Bell tensed every muscle, as if he could somehow help her machine survive by force of will. But it seemed certain that despite her cool courage, lightning reflexes, and vast experience, the power of the wind and the crippling loss of a control flap would smash her into the harbor.

He saw a blur of light ripple across the waters around the Statue of Liberty. Spectators on scores of boats were looking up at her falling craft, thousands of faces agape with horror.

Bell hit his blip switch, cutting off his motor, and put the monoplane into a steep volplane, dropping after Josephine’s machine at a sharp angle, trying to stay with her, in a desperate impulse to help that was as impetuous as it was futile. The wind humming in the wire stays rose in pitch, shrieking, as the Eagle increased speed.

One hundred feet above the water, Josephine’s aeroplane banked sharply into a turn that put her on a collision course with the colonnaded pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Leveling off, her craft headed directly into the wind, which was blowing every flag in a stiff line from the south. It descended and wobbled left of the statue. She was attempting to alight, Bell realized with unexpected hope. She appeared to be aiming for a tiny patch of lawn beneath the stone walls of the star fort and the water.

The narrow space looked no bigger than a country vegetable garden, not more than sixty yards long and barely two wingspans wide. But as Bell leveled out of his glide and restarted the Gnome, he saw that that was all the room the aviatrix needed. Her wheels touched at the start of the green grass, and the monoplane bounced, skidded, and stopped a foot from the water’s edge at the tip of the island.

Josephine scrambled out of the nacelle. She stood, arms akimbo, inspecting the wing where the alettone had broken. Then, mirroring the colossal green statue, she raised her right arm like Lady Liberty lifting her torch of freedom and waved to the crowds on the spectator boats. The pasty ripple of horror-stricken faces exploded into the joyous flutter of thousands of handkerchiefs saluting her pluck and good fortune.

As soon as Isaac Bell saw a V-marked Van Dorn Agency steam launch speed to Bedloe’s Island, he whipped his flying machine past the Statue of Liberty’s stern Gallic nose and raced up the Hudson River at sixty miles an hour. Nature had lent a hand with her lethal wind gusts, and it was not a gift he would waste. Josephine was safely on the ground, soon to be protected by armed detectives, and if Harry Frost was lurking on the route ahead, Bell’s decoy was now the only yellow flying machine the killer would see to shoot at.

The tall detective did not have long to wait.