Lieutenants Buford and McLanahan arrived after all of the others,
except Lieutenant Roosevelt, had returned to the field. They were not
worried about him at the time, but when hours went by and he failed to
return, they knew that something had gone wrong. Still, they did not
think he had been killed. As Captain McLanahan explains:
“We were encouraged to hope for the best by the fact that Quentin had
remained out a considerable time longer than the rest of us three days
before. On that occasion he had become separated from the squad, I
don’t just know in what way, and when we saw him again he jumped out
of his airplane in great excitement and so radiant with elation and
with so broad a smile that his teeth showed exactly in the same famous
way as his father’s used to do. He never reminded us so much of his
father as on that occasion.
“He told us that after losing track of us he sighted a group of
airplanes which he believed to be ours and headed his airplane toward
them. He was too cautious, however, to take anything for granted, and
so in steering toward the group he kept himself in the rear of them,
and when he got closer he discovered that they had the cross of the
Germans painted on them.
“His first impulse was to get away as fast as possible; but then the
hero in him spoke up and he decided to avail himself of the chance to
reduce the number of our enemies by at least one. And so, flying quite
close to the last one of the airplanes, he fired quickly and with such
good aim that the plane immediately went down, spinning around, with
its nose pointed to the ground.
“‘I guess I got that one all right,’ he said; but he did not wait to
see what the final outcome might be, for aviators are full of tricks
and, by feigning disaster to their own machine, often succeeded in
drawing an overconfident enemy to destruction. Quentin knew this; and
moreover, he had another big contract on his hands, namely, to get
away from the associates of the man whom he had attacked. They all
turned upon him, firing from a dozen machine guns; but in firing his
own gun he had wheeled about at the same instant, and in that way had
a big handicap over the pursuers. He kept far enough in advance of
them to get back within the American lines before they were able to
lessen the distance sufficiently to make their shells effective. The
rate of speed, by the way, was 140 miles an hour.
“Despite his excitement and the really exceptional achievement,
Quentin modestly refrained from declaring positively that he had
bagged his man. It was only afterward, when we learned through an
artillery observation-balloon that the airplane brought down by
Quentin had been seen to strike the earth with a crash, that he
himself felt satisfied that he was entitled to be regarded the victor.
This was the occasion which brought him the Croix de Guerre.”
When the day passed and Quentin failed to return, his associates
still remained hopeful that he had landed in the enemy lines, and had
been taken prisoner. But there was further news, bad news, as Captain
McLanahan relates:
[Illustration:
© _Underwood, and Underwood._