mental hospitals,” Lockwood said. His voice was firm; he had studied the problem and was beginning to shift into high gear now. “Find out if there’s a record of anybody anywhere who had delusions about being a war ace. Next we alert the Air Force and ask them to post a couple of squadrons high up over this whole area. Then we try to blanket the area with radar, radioing the Air Force to come on down and look if any plane starts making suspicious moves. In the meantime, we start checking planes for evidence of weapons. Another thing, if this guy has a gun in his plane he’s flying from a private strip. That ought to be easy.”

“How about checking the gun itself?” Biancoli said. “There must be a record…”

“No dice. There must be thousands of unregistered machine guns in this country. No way of checking. But there aren’t too many private strips.”

“I hope to God you’re right.”

“There’s one more thing. You’ll have to figure whether or not you want to issue a warning to all pilots.”

Biancoli started. “What?”

“If this is a nut he’ll be up again, looking for somebody else. If we can pass this off to the papers as just another wreck, not let anybody know we found the bullet holes, the killer’ll be maybe a little less cautious about coming out again.”

Biancoli blew a breath, rubbed his face nervously.

“Otherwise,” Lockwood went on, “the nut might just possibly pack up and leave for somewhere else. Take the gun out of his plane and ship it to another state, and start all over. And we lose him.”

“Sam,” Biancoli said, his face turned suddenly strange in the dim light of the fire, “listen—”

“It’s your choice.”

“No. Listen. This has been nagging me. I didn’t—last week two planes crashed in these mountains.

Harry Ball felt a sudden chill.

“They were both little Cubs,” Biancoli said. “They both burned. The weather was perfect; we couldn’t figure out why they went in. We inspected the wrecks, but we couldn’t do much out here, in the hills. But listen, we weren’t looking for bullet holes.”

Lockwood nodded.

“All the fabric was burned,” Biancoli said. “We never saw any bullet holes.”

“I think you better check again.”

“It could be that this one nut got all three of them.”

“It could be,” Lockwood said.

“My God.”

“A nut is a nut,” Lockwood said. “With a nut, you never know. But he’ll be up again looking for somebody else, that I guarantee you. You check on those other two wrecks. In the meantime we’ll”—he stopped abruptly, turning to glance at Ball. He thought for a moment, then swung back on Biancoli.

“We can try a trap,” he said. “We’ll get some private planes and have them fly back and forth over these mountains. If this joker comes out again our boys will have radios and the Air Force will be waiting up high, in jets.” He swung back to Ball. “Harry,” he said, a very faint smile in his eyes, “you seem interested. Want to volunteer to fly?”
“Yes,” Harry Ball said.

Under the wide and starry sky, dig the grave and let me lie. The phrase was running through Hemminge’s mind over and over and over again, the silent peaceful beautiful words soothing and smoothing the mighty pain in his head. He was lying on a cot on the screen porch in the darkness of night. It was raining heavily, blowing down through the screen on him and he was soaked through, but he did not mind it. The cool water on his face dulled the pain, the pain, which was all he could think about. All through the rain there was wild white lightning, but Hemminge could not see it. His eyes, whether open or closed, saw only the strange glowing jagged lines that were a part of the headaches, had come with the headaches for as far back as Hemminge could remember. The pain was always bad, but the pain of this one was enough to drive a man out of his mind. I’ll go mad, Hemminge thought, I’ll go mad. Under the wide and starry sky, under the wide and starry sky…

Yet the headache was going away. In the midst of the pain he could sense the slight lessening, the nerves quieting, dulled now before the awful pain they could no longer feel, and Hemminge began to be dazedly grateful. Earlier, the pain had been so bad he had been sick to his stomach. Under the wide and starry sky, he thought, remembering at the same time the misery of that sickness. But the headache was definitely going away. The fact that he could think proved it was going away. But under the wide and starry sky, dig the grave—there, now even his vision was coming back. He had just seen a flash of lightning.

