Whether or not the Messerschmitt's pilot saw Dave closing in on him at lightning speed, the German plane held straight to its course westward. Dave frowned and slid off the safety guard on his trigger button, and started lining up the Messerschmitt in his electric windshield sight.

"Of course the guy could have suddenly gone blind," he murmured to himself. "Or maybe he's just sick and tired of this war. Me, I wouldn't know. But ... there's just one thing to do when you see a Jerry lad plowing around over forbidden ground. And so!"

As he spoke the last he started to apply pressure on the little button that would send a shower of machine gun and aerial cannon slugs straight at the German plane. That is, he started to. He didn't complete the action, for at that instant something happened that brought him up straight in the seat with a gasp of surprise.

The Messerschmitt dropped down by the left wing and something went hurtling out through the opened glass "hatch" of the three place cockpit. That something became the figure of a man in the next split second. And in the split second after that Dave saw the white puff and the man's parachute blossoming into being. The tumbling figure was jerked sharply upward toward the sky. It seemed to hover motionless for a brief instant, and then start swinging back and forth like the pendulum of a clock while the air filled parachute envelop drifted slowly earthward.

"Now, ain't that something!" Dave grunted. "The boys start getting scared before I've even fired a shot. Wonder which one he is. The pilot, radioman, or the rear gunner. Anyway, he sure...."

He bit off the rest as he took another look at the figure swaying back and forth at the ends of the parachute's shroud lines. There was something about the man that didn't seem right. But in the next instant Dave realized why. The parachutist was not garbed in flying gear, or even in the uniform of a member of the Nazi Luftwaffe. Instead he wore civilian clothes.

"Spy dropping in broad daylight?" Dave gasped. "Well, I've seen almost everything now! If that isn't a dumb thing to try and pull on us. What does Hitler think we are, anyway? As dumb and thick as his murdering Nazi gang?"

He let it go unanswered. As a matter of fact he didn't bother to give it a second thought. He didn't for the very simple reason that sudden movement of the Messerschmitt showed that the pilot was still aboard. And the sudden movement also showed, rather, indicated, that the German pilot had decided to knock one Dave Dawson out of the English sky before buzzing on back home to Naziland.

At any rate, the One-Ten whipped around in a wing screaming turn, dropped sharply by the nose for a brief instant and then came tearing up at an angle for the belly of Dave's Spitfire. The Messerschmitt's machine guns and air cannon hammered out sound and jetting flame. Not a shot, however, smacked into the Mark 5 Spitfire. Before the German plane started to zoom Dave belted the stick over, jumped hard on right rudder and spun in less than the area of a dime. Before the maneuver was half completed Dave pulled the Spitfire's nose up straight for the sky.

He roared up a good hundred feet, then kicked the ship over on wingtip and dropped straight down like ten ton of brick. Right below him was the Messerschmitt One-Ten, its pilot striving frantically to kick out from under and go skidding away into the clear. He might just as well have jumped out and tried to walk across the sky back across the Channel. Dave had him cold, and everybody concerned knew it.

"Next time, stay home!" Dave shouted and pressed the trigger button.

His guns yammered sound and death. The Messerschmitt took the whole works square in the cockpit. The plane leaped and bolted off to one side as though it had been sideswiped by an invisible express train. For a brief moment Dave saw the pilot and the gunner fighting desperately to shove the cockpit's hood wide open and bail out with their parachutes. Then they became lost to view as sheets of flame belched out from both the port and starboard engines, and the whole plane became a raging ball of fire that went tumbling over and over down toward the ground.

"Another one you won't be using any more, Goering!" Dave grunted and pulled the Mark 5 out of its engine howling dive. "But I wonder why one of those birds jumped so soon? Was he a spy, or was he just too yellow to even be in the Nazi Air Force. Boy! That would be being plenty yellow, what I mean!"

As he voiced his thoughts aloud he started circling about staring downward for a sign of the descending parachute. He spotted it in less time than it takes to tell. The parachutist was still a good two thousand feet from the ground, and a stiff wind was sending it skidding rapidly to the right as the figure at the ends of the shroud lines made no effort to "slip" his 'chute (or spill air from the envelop by hauling down on the shroud lines on that side) to counteract the side-ward movement. As a matter of fact the figure at the ends of the shroud lines didn't seem to be moving a muscle. Instead of the man's hands reaching up to grab the shroud lines and take some of his weight off the harness, the arms just dangled down at the man's side.

