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Title: Wing for Wing

Date of first publication: 1932

Author: Thomson Burtis (1896-1971)

Date first posted: April 26, 2026

Date last updated: April 26, 2026

Faded Page eBook #20260454

This eBook was produced by: Al Haines, John Routh & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net

GROSSET & DUNLAP, Inc.

Made in the United States of America

As Major Rudford Riley pointed his SE-5 toward the airdrome, it seemed that a dread of the future of which he had been subconsciously aware for days had come to the surface of his mind. The observation plane which he and Jerry Lacey had been guarding departed for its own tarmac. But the fact that a dangerous mission had been accomplished without accident didn’t help Rud’s frame of mind.

At first it had seemed a definite relief for Major Rudford Riley to get back in command of a straight pursuit squadron on the western front after his experiences with the famous Flight A on special duty. But now his mind flashed back with pleasure to the exciting days on the Italian front with Jerry Lacey, the Manhattan Madman. In contrast to the present duty to which he had looked forward, those old days in Italy and later on the Western Front with Flight A had been days of excitement and breath-taking adventures. Things weren’t going right with his present command and he knew it. A deep furrow of worry etched itself on his forehead under his leather helmet.

“About another day and I’ll be scared of the dark,” he told himself disgustedly as he eased his big body down further into the cockpit.

His steady, gray-blue eyes swept the instrument board casually. Then, despite the fact that he was fifteen miles inside the Allied lines, he turned his head quickly to look behind him. His heart seemed to stop for that second. He was conscious of a great feeling of relief as he saw no enemy ship anywhere in sight.

“If I don’t stop mooning around, I’m going to wake up some day and find that the whole German air service has sneaked up on me,” he soliloquized. “I guess this being commanding officer has got me some way.”

The converted pasture lot which was the present base of the 31st Pursuit Squadron was only five miles away now. As his heavy-lidded eyes swept the half dozen dots below that he knew to be ships he smiled grimly.

The 31st had taken an awful licking in the last week. In a way he was glad that replacements had been so slow that the commanding officer had to fly missions himself. It was better than sticking on the ground wondering who wouldn’t come back.

He had been aware of a warm glow of satisfaction when he had gotten his commission as major and succeeded to the job of commanding officer. A part of the glow still remained. Somehow though, he felt as though there was something he ought to be able to do for the gang. They needed new men, they needed new ships, and most of all, three or four of them needed leave if they weren’t to crack wide open.

Again his heart jumped queerly as he looked back of him. Jerry waved jocularly. Thirty miles away old Salami, the German observation balloon, was a bobbing speck in the sky. Three of the 31st had been killed trying to get that balloon.

Slowly, he cut the hundred-and-eighty horsepower Hispano-Suiza motor to a thousand revolutions and started in a gradual dive for the drome. Handling his motor with all the care a watchmaker would give to the most delicate piece of mechanism, he brought the SE-5 to rest on the tarmac with one last stab at the throttle.

“Just a quiet little joy ride, eh?” he said in his soft southern drawl as Jerry clambered out of the other ship.

Jerry Lacey rubbed his straight nose with one finger, smudging oil all over it. Above his bronzed face his brown, curly mop of hair was in its usual disarray. Rud grinned back at the tall youth whose adventures and misadventures had been the talk of the front a year or so ago. Jerry, known as the Manhattan Madman in those days, had gotten both feet on the ground at last and had been a great help to his young C.O. during the past few months.

Rud took off his own helmet, exposing a thick shock of red hair to the chill fall breeze. Below it, his face was tanned and square with wide-set, steady gray eyes. His big body moved with slow grace, his long legs slightly bent at the knee and his powerful shoulders hunched wearily. There were deep lines around his mouth and a curious look in his eyes which often caused strangers to stare at him queerly. It was compounded of the quality which comes from looking habitually into the distance, but there was something else there too. A man doesn’t stare death in the eye daily without getting a different viewpoint on life.

As they entered the big room which was a combination mess hall and lounging room, the familiar sight of a dozen flyers ranged along the tables and benches at one end met Rud’s eyes and the smell of lunch assailed his nostrils. “Stubby” Farmer looked around. Then, as though every man’s head had been pulled around by the same string, the entire outfit turned. For a second there was utter silence.

There was another second of silence as Rud’s eyes went slowly from face to face.

“Step up and have the biggest shock of your life,” “Red” Somers yelped suddenly.

He leaned against the wall and his shoulders seemed to come back slightly as though the easy-going Texan was preparing himself for the shock. The fox-faced little Somers pulled out a cigarette before answering.

“A new replacement will be with us for lunch,” he stated in his high-pitched voice, “and his name is Lake.”