He lay for another hour on the couch. The pain was not gone, but it was bearable; compared to what it had been, the pain now was nothing. But he was exhausted. He lay on the couch until he had some energy; then he stumbled on into the kitchen and made himself some coffee. On the way into the kitchen he had to go through the living room, and there almost tripped over the body of his wife. Looking down at her, suddenly the vision of her bloodied head hit him with a shuddering knife blow in the chest. The memory of what he had done to her blossomed stark and murderous before he could shut it out. But he did not want to think of it, and so he did not think about it. Toodle-oo, toodle-oo, he thought, and that was the end of it. He made his coffee and went wet and dripping back out to the porch.

The rain was letting up. In one of the last flashes of lightning, he saw his plane perched blue and lovely, alive, on the strip by the house. A wave of love for the plane came over him, a proud, gentle love. He raised his coffee cup toward the plane. Thee and me, he thought lovingly, we are one flesh. He drank the coffee and lay down.

But the trouble with lying down was that you always thought too much. You are pretty far gone, aren’t you? he told himself, in a burst of brutal clarity, but mercifully that faded away and his mind went back to the muddied fragments of poems and dreams and sweet violent visions that were all that was left of him now, Arthur Hemminge, a small fat man with graying hair, not yet fifty years old.

Now he could no longer stop himself from thinking. Visions passed through his mind like black flak bursting around a dying plane. My father was a proud and virtuous man—vision of his father in a fine flying uniform—and now I’m a pilot too, Hemminge thought, and wouldn’t he be proud now—but hate, hate, Hemminge shuddered with hate for his father. And he could admit it now, what a wonderful feeling to roll and revel in the hate for his father—who did not want me or anything or anybody, but the fine proud talk about flying, and, and…Before other memories of his father Hemminge’s mind halted and swung off down the dark halls of his life, passing the mother he had loved who was dead, and the son he had loved who was dead, and now even the wife, and my God, Hemminge thought, what I love is all dead. And visions now arose of great planes sweeping through the sky like black vultures, and Hemminge began to cry.

I had a father, Hemminge thought, and I had a son, and…and now I’ve gone mad.

He knew that, from time to time. The most horrible moments of all were when he could see himself clearly, when he could no longer blot himself out and bury his mind in visions. It was peculiarly horrible the way it had happened—things seemed to reverse themselves, not like you expected it to happen at all. First the pains and the visions and the weird flowing feeling, especially at night. During those you knew you were going insane, but you did not know what to do about it. Then the electric pinging sensations that came and went, and periods of total blackness, from which you awoke with sweating horror wondering what of all those things you had dreamed was real, and what wasn’t. And then gradually, but with increasing swiftness, the true breakdown, the orgy in the mind, and the last muffled cry for help, and after that nothing, nothing, the shadow world with the red figures all around you and death, from which you rose in brief bright flashes of clarity and saw yourself as you had become, the clear tragic moments which were the most horrible of all not only because of what you had become, but because there was no longer any possibility of help, of cure, you were this mad thing here and would be this mad thing until you died. Under the wide and starry sky…

In psychiatric clinics you can find many beautifully written, clear and clinical reports of just what things it took to drive a certain person mad. In the case of Arthur Hemminge, the prime mover would have been, of course, the father, the tall proud war pilot whom Arthur loved and whom the father not only loved, but never hated either, just simply ignored. Hemminge’s mother, who would have loved him, died too young. That was a contributing factor. The father forced Arthur to fly too early, after filling him with wild terrible stories of how planes crashed, and so imbedded in the boy a fear of airplanes, and of heights. That was also a contributing factor. Arthur’s only son became a pilot, and was one of the few American airmen to be killed in the Korean War. That was probably the final factor. The report would say of Arthur Hemminge that he had fixed on airplanes as the cause and solution of all his life’s pain.

