CHAPTER XX

WITHIN AN ACE OF DEATH Ted Scott’s face was white and his heart skipped a beat. He knew instantly what had happened. He had struck an air pocket, one of those treacherous partial vacuums that are the dread of the air navigator, as dangerous as the concealed rock is to the mariner. There was no longer any buoyancy in the plane. The sustaining air had disappeared. The law of gravitation had asserted itself and the plane was going down like a plummet. Instinctively Ted threw in all the power of his engine in the hope …