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The second in command at the airdrome gave Parker and Jimmy their final instructions. "This is Hill's first time over," said the officer to Parker. "He can fly, though. I think for the first time he had better guard and watch." Then, turning to Jimmy: "Watch Parker, and fly about eight hundred feet behind him and the same distance above him when he straightens out.
Lines of trees, patchwork patterns made by the fields, and oddly grouped farm buildings swept along beneath the soaring plane, growing smaller with uncanny rapidity. The day's work started. That was all it amounted to. In the airdrome they had left behind, the eyes that had followed their first moments of flight were turned to other sights nearer at hand.
How they escaped death at his hands they hardly knew, for he had poured a veritable storm of lead into them at close range, and made dozens of holes in one or other of the three planes. Richardson's arrival with the major at the home airdrome was the first news to come back of the fight in the air.
The two new triplanes were to be used as a bombing machine and an observation machine respectively. The flight commander assigned the piloting of the first machine to Richardson and the second to Bob Haines. To Bob's delight Dicky Mann was chosen as his observer. Four of the wasp-like hunter machines, the swiftest planes in the airdrome, were to accompany the two triplanes.
The pilots selected for these four one-man fliers were Parker, Jimmy Hill, Joe Little and Harry Corwin. The six machines were in the air before the boys realized that they had their wish of two nights before. The roar of the six engines filled the airdrome.
Her mind went back, as it had done frequently after the boys had commenced their work at the airdrome, to the days of the short Spanish-American war. Joe's father, impulsive, had joined the colors at the first call and gone to Cuba. Mrs. Little's only brother, very dear to her, had volunteered, too, and was in the First Expedition to the Philippines. Neither had come back.
The falconer of war had unhooded his new brood of hawks and they mounted up, free of bells and jesses. The flight to the airdrome some six kilometers south of Epernay was made without incident. That is, it was thought to be without incident until Yancey, leading B Flight, reported to Cowan that Siddons had been forced down by some trouble over Vitry. Cowan was evidently displeased.
With such eatables as they had bought stored in a basket, and carrying a few other packages, the boys went out to the airdrome. A guard stood at the door to keep out those having no business in the hangar, and as the young flyers passed in they noticed that Mr. Wrenn and a group of four fellows in flying-suits were going over the rival airplane.
But to the airdrome near St.-Omer came later models, out of date a few weeks after their delivery, replaced by still more powerful types more perfectly equipped for fighting. Our knights-errant of the air were challenging the German champions on equal terms, and beating them back from the lines unless they flew in clusters.
Get some sort of rig so I can tell you when I see you, and come to me again and I will set you at work." Not long after, vacation time had come, and with it the new uniforms, in neat, unpretentious khaki. Garbed in their new feathers and "all their war paint," as Mr. Mann called it, they reported at the airdrome main gate just as the first big wooden crate came past on a giant truck.
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