And so when Arthur Hemminge took his father’s inheritance and bought him a lonely place in the mountains and learned, finally, to fly, the fear of heights now suddenly, oddly gone, and built himself a private landing strip and began his weird path of murder, the reasons were obvious: by becoming a pilot himself he could take his place at last with his father, his son, a man among men, a fighter pilot among pilots, and yet at the same time he would be destroying the things that had taken the loves of his life from him—airplanes.

All this a report would say simply and with truth, and yet—Arthur Hemminge was forty-three years old before he broke. It took him forty-three years of bitter building to bring him to the moment when his mind fragmented like pulverized glass and he became the odd horrible thing that he became, but it took forty-three years to do it. Forty long years of memories and events entered one after the other in endless succession, day after day, a tiny moment here, a gesture there, words overheard and words spoken directly to him, memories of his small son, brutal memories like the telegram from the War Department, sweet contrasting memories of his mother. All added together brought the moment when he went, finally and for good, insane.

To understand what Arthur Hemminge was is to understand all of those moments, to enter into Arthur Hemminge’s mind. And a clinical report is not enough for that, whole books are not enough for that, there is a mystery to insanity which remains a mystery, even to the insane. Most of all, perhaps, to the insane, who sometimes have, like Arthur Hemminge, those terrible moments of clarity, rising like islands in a boiling sea.

So Arthur Hemminge lay on his couch in the desolate midst of nowhere, his mind filled with the roiled visions of madness. He had killed his wife the day before, when she had found out what he was doing and wanted him to go to a doctor. He could not help thinking about her, and from her he thought suddenly—women and children. Women and children must die in a war, because that is one of the things that makes war so terrible. And he thought: a pilot not only shoots down planes. He strafes. He bombs. Visions of bombs bursting among crowds of civilians swarmed in his brain.

I have to do that, he said aloud. All pilots have strafing missions. So I must bomb crowds. He sat up on the couch. He tried to think. Now where could I find a big crowd?

When Harry Ball got to Pat’s house, it was very late and she was not in a good humor. She was standing in her doorway, tapping her foot, looking very small, soft, blue-eyed and delightful. Looking at her, he began to hunger for her, gently, dangerously, and he pulled himself back. Remember, he told himself, she’s got a backbone of steel. Don’t be fooled by the softness, or you’ll be in trouble.

“Hey,” he said happily.

“Well,” Pat glowered, “have a nice vacation?”

“Honey,” Ball murmured, soothing, reaching for her.

“Now none of that,” Pat fended him off, “you promised me you’d be here by eight o’clock—”

Ball kissed her. She was stiff and unbending and then suddenly she melted, coming into him, and he held her close for a long moment silently. He had driven a long way that night and he was tired and maybe that was part of it, but he suddenly wanted only to hold her and feel the warmth of her all the rest of the night. I’m in love with you, he thought, the words rising in his mind, shocking and warming him. But he said nothing. When he released her she looked up at him, her eyes searching, and then she said: “You. Oh you,” and then turned and went away from him, going for his coffee.

He went to her father’s favorite chair and sat down. He looked after her, shaken. Pat was the one and only girl he had been dating for the past six months. She was a nurse in the hospital at Dawson. He had known he was in love with her for several weeks, but he had not said anything about it. He did not know what to do about it. Pat was possibly too much for him. When he was with her, he was never quite sure just who was in command, under that fluffy exterior lurked a girl with a mind of her own. Harry Ball was old-fashioned enough to want to be the boss in his own house. And honest enough to realize with Pat he might not be. She was more than strong-willed; she had “education.” Because Ball had not gone to college himself, it was a barrier between them.

It was not Pat’s barrier; it was his own. He knew that, but he could not seem to help it. There was a certain poise in Pat, the way she used words, the ease with which she could carry on conversations about things Ball did not know. Education and intelligence are two different things, and Ball knew that, and knew also that he was no fool, but…he had a deep inviolable belief that a man should not feel inferior to his wife. He had a need in him to father, to protect. So he said nothing. And went on falling in love with her, falling slowly, helplessly, like a man sliding down a long, long glacier.

