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changed speed, inertia removed its clutching hand.
    Flung out into the battering flow of air, turned over and over through lusting space, Lucky saw the earth three hundred feet under him.

    Flung out into the battering flow of air, turned over and over through lusting space, Lucky saw the earth three hundred feet under him.
    His fingers gripped the rip cord and he started to pull. A wing fragment passed a yard from his head.
    The pilot chute grabbed air and whistled back. The big chute cracked and flowed in a white bundle behind him, but not open.
    He was still falling.
    One hundred, seventy-five, fifty…still falling free.
    With a resounding slap, the main chute opened. The harness yanked him backward from the ground, bruising him.
    An explosive crash to the right told him that the fuselage had hit in the open field.
    Swaying gently like an acrobat on a trapeze, Lucky reached the earth and fought down the billowing chute which dragged at him.
    He unbuckled his harness and when they reached him he was carefully wiping his face with a handkerchief.
    â€œGot a smoke?” said Lucky to an awed sailor.
    But everybody except Lucky was too excited to locate one.
    Dixie’s face was as pale as ice cream and she couldn’t see because the world was swimming and misty. But she touched his sleeve to make sure that he was real.
    â€œHave you got a smoke?” said Lucky.
    Dixie opened her purse and handed him a pack and matches.
    â€œThere goes the old ball game,” said Lucky, jerking his smoking cigarette at the smoking hole in the earth.
    Lawson cleared his throat nervously. “Too bad and I won’t say I told you so. I’ll give you a report on this if you want, but all I can say is that the ship is only capable of usual wing loads and should not be recommended for anything but sporting use and private fliers who will give it no strain.”
    â€œI don’t care about that. There’s no decent market,” said Lucky. “Who’d want a sporting plane of this design?”
    â€œWell,” said Lawson, “people do buy sporting planes. And just this morning Mr. Bullard was telling me that this crate, though useless to the government, might fill his needs. He has a foreign order for private planes, not of pursuit variety. This is the furthest thing from a fighting craft I ever saw, but it would fill a sporting requirement if equipped with a smaller engine. See Bullard. Don’t give up.”
    â€œIf you see him first,” said Lucky, “tell him to go to the devil. I don’t like him. This is a dive bomber—or was.”
    â€œIt is and was a pile of junk,” said Lawson, stiffly. “A sport plane and nothing more. See Bullard.”
    â€œNuts,” said Lucky Martin, taking Dixie’s arm. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER SIX
    The Devil
Springs a Trap
    D IXIE mysteriously produced ten dollars and Flynn, sworn to secrecy, did not reveal that he had hocked her wristwatch worth a hundred and fifty.
    And thus it was that they ate for three days.
    At the end of that time the wires Lucky Martin had sent (collect) were answered severally to the effect that it was vacation time as far as test pilots were concerned.
    â€œI guess,” said Lucky, sitting on the porch of the soon-to-be-foreclosed O’Neal mansion, “that I’d better contact an airline.”
    â€œI did this morning,” said Dixie. “I called up the general manager of EAT, and he says he has a waiting list as long as a Department of Commerce appropriation bill.”
    â€œMaybe Western Air—”
    â€œPlans,” said Dixie, “are fine as long as they remain in the dream stage. But I was wrong.”
    â€œI’m not licked yet,” said Lucky in a hopeless tone of voice.
    â€œOf course not.”
    â€œWe’ll…we’ll… Well, what the hell will we do?”
    â€œThe plant is going to go under the hammer , and everything else as well.