“Stormy Lake,” Red told him, like a bantam rooster crowing, “and that isn’t all.”

“Well,” “Jumbo” Ross explained, “you know this man’s army never could make up its mind from one day to another whether to kiss or kill Stormy. Yesterday was kissing day so he gets here as a Lieutenant-Colonel in full silver leaf.”

For a second Rud didn’t comprehend what that meant. Then it seemed that his stoical exterior had suddenly cracked, and that the fiery spirit of him shone through his blazing eyes. His drawl was even more deliberate than usual.

Jerry Lacey threw back his head and laughed. “Stormy Lake commanding officer!” he chuckled. “Pardon me boys, I’m going out and break a leg. Why I’d be better myself! Give me a nice clean hospital any time——”

Rud’s steady self-control seemed to snap at that. And the temper which it had taken him years of time and many a tragic lesson to learn to control flared forth white hot.

“Has this darned army gone completely crazy?” he shouted, the words literally crackling as they fell from his lips. “The craziest coot that ever flew a ship a commanding officer! A guy who ought to have broken his neck six months ago, who’ll be giving suicide orders from morning till night——”

Jumbo Ross put a friendly hand on his shoulder. Turbulent brown eyes below bushy black eyebrows stared into Rud’s and the blonde giant’s words ceased as though a hand had been clapped over his mouth.

“Exactly,” Jumbo boomed in his bass voice. “Something’s got to be done about it.”

For a second there was silence. Attention remained concentrated on the commanding officer of a week’s standing.

“Well, at least we’ll get a look at him,” piped Red. “He must be a humdinger at that. One day he’s court-martialed, the next he’s promoted, the third day he knocks down a couple of balloons against army regulations; then he disappears for a week and comes back with anything from four more German ships to a kidnapped colonel. A broth of a lad, I’d call him.”

Rud nodded slowly. No one in the 31st squadron had ever crossed trails with Major, now Lieutenant-Colonel Lake. However, from the remotest village in the United States to the furthermost hamlet in Germany, the fame of the twenty-three-year-old flyer to whom orders were nothing and who seemed to live on a diet of German airplanes, was a household word. A member of the French air service at the age of nineteen, in the Lafayette Escadrille at twenty, an American ace credited with more than twenty planes officially at twenty-two, Stormy Lake was a raging demon of the air who had spent half his flying career in hospitals and the other half breaking army regulations and German flyers with equal facility. His career reminded Rud of the meteoric rise to fame of Jerry Lacey, the Manhattan Madman, though Stormy Lake was far wilder and crazier than Jerry had ever been in the early days of the war.

At the moment, the thought of being superseded in command didn’t affect Rud. His fingers ruffled through his disarranged red hair as he said slowly, “I have run into a few boys that know him and they say he’s absolutely nuts and should be in an asylum.”

It was the voice of Lieutenant Isaiah Hatfield, the husk of it cracking as the adjutant tried to make it carry from the doorway to the other side of the room. Somewhat portly and completely baldheaded, Lieutenant Ike pattered across the floor like a pouter pigeon in a hurry. His half-moon face was garnished with a grin, and consequently his eyes were two rounded slits below his dome-like forehead.

“Just wondering what we’re going to do with Stormy Lake when he gets here,” Jerry told him.

“Well, don’t worry,” croaked the adjutant, reaching for a cigarette. “Let our new papa worry about that!”

Every muscle in Rud’s body seemed to freeze. “What do you mean?” he drawled. “Stormy Lake is our new papa.”

“Oh no, he isn’t,” crowed Ike. “Within a half an hour our new papa will be here. He’s a real colonel.”

“Get set, lads,” chuckled Hatfield. “Looks like we’re going to be the freak museum of the air service.”

“All ready?” he went on with unction. “Well, it’s none other than ‘Squads Right’ Shafer!”

It was partly an exclamation, but mostly a prayer from Jerry Lacey. The other flyers seemed to be stricken dumb. Then Jumbo Ross’ fist smacked down on the table and as though it were a signal, everyone except Rud started talking at once. Jumbo was outshouting the rest of them.

“So that’s what they’re pulling on us, is it?” he bawled. “They can’t even pay us the compliment of sending us a flyer! He hasn’t had forty hours all told.”

“But oh, what a hound he is on having your buttons shined and your pants pressed,” Jerry put in. “It’s going to be eat by the numbers, get up by the bugle, and brush your teeth in cadence.”

Rud stood quietly amid the bedlam. It seemed to him that the premonition he had had half an hour before was strengthening every moment. He felt somehow as though the squadron, and he with it, was rushing toward some unfortunate crisis.