She came back with his coffee and plunked it down by him, and plunked herself down in his lap. He reached up and turned out the light and there were a few lovely seconds in the dark, and then she reached up with determination and turned the light on again.

“Coward,” he said.

“Uh uh,” she shook her head teasingly, then slyly tapped her temple. “Brains. Part of my foxy campaign.”

Which brought it up all over again. Ball frowned.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” Ball turned away. “A hard day.”

He began to tell her about it and soon he even forgot that she was still on his lap.

“They’re giving you a plane?” Pat said, startled.

“Yep. A Navion. Lockwood borrowed it from some big wheel in the State Government. There’re about six more volunteers. We’ll all be flying back and forth in shifts. We’ll catch the bugger. But boy, isn’t that something?” He chucked. “To be paid for flying?”

“The poor man,” Pat murmured.

“Poor man?”

“The man you’re looking for.”

“Poor man?” Ball repeated, astonished.

“Well, he’s insane, obviously.”

Ball stared at her. Pat looked down at him coldly.

“He’s a sick man,” she said. “Most policemen just don’t seem to realize…well, you shouldn’t talk about him as if he were just another…purse-snatcher.”

Ball dropped his eyes. After a moment he said:

“I get it. Time for a lesson in psychology. All right,” he reached out for his coffee. “Go ahead.”

She looked at him for a moment. Then got up off his lap.

“Well, let’s have the lecture,” Ball said.

“If you’re going to act like that—”

“I know I don’t know anything about psychology,” Ball said. “I know I’m just a dumb insensitive clod. But honey,” he leaned forward brutally, “this here poor man you’re talking about has killed, altogether, six people, six real live human people. Two of them women. Killed them for no damned reason in the world that makes a difference to me. If we don’t get to him very quickly somebody else who is alive right at this moment, walking around healthy and full of beans right now, will be spread all over the county maybe this time tomorrow.”

Pat sighed. “Harry, I wish you wouldn’t—”

But Ball went on relentlessly. “You say he’s sick. Yeah. Well. The people he’s killed are just as dead as if he was healthy as a pink hog. I don’t want to know his temperature or his pulse or any of that. I leave that to people like you. My job is to get him. If I run across him I’ll kill him.”

Ball had not meant to be that brutal, but all of this had jarred him.

“What an awful thing to say.” Pat rose, flushed.

“Listen, now, this is my job. I don’t mind you passing judgment on Cezanne or how to do a hysterectomy or any of that, okay. But this is my job and I am not bad at it. My job is to see that this joker does not kill anybody else and if I have to kill him to do it then that’s my job, and this poor man stuff is not for me.”

“So that’s what it is,” Pat said softly, staring at him. “Your pride has been hurt. It’s your pride.”

“Pride, hell!” Ball said. Now he stood up. “I’ve seen it too many times. We’re always the villains, guys like me, the brutal cops. Every day we get the sociologists, the psychologists, coming down and telling us what we do wrong. You’ve got to treat poor Ferd gently, he’s not a common criminal, he’s sick! And so we give them poor Ferd and they treat him in some understaffed hospital and have to let him go too soon and then we only have to get him again, and again…”

“I’m sorry,” Pat said, still staring at him. “But you know, I don’t think you’d kill him.”

“You don’t think I would, huh?”

“You couldn’t anyway. You won’t have a gun.”

“They’re arming the planes,” Ball grinned. “Old Lockwood’s having them install guns in the planes, just in case. He said he wouldn’t send his boys looking for any killer without a chance to fight back.”

“Now you’re being melodramatic,” Pat said, stiffening.

“Another four-barreled word,” Ball said. “Where’s my hat?”

“Harry,” Pat said. He stopped.

