THROUGH FIRE AND FOG.
"YOU'RE a pretty pair, I must say."
True it was, the boys were not fixed for any dress parade when they
first faced Roque, immediately after their delivery to the secret
agent by the police authorities. The crawl through the drain pipe and
the additional effort to give them the appearance of real victims of
violent treatment, had served to convert the usually natty and trim
youngsters into a couple of quite disreputable looking characters.
It is quite likely that Roque would there and then have put the
returned wanderers through the "third degree" of questioning had it
not been for a fortunate and welcome interruption in the shape of a
messenger, who could not be denied, and who, it proved, brought tidings
that wholly changed the line of thought of the stern chief.
"Take these chimney-sweeps to the tub and the clothesline," he gruffly
ordered, and Schneider, half concealing a broad grin, accepted the
service with celerity.
"You ought to have heard the boss when he found that you had not
reported at quarters last night," said the red-topped aviator, when the
trio were out of Roque's hearing. "He took the wind out of my sails, I
tell you, and I am not considered slow in the cussing business."
"Where were you, anyhow?"
"In the hands of brigands, of course," gravely advised Billy, with a
wink at Henri.
Schneider was so possessed with the prospect of some new and exciting
move by Roque, indicated by the manner of the chief upon receipt of
the message a few minutes before, that he did not burden the boys by
forcing evasive explanations of their mysterious absence.
"If Roque had half a suspicion that we had been in company with his pet
enemy, the prince of slyboots," confided Henri, when the chums were
alone, "our joint name would be Dennis."
"Gee! If that fellow hadn't bumped in just at the right time, I think
we both could have claimed the title of Ananias!"
Billy was a poor hand as a dodger of truth, and much relieved to escape
the witness stand in this instance.
The kind of danger with which the boys best loved to toy was again
speedily coming to them--the peril of aëroplaning.
Schneider brought the order to report forthwith at the aërodrome.
At the aërodrome an immense Zeppelin airship, as long as an ocean
liner, had just been inflated. Roque was engaged in conversation
with the captain of the great dirigible when Schneider and his young
companions reached the grounds. The pilot of the huge craft and his
assistants had already taken their places in the front gondola, the
foremost end of which had been screened for their protection, and
it was evident that sailing time was near. When the master mariner
had exchanged a parting word with the secret agent he entered his
room in the central cabin of the Zeppelin, which was in telephonic
communication with the front and rear gondolas and other parts of the
ship. In the meantime, Schneider had instructed the boys to give the
No. 3's an inspection to see if the attendant helpers had properly
prepared the machines for a long journey.
The young aviators then surmised that they were to travel as convoys of
the monarch of the air, which even then was majestically rising.
Roque hastened to the machine in which Billy was already seated and
waved a signal to the waiting Henri in the other biplane, containing
also the redoubtable Schneider.
The swift flyers easily overcame the slight lead of the big ship,
though it was making 40 knots, and took up the guiding positions. The
flight was directly away from Lorraine and historic Strassburg.
"I wonder if our huckster friend is in the crowd back there?" was a
mental question with Billy.
It was many a day before the young air pilot had a chance to again meet
Anglin.
When this journey ended it was in territory remote from that of any
former experience of the Aëroplane Scouts--a new battle landscape.
It had snowed, and the drab, brown plain of Poland had turned to
glistening white. The biplanes floated in a tarnished silver sky,
which, pressing down, seemed hardly higher than a gray ceiling. The
aviators landed on the clay bank of the winding yellow river, the
Bzura, within 400 paces of the German trenches. Gun answered gun across
the golden stream, shell on shell spattered into the soft earth, and
rifles rattled unceasingly.
Schneider sniffed the powder smoke like a seasoned warhorse. "It's the
life!" he exclaimed.
"And the death," added Roque.
He knew that men lay bleeding and broken on the banks of this yellow
streak in the white picture.