Squads Right Shafer was known all over the Western Front as a pitiless martinet whose unpopularity had started when he was in charge of the M.P.’s in Paris and increased with each week after he had been assigned to the air service. He had learned to fly less than three months before.

Rud turned to confront a tall, thin man in the uniform of a lieutenant-colonel. Tarnished wings garnished his rather ill-fitting uniform and a pair of sunken dark eyes stared unwinkingly.

The exclamation seemed to be jerked from him. The rest of the flyers were motionless, staring at the far-famed Stormy Lake as though they could not believe their eyes.

“You seem surprised. Didn’t you know I was coming?” Lake inquired with a hint of sarcasm.

Every mental picture he had had of Stormy Lake was smashed into smithereens by the man before him. Below neatly combed black hair, Lake’s thin face was lined. His cheeks were deep hollows which merged into a thin square jaw over which the skin was stretched tightly.

It was his eyes, however, that fascinated Rud. He felt as though he was hypnotized and somehow couldn’t drag his gaze away from them or think of anything to say. They were large and dark and curiously sunken. There was something haunted about them and there was a blank starey quality in them which affected Rud in eerie fashion. They were like blank windows. He had the feeling that the real Stormy Lake was peering through them at the world but that the world could see nothing of the real man through them.

“Meet the boys,” Rud said finally and started introducing Lake to the flyers.

Lake looked as little like a wild kid as Rud did himself. There were marks of suffering and maturity in that lined countenance although it was plain that in years the man was very young. There wasn’t the slightest sign of cockiness or conceit in him as he shook hands all around, before he sat down to lunch.

“Well, how about a few good stories of the Foreign Legion,” Jerry Lacey asked sardonically as he attacked his soup. “You might as well get them off your chest now, colonel, before Squads Right Shafer gets here.”

“I’m glad I’m not booked for commanding officer anyway,” he said quietly.

His voice was low and slightly husky. It seemed as though the presence of the young colonel had affected the entire squadron. The customary badinage around the board was nonexistent and frequently there were awkward silences. Rud strove to break one of them.

“Well, Colonel Lake, we’re sort of relieved that you aren’t going to be C.O. at that. I’m frank to say that I wouldn’t care to follow you everywhere you’ve been.”

Lake shrugged his shoulders and for a minute those hypnotic eyes stared blankly into Rud’s.

“If it’s just the same to everybody, I’d rather not talk about what’s past and gone. This outfit’s been having a tough time lately, hasn’t it?”

Rud Riley nodded and his face flushed slightly at the implication in the colonel’s words. The other flyers were looking at Lake resentfully.

“He thinks pretty much of himself at that,” Rud thought. “I’m sorry,” he said aloud. “Well——”

The door opened to admit an orderly. “Colonel Shafer has just arrived, sir,” he said quickly, his eyes on Riley.

“Don’t get up!” Shafer snapped. “You can go back to the office, corporal.”

The soldier withdrew and for a long thirty seconds Colonel Squads Right Shafer gazed over his new command while he lit himself a cigarette. His inspection was returned with interest by the quiet flyers.

The new C.O. was tall and gaunt and granite-faced. A thin high-bridged nose jutted boldly forward over a wide, thin mouth. His jaw was long and narrow and thrust forward pugnaciously. Hard, gray eyes glinted coolly as he removed his hat and walked deliberately toward the table. His hair was slightly tinged with gray. He was about thirty-eight, Rud estimated, and he certainly did look like a tough hombre. Even his voice was metallic.

“Go ahead and eat,” Shafer told them. “You’re Colonel Lake, I suppose?”

Rud wondered momentarily why Lake had said “sir.” It wasn’t in keeping with Lake’s reputation to take a back seat for anyone, least of all his equal in rank. The most famous flyer in the American air service seemed almost frightened at the hard-bitten professional soldier who was now staring at him with a baleful glint in his long, narrow eyes.

“Go ahead and eat,” Shafer repeated. “I’ll do all the talking for the next five minutes and we’ll know where we stand.”

He leaned forward on the table and took a look up and down the board before he went on. “I heard I was coming to the sloppiest outfit on the Front and now I know it. Is there any law against a man shaving or washing his face in this squadron?”

“I’ve seen a lot of sloppy-looking soldiers in my time, but I’ll be hung if this isn’t the choicest-looking collection of birds I’ve ever seen masquerading as officers. Major Riley, I’m sorry to tell you that you’ve done a lousy job as C.O. of this flight, and I’m telling the rest of you that things are going to change from now on. I see from the looks of you all, one good reason why your flight has lost more men and ships than they had any license to.”