“It’s the college, isn’t it? That’s what’s holding you back.”

“Holding me back from what?”

“From loving me.”

It was the first time the word “love” had ever come out between them. Ball said nothing. He stared at her, tortured by the sweet sight of her, by the proud rage within himself.

“Harry,” she said, pleading.

“No,” Ball said. “It’s no good. You won’t even leave my job alone. What am I if you take over my job?”

He went on out the door. He did not look back. Something inside was telling him that all this was ridiculous, that he would probably never even see the killer, that some of what she had said was right, was true, but…he did not turn back. He drove home through the same rain that was falling, at that moment, on Arthur Hemminge.

The next day Hemminge did not fly. He was busy preparing bombs. He wasted a lot of time trying to be complicated and exact, but in the end he decided on simple gasoline. He puttered away most of the afternoon, humming with delight. But just before sundown, he went back into the house and stumbled again across the body of his wife.

After that he had a very difficult time. He could not seem to think clearly. Almost immediately the headache began coming back. The glowing lights began again in the corners of his eyes; he could feel the pressure building as if black water was being pumped into his head. He was tremendously depressed; he became violently angry. Usually the headaches gave him a few days peace in between, but now he had hardly gotten over one when another one began. He raged around the yard while he still had his sight, kicking, destroying, emptying gasoline and burning it. Then he blacked out.

When he came to, it was dark and the stars were out. He could not move. He lay on the ground in the cool grass, staring upward. The pain in his head had come and gone, looking upward into the cool heaven, the mighty black, he felt a moment of enormous peace. He slept.

He awoke some time later, just before the sun came up. He was still in the grip of a deadly paralysis; he had to fight himself to move, get up. He staggered back to the house, but did not go in. He sat on the porch. He had not shaved in several days; his beard was thick and dark. He lifted his face to the morning, remembering last night’s brief moment of peace. He prayed. What he said did not make any sense, but there was no one to hear him. He prayed for a long while, tears streaming down his cheeks. Eventually he stopped.

It’s time to fly, he thought. In the red glow of the horizon he could sense men moving about him—Pilots! Man your planes! He could see long lines of great black planes outlined against the sky, flames winking on in the exhausts one by one. I’m coming, he said aloud.

He rose and ran out to his plane, hearing the squadron thump by around him in heavy flight boots. He started to sing. He gassed the plane and loaded the gun. Planes roared all around him. He took his place in the line, answering commands over the radio from the tower. When it was his turn, he took off and climbed high up into the sun, along with the rest of the Dawn Patrol. When the squadron broke off, Hemminge waved the all good-bye. He settled down alone, the hunter, searching for game in the clear vaulted sky.

Just before he took off that morning, Harry Ball was handed a letter from Pat. One of the boys had gone up to the hospital where she worked and she had given it to him to deliver. Ball stuffed the letter into his shirt pocket, unopened, and took off. Once out of the traffic pattern, he pulled back on the stick and began the long slow climb to the west, toward the mountains. The letter was heavy in his pocket, but he did not open it. There was a force in him urging him to open the window and let the letter slip out into swift empty air.

Harry Ball was a hard man and he had not broken with Pat lightly; for two days now he had been making it clear to himself that he would not call her again, he would not see her again. He admitted to himself that he loved her, but that made no difference. He had come very close to kneeling to her, but his pride had held him back. And he knew that because of his pride he had lost her, and he also knew that there was nothing else he could have done. Because there was that same proud thing in Pat which also could not kneel to him. And what kind of marriage would that make? Ball thought, two people forever fighting each other for control. And after all, Ball thought, I’m thirty years old. Maybe I am not a man for marriage.

So it was all done. Ball looked around at the sky and made an effort to push Pat out of his mind. He flew on over the mountains, high in the morning sun, forcing himself to think about the killer—whom he could begin now to really and truly hate, a startling feeling, a new and murderous feeling. But now Ball had something personal in this, and so scanned the sky intently, searching for any other plane in the dark blue above, forgetting Pat enough to feel a stomach-tightening thrill as he approached a high bank of clouds, thinking that the killer could be waiting just ahead, hanging swift and hidden among the soft white folds.