"Maybe he broke them bailing out," Dave grunted and stuck the nose of his Spitfire down. "If so, he's going to land with an awful jolt. And that ground wind's liable to drag him half way across this little island of England. Yeah! Maybe you should have stayed put, my little Jerry."

Dave kept his eyes on the seemingly lifeless figure floating earthward with his parachute, and held the Spitfire in its dive until he was down close. There he pulled out, leveled off, and began to circle about the parachutist as a strange sense of weird curiosity got hold of him. And as he cut in closer and closer to the dangling figure his curiosity gradually changed to a sense of utter astonishment. The man in civilian clothes kept his chin sunk down on his chest all the time. He didn't once raise his head to look at Dave's circling plane. And it was absolutely certain that he must be hearing the roar of the Rolls-Royce engine.

As far as that went, however, the man didn't do anything. Any and all movement was caused by the wind whipping at the parachute. The man could well be a sack of wet meal being lowered to earth.

"Maybe he took sleeping tablets before he jumped out," Dave grunted aloud. "Or maybe.... Hey! What gives?"

He shouted the question and sent the Spitfire ripping in so close to the dangling figure that he came within a foot of brushing the man with his wingtip. He veered off just in time but not before he saw that there was a sheet of paper pinned to the front of the man's jacket. Whether or not there was writing on the paper, Dave couldn't see. But that the sheet of paper was pinned there was enough to make up his mind.

"This gets screwier!" he shouted and hauled back his throttle. "Screwy as can be. Maybe I'm all wet, but that lad looks stone dead to me. And somebody has pinned a note on his jacket. Me, I'm going down and find out what in heck this is all about."

Checking the general direction in which the parachute was drifting, Dave then took a look at the ground below. As luck would have it he spotted a field with plenty of room for a Spitfire to sit down. Having spotted the field he slid down, let down his wing flaps, and presently settled light as a feather on an expanse of slightly uneven ground. As he wiggled out of his safety harness, and parachute straps, he heard the sound of another plane tearing down. One look upward showed him a diving Spitfire with a big figure "8" painted on either side of the fuselage. He chuckled and vaulted from the pit to the ground.

"Good old Freddy, the watch dog," he said. "Betcha think the guy slugged me down. Nope, pal. Not yet, anyway."

Not bothering with a second glance at Farmer's plane coming down to a fast landing, Dave broke into a run and raced toward a smaller field in back of a line of trees. The parachutist was just disappearing from sight down behind the trees. By the time Dave reached the field the man was on the ground. All of him on it! He was crumpled flat and the ground wind was starting to fill out the parachute silk like a boat sail and drag it across the ground. Speeding up, Dave tore over and practically threw himself at the shroud lines. He caught them and jerked hard on the underside ones ... the lines extending to the part of the silk envelop that was nearest the ground. The action "tripped" the parachute envelop, spilled the air from it, and caused it to collapse to the ground. As an added precaution Dave darted forward and gathered up the limp folds of silk in his arms.

Then he walked back to the crumpled figure on the ground. The man had his face turned toward the sky. His eyes were closed, and he was dead. A bullet hole square in the middle of his forehead was all the confirmation Dave needed. The Yank took his gaze off the death chilled face, and looked at the sheet of paper pinned to the front of the dead man's jacket. The paper had been torn by the wind, and the landing, but the words written with blue crayon stood out clear and readable. Dave's heart turned cold and his head pounded as he read the words.

    British Intelligence:

    Take your swine dog back. We don't want him, the fool!

              von Peiplow

For a long minute Dave stared at the words, hardly able to believe his eyes. Then he shook himself out of his trance, knelt down beside the dead man and searched his pockets. His "reward" consisted of a small notebook from which half the pages had been torn out, the stub of a pencil, a few French francs, a pocket knife, a clip of cheap German matches, and half a pack of even cheaper German Army cigarettes. There was nothing else. Not a single shred of anything that could tell him the man's identity.