“We’ve lost a lot of men and ships, Colonel, because we’ve had two weeks of almost steady ground strafing,” he said very slowly.

“Well, we’ll see what you can do in the future!” snapped Shafer. “From now on not a member of this command leaves the post without my permission. Likewise, from now on, every man will shave at least once a day and be properly uniformed at meals and all other times. After I look around a little more, I’ll probably have some more to say.”

“This is worse than I thought,” Rud reflected, and suddenly he was aware that he was very miserable. He had not realized until now how much pride he had taken in being a squadron commander. It wasn’t so much the prospect of being under the thumb of that gray martinet at the head of the table that depressed him. He felt as though he had lost something infinitely precious—had been tried and found unworthy.

“I might as well tell you something here and now,” Shafer went on, his eyebrows coming forward in a frown. “It concerns you, Colonel Lake.”

“You may be famous and a lot of boll busters back in the States may think you’re great, but everybody in the service knows that you’ve been the most insubordinate and big-headed officer that ever thought army regulations ought to be rankly disobeyed!” Shafer snapped. “All the planes you’ve got don’t mean a thing to me. For once in your life, you’re going to obey orders and your prima donna days are a thing of the past. The first time you get out of line—and I’m giving you fair warning—you’re going to get it right in the neck. Orders are orders in the Thirty-first Squadron. Understand?”

“I do, sir,” Lieutenant-Colonel Lake said quietly, and a dark flush crept over his face.

Rud had the impression that Lake was laughing at Shafer inside. There was some intangible quality back of Lake’s words which was almost as though he was pitying the man who was publicly humiliating him. It seemed that Shafer felt it too and that Lake’s quiet answer had stung him.

“I’ve run into a lot of your kind,” he went on harshly. “Young squirts that get a couple of lucky breaks and think they’re too good to be true. So watch your step, Mr. Ace! Those pretty medals won’t help you out any if you’re court-martialed. I don’t know who your other commanding officers have been but you’ve gotten away with murder since you’ve been in France. Starting now you’re just another flyer, understand?”

“I do,” Lake said. He seemed to be examining Shafer as though the ex-M.P. were some new and curious kind of insect.

There was a moment of silence. Rud glanced surreptitiously at the sullen faces of the flyers.

“Things are going to happen around here!” he thought swiftly. “They’re not going to take much more of this stuff—colonel or no colonel.”

“I’d like to ask permission to take a hop this afternoon,” Colonel Lake was saying. “I’ve been flying Spads and Nieuports, so SE-5’s are sort of new to me.”

“O.K., but stay over the airdrome!” Shafer snapped as he got to his feet. “Major Riley, I want to see you in headquarters as soon as you’ve finished eating.”

Without another word, Shafer took his hat and strode out. For a moment the flyers looked at each other wordlessly. It was Jumbo Ross’s voice that broke the silence.

“Now what are we going to do with that?” he inquired, his stormy eyes flashing.

“So he’s going to make soldiers out of us!” Jerry Lacey interrupted savagely. “He’d better not go in any formation with me! My eyes mightn’t be working so well and I might mistake him for a Heinie.”

“What right has he got coming in here and bawling out Rud and everybody else?” little Somers raved. “So we must not leave the post without his highness’ permission? I’m going now!”

“Now listen, boys, let’s not bite off our noses to spite our faces,” Rud said quietly as Somers got to his feet. “There’s no use in deliberately making it worse for ourselves. Orders are orders.”

“Oh shut up!” Jumbo Ross told him. “You’re not C.O. any more. You’re just a lousy major that couldn’t make the grade.”

Rud winced. As one man the others elaborated upon Jumbo’s thought. In a moment, Rud saw that there was no way of controlling them right now. It was Jerry Lacey who summed up their feelings in short, viciously clipped sentences.

“For three weeks they have us ground strafing and trying to get old Salami—killing us off like flies. And now they send Squads Right Shafer down to tell us how lousy we are and what an inefficient slob of a commanding officer Rud is. As if life isn’t tough enough in this sector without putting up with that punk!”

“There’s more than one way to cook a goose,” Jumbo Ross added significantly.

The strain of the last few weeks had drawn them to the limit, and there were times when there was a note of hysteria in their resentment against Shafer and all that he meant.

Suddenly Lake got to his feet. “I think I’ll take that hop,” he told Riley quietly. “What ship shall I use?”

Five minutes later, his eight-cylinder motor thoroughly warmed, Rud watched Lake take off. It was a conservative take-off as the ace felt out his ship.

“I figured the least he’d do would be a zoom right off the ground,” Rud thought to himself. “So that’s