But the killer did not come, and abruptly the murderous feeling in Ball died. The sky was wide and white and empty. Ball flew on toward the west with the letter in his pocket, soothed by the drone of his engine, and gradually the fact of the letter in his pocket no longer jarred him. I can handle it, he thought. I can say that I won’t call her again and I won’t. And he knew that to be true. Then he took the letter out calmly, coldly, and opened it.

My darling—Ball read—I love you. I have been sitting here all night trying to think of the right words, but all that matters is that I love you. I cannot get over the feeling that I have really and truly lost you, that you will never come back. My darling, I have been terribly wrong. You are all I want in the world. Because you mean so much to me I have tried to mean something to you, but I had never tried to make anyone love me before and I did not know how. I had to be something special to you, but all I had to give were a few long words and theories I learned in school, and I only wanted to impress you, but more than anything else now I want you, and no theories, no words. I accused you of pride, but it was my own pride that hurt us. Darling. I do not care about pride. I love you. I will love you whether or not you have to kill, whether or not you come back to me. I love you. I can’t seem to say that enough. I only wish I had said it before, that it is not too late. But it is all stored up in me, waiting to come out. I will come to you, if you will only call. I love you. Pat.

Ball put the letter down. He was shaken. Well, he thought. He studied the letter for a long moment, trying to get his mind into focus. She went a long way, he thought. Somebody had to give and she saw that and so she gave. And it was her place to give in, wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?

In the midst of all his emotion, in the midst of the absolute certainty that he had been right all along, Ball felt a sudden stab of doubt. There was something wrong. He did not know what it was, but it was jarring him. It began to occur to him that he had humbled her, had forced her to come to him. But…was it that bad? He had needed her to come to him. He did not know why that was so but it was so. He flew on in a straight line, thinking about it, trying to discover the thing that still bothered him. He flew on without looking around him, or behind, up at the sun, and in the end the letter nearly cost him his life.

Hemminge came down on him from directly above, out of the sun.

The first Ball knew of it was a pluck, plucking sound at his right wing. He turned and stared stupefied at black holes being stitched with astounding speed across the metal. What saved him was instinct. He rammed the left wing hard down, dropping the nose; the bullets meant for his cabin zipped by him through the air. He did not see the other plane coming, but he heard it go by, felt the blast of air from it going by. He dropped far down to the left before pulling up and he had no idea what to do. At the top of his climb he saw the other plane for the first time and stared at it across the open air, losing precious time just to see it, still stunned, and realized that it was a Comanche, a trim new Comanche, blue and silver and glittering in the sun.

It came at him again, nose on and shooting. He swung hard to get away and made a very bad mistake; the Comanche slipped lethally in on his tail and bullets plucked again at the Navion, at the fuselage behind him. He thought of the radio, for a call for help, but there was no time. He needed both hands to fly the plane. He dropped the nose again, gathering speed, rocking wildly back and forth, but the Comanche stayed with him. A bullet smashed through the canopy above him, spattering pieces into his hair. He had an enormous urge to pull up, but once again instinct saved him, telling him that if he pulled up now the Comanche would have him broadside, a lovely shot right into the cockpit. He did the only thing he had left to do—he let down flaps and hauled back on the throttle. The Navion slowed drastically; the Comanche overshot and brushed him going by, picking up speed.

Ball fought for altitude, but was impossible to keep the Comanche below him. It was much faster than he was; it gave him no time for the radio. As it came at him again he turned to face it, in desperation he pushed the little button on the dash that fired his gun. The Navion kicked back as the gun went off; he could see the bullets sliding away, missing, but the Comanche veered crazily and Ball heard incredible sounds begin on the radio receiver.