"You're just right, boss," murmured Billy, nodding his hooded head,
"the war map looks all red to me."
Roque, as usual, wherever he went or wherever he was, seemed to carry
an Aladdin magic carpet on which to sail, for in the next flight of the
biplanes a few miles distant he found a bright spot in this winter
scene of rack and ruin--a clean, white lodgekeeper's kitchen, where a
canary sang, and where the aërial wayfarers rested and were fed.
"I'll show you even better," he said, "when we break into Warsaw."
The chief also had a particular crow to pick with the defenders of
the Polish capital. One of his men, for some time operating with the
Russians, had been detected, and the end of a story of brilliant secret
service achievement was marked by a little mound of earth in a Warsaw
stable yard.
But for the present there were busy days ahead for the aviators in
reconnoitering the Russian lines.
Most of the aërial work here was over a plain, flat as a floor. Black
dots here and there marked isolated houses, and the Kalish road was
bordered by a line of leafless trees with smooth trunks, which reminded
the young pilots of a rank of grenadiers.
"What's that bunch over there?" queried Billy, nodding toward a group
of horsemen, shrouded in long caftans, wearing lambskin caps shaped
like a cornucopia, and bearing lances.
"They are Cossacks," replied Roque, from the observer's perch, "the
strange fighters who never surrender."
Billy had later an opportunity for closer view of these reckless riders
in the service of the Czar.
The flyers could see that the road below was this day crowded with the
carts of refugees, trailing in endless procession, on the top of each
vehicle the members of the family, the average one man to five women.
The boys noted that there were not so many children here as they had
seen among the homeless wanderers in Belgium. The same problem was
here, however--what are they going to do?
"There they go again," cried Henri, referring to renewed outbreak
from the long gray noses sticking out over the top of a brown gun
emplacement--belching cones of death, and shooting red flare into the
gray-white atmosphere. Then another noise out of the winter-worn copse
of trees--pop, pop, pop, the notes of rifle fire, all raising a queer
mist over the plain. With all this racketing no soldier could be seen
at the point of fire.
If trouble was contagious, the biplane Henri was driving suddenly
caught some of it; something went wrong with the motors, and it was
a case of get down quick in the long slide, in which performance the
young pilot excelled. He landed safely enough, but without choice of
place.
The machine was stranded in Sochaezev, a city of the dead. Pale faces
were still peering from some of the doors and windows, though almost
every roof had been battered in, leaving only the stringers, reminding
one of skeletons.
Billy had instantly volplaned in pursuit of the disabled biplane of his
partner, and the two experts, assisted by Schneider, were speedily at
the work of repair.
Roque impatiently moved about among the ruins, acting as a sentinel,
and occasionally turning to the laboring aviators with muttered
insistence for haste.
"Hist!"
With the chief's sibilant warning the boys softly laid down the tools
and motor parts they were handling, and stood at attention. Schneider
drew a revolver from his belt.
Roque, in crouching attitude, held an ear close to the frozen earth
surface, and the others took example.
"There's a cavalry troop headed this way," hoarsely whispered
Schneider. The pounding of many hoofs, growing louder and louder, was a
sound apparent to each listener.
Then as a new diversion, out in the open field to the right of the
road, down which the horsemen were galloping, rang out the rapid blows
of pikes and spades on the ice-covered soil.
"They're throwing up kneeling trenches."
Schneider had a true ear for war moves.
The grating noise of the closing of a gun breech preceded a tense
moment.
By the shifting of sound it was impressed upon the listeners that the
oncoming cavalry had left the road and had swung into the plain on the
left.
"We'll be between two fires in a minute or so."
This from Roque, as he rejoined his companions standing by the
aëroplanes.
"Give us a precious ten minutes and we need not care," volunteered
Henri, who had discovered the defect in the machinery which had brought
them down.
"Get at it, then," urged Roque.
The boys did "get at it" so vigorously that they raised a perspiration,
despite the frigid air.
