The
last of them fell off, baffled,--or afraid to go deeper into France. Now
he emerged again into the clear air and the starlight. The land beneath
him was a scudding blur, with a dark-green mass in its center, the
forest of La Fay.
And then, suddenly, he knew he must land if he were not to lose
consciousness and hurtle down blindly; and with set teeth and sweat
beading his forehead, he began the descent. At the end his strength
failed him. The plane crashed among the trees. "But Saint Denis, who
helps all Frenchmen, helped me,"--he smiled--"and I was thrown clear."
From that thicket where his machine lay hidden it was a mile to
Prezelay. He dragged himself over this distance, sometimes on his hands
and knees. Soon after dawn Marie-Jeanne, answering a discordant ringing,
found a man lying outside the gate and babbling deliriously, her
master's cousin, in a blood-soaked uniform, holding out a bundle of
papers, and begging her by the soul of her mother to put them in the
castle's secret hiding-place.
She did it. Then she coaxed the wounded man to the rooms opening from
the gallery and tended him day and night through the weeks of fever that
ensued.
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