Somehow, though, he felt sure the man was British though the clothes he wore were Flemish peasant, and his face was Teutonic in appearance, being broad and flat, with a low forehead and short, bristling straw colored hair. True, not a thing about the dead man looked British, yet somehow Dave was convinced he was.

"Dave? What in the world?"

Freddy's cry straightened Dave up and turned him around. Freddy Farmer had come to a stop not five feet away, and was standing there gazing at him out of eyes that seemed to pop from their sockets. In the next second Dave realized he still held the dead man's possessions in his hands. He scowled at his pal.

"No, not what you're thinking, you dope!" he growled. "And remind me to bust you on the nose for even thinking it! Holy smokes! What do you think I am? A darn grave robber, or something?"

"Of course not, Dave!" Freddy said sharply and pinked a little. "You just startled me, that's all. I mean, bending over him with your hands full of things. I...."

"Skip it, and come take a look yourself!" Dave cut him off, and pointed at the paper still pinned to the dead man's jacket. "Read that! But don't expect me to answer your questions!"

The English youth came closer, bent over and read the words on the paper. It was several seconds before he lifted his head and looked at Dave. And when he did dumbfounded amazement was swimming in his eyes. He shook his head, blinked hard, and took another quick glance down at the paper to make sure.

"Well, strike me pink!" he finally exclaimed in a bewildered tone. "This is the craziest thing ever!"

"You're not telling me anything new," Dave grunted. Then more to himself he added, "So that's why they tried to sneak over? To toss this poor lad out and let him float down to be recognized."

"What's that?" Freddy cried sharply. "You mean he came down by parachute? From what?"

Dave jerked his thumb at the rolled up parachute silk and shroud lines on the ground a few feet from him.

"There it is," he said. "The One-Ten popped down out of the cloud stuff right in front of me. It was duck soup and I was just about to give him the works when one of the crew bailed out. That startled me so that I didn't fire. Then I woke up just in time to see the One-Ten cutting around to give me the business. I was lucky and able to get out into the clear. After a bit the One-Ten's pilot was unlucky. He went down in flames. I saw this lad floating to earth, and he looked kind of funny to me. Didn't move at all. So I came down for a look-see. And there he is. He didn't bail out. He was thrown out, with his 'chute opened!"

Freddy whistled softly and rubbed the side of his face.

"I just saw you circling down, and I thought you'd been hit, or something," he said after a while. "So I came down to see if I could help. The others are still upstairs hunting for the bloke. When I realized you weren't with us, I went hunting for you."

"Thanks, pal," Dave grinned and gave Freddy an affectionate slap on the shoulder. "I had another of my hunches and went down under the stuff, figuring he might drop down through. He did. But, if you can help me, I sure wish you would. Explain this business."

Freddy made a hopeless gesture with his hands, and read the note again.

"Von Peiplow?" he murmured aloud and screwed up his face in deep thought. "I think I've heard that name before. It has a familiar ring, or something."

"Yeah, like Smith, or Jones," Dave grunted. "But wait! I.... Aw, nuts! I thought for a second that it was going to jog my own memory. Well, there's no use our standing here. We're only drawing blanks. Catch hold of his heels, Freddy."

"Heels?" the English youth gasped. "Why? You're not going to bury him, are you? I think...."

"Don't!" Dave snapped. "You'll over-tax that pea inside your head you call a brain. Of course I'm not going to bury him. But I'm certainly not going to leave him here, either. I'm going to fly him back to the Squadron. I don't know where that One-Ten planned to toss him out, but I think they tossed him out too soon. We'll take him back to the Squadron and have the O.C. get in touch with British Intelligence. The note's addressed to them, so I guess they'll probably know what it's all about. But I sure hope he's English, and not Nazi like he looks."

"Why?" Freddy demanded. "Why do you hope he's English?"

Dave flung him a scornful look.

"That should be easy to guess," he said. "I'm particular who I ride around in my airplane. And Nazis aren't on my list. Now, catch hold of his feet and help me carry him back to the plane. I'll put him across the cockpit and hang onto him with one hand."

"That field isn't so good for Spitfire take-off," Freddy commented dubiously.

"So what?" Dave growled. "So if I crack up, you can fly both of us back. Now, stop worrying, and lend me a hand, pal."