"It's all right now," triumphantly announced Billy, hastily repacking
the tools.
That they had been spared the time required to meet the emergency was
due to the fact that the cavalrymen had diverted their course so as to
make a sudden frontal charge on the artillerymen from the cover of the
ruins.
"Now for a move backward," ordered Roque in low tone; "even though
the gunners to the right may wear the gray we would have no show for
recognition if we bounced up like a flock of partridges."
So the aviation party cautiously wheeled the biplanes in the deserted
street as far as they could from the supposed line of the coming clash.
None too soon were they out of range, for with savage yells the
Cossacks rode full-tilt from cover at the German guns and gunners in
the shallow trenches.
Amidst the roar of desperate conflict the biplanes whizzed away like
great arrows.
"Some speedy tinkering we did in that ghost town, Mr. Roque?"
"Nothing slow," assented Roque, leaning forward to give Billy a pat on
the back.
"Where away now?" asked the pilot.
"Back to the lodge for the night," directed the chief.
No such comfort for the boys in the next flight.
They were booked for a journey to Przemysl, the vast underground
fortress of Galicia, about which the Russian right end was then
snapping like the tip of a whip around a sapling, and later surrounded
on all sides by the Muscovite forces.
While viewing the first back-wash of the Austrian forces from the high
tide of Russian invasion, the aviators had hurtled through a maelstrom
of noise. The yells and shoutings of wagon drivers, the rattling of
thousands of wheels over stony roads, the clatter of horses' feet made
an indescribable tumult, and to this were added the sounds of infantry
fighting.
Roque had reliable advices during one of the stops in the flight that
the fortress defenders were still holding their own, and no Russian
charge had as yet crossed the barbed wire mazes that circled the city.
Never since the memorable race at Friedrichshaven had the No. 3 type
of biplane attained such velocity as in the finish of this forced run
to the Galician stronghold, the final dash over the black-plowed farms
through a wet fog and under fire of a Russian battery posted in the
hills.
"I feel like I had been hauled through the lower regions by a
nightmare," complained Billy, as he later sat with Roque, Schneider and
his chum in the Steiber Coffee house.
"I will say," confessed Schneider, "that I never hit the wind so hard
before in my flying experience. My eyes must look like two burned holes
in a blanket."
"I might say, Schneider," remarked Roque, "that if it had not been for
that timely fog you would have hit the ground harder than you ever did
before. Those gunners on the hill could not have missed us if given
fair sight."
"It has just occurred to me that they came pretty close, anyhow."
"They sure did, Buddy," laughed Billy, following this assertion by his
chum. "I almost collided with a shell that sounded like a dozen factory
whistles. By the way, Mr. Roque," he continued, "it looks like you were
tied up here for some time to come. I don't see any way out of it."
"Do not lose any sleep over that problem, young man; if we got in we
can get out. You ought to know by this time that there is always a
hole in the air that cannot be blocked."
"You bet he's right," exclaimed Schneider, slapping his knee for
emphasis.
"Hustle for bed, all of you, and stay there until you are called."
With this the chief faced the fire and lighted one of his big, black
cigars. He had some thinking to do.
The boys were awakened the next morning by gunfire.
"Oh, lawsy," sleepily murmured Billy, "is there another battle started
already?"
Schneider at the first report had gone on his bare feet to the nearest
window.
"Nix, fellows," he cried, after short observation, "they're not
shooting at men this time, it's wild geese they're popping at."
The besieged garrison was adding to its store of eatables by bringing
down wildfowl, which flew in abundance over the town.
"Let me in on that."
Henri owned the idea that he was something of a full hand as a Nimrod.
A voice in the doorway: "You will be 'let in' on bigger game than that."
Roque smiled at the youthful enthusiast, and added:
"There is a man's size job for a half-sized man waiting until you shake
the sleep out of your system."
"Get up, you snowbirds, and sing for your salt."