It was a long eerie second before Ball understood. The killer was speaking to him. The Comanche had swung off high above him in a confused circle, and was speaking, yelling. In German.

Ball did not know any German, but there was no mistaking the guttural sounds. The killer probably thought he was fighting a real war, against a German ace. But there was no mistaking the other thing, the weird, jittery, unnatural thing in the voice that came down from the other plane. Dribbling, spattering sounds. The killer was shouting at him, and coming down.

Ball had time for a quick cry into the radio; Harry Ball, Mayday, Mayday, near Bear Creek, over Bear Creek—before he had to fight again to keep the Comanche off. He wanted to get one more message across, at least one, that the killer was flying a blue and white Comanche, but bullets came into the canopy again and the killer would not stop talking, and the voice rattled Harry Ball’s mind so that he could not speak, but had to go down again in a dive, with the Comanche following. He pulled the same trick again, and it worked again, and as the Comanche slid by him Ball raised his nose slowly and the killer was dead ahead, and Harry Ball’s hand was on the machine gun button, and time froze as Ball looked down and saw the black helmet in the cockpit, the wild green scarf around the neck, no sound coming over the radio now, and Harry Ball didn’t shoot.

He pulled up slowly; the Comanche went down and away. Harry Ball felt sick in the pit of his stomach. He felt that he had almost done a dirty thing. It would have been like running over a dog that comes out in front of you on the highway. It struck him now that Pat had known he would not be capable of doing this thing, just as he had known it, but had been to perverse to admit. And then a new sound came over the radio, a strange deep voice, puzzled, plaintive, in English:

“But why didn’t you shoot?”

Harry Ball did not answer. He radioed another quick Mayday, giving the Comanche’s serial number. But the Comanche broke in, coming back at him, saying, “You should have shot. You had me fair and square.”

But now Ball was in control. The Comanche seemed no longer as fast and sure, and Ball watching it sensed that the Comanche was through and knew at the same time that if he had to kill the Comanche he would do it, as soon as it became really necessary, because regardless of the sickness in this man he had his job to do—but thank God it was not going to be necessary. He said into the radio: “Give up, Comanche. I’ll follow you down.”

At that moment something caught the corner of his eye. Glancing up quickly he saw the jets coming, two of them, trailing thin smoke down the sky. Ball said something else into the radio, but the Comanche did not answer. It swung quickly to meet the jets, a lovely little plane glowing a burning blue in the afternoon sun. It rose up toward them and the jets broke apart, swung out in a wide pincer, and the Comanche went up between them, climbing.

Ball tried to follow, but the Navion was too slow. The Comanche went on rising, higher, higher, and now Ball could hear sound on his radio, an even stranger sound, singing. The man was singing now, a broken unintelligible song in that eerie unnatural voice, and even the jets were silent, but swung easily around the little plane like huge fast fish around a slow blue minnow. They would follow him wherever he went. It was all done and they knew it, and as Ball watched he saw the Comanche flip suddenly, roll over on its back and it began to go down.

The man was still singing, humming. Ball listened to him and watched the plane go down, picking up speed, falling faster and faster with the engine wide open, boring straight down, the watching jets sweeping grandly down after it. For a moment Ball thought that the Comanche was making one last effort to get away, but then the singing stopped and there was a dead silence in the radio, and the Comanche kept going down, moving so fast now that Ball knew he would never pull it out anymore, not even if he wanted to. And so the Comanche went straight down, falling out of the sunlight into the rising dark, and the man in the plane began to speak, praying, and he was still praying when the Comanche blew up in the rocks.

The three planes circled above aimlessly, silently. Ball could not think of much to say to the other men. They did not say much to him. After a moment he heard one of the jet pilots give the position of the wreck. He turned off then and started the long flight home.

When he got home, he called Pat and told her that he loved her.

First published in Hitchcock Mysteries, December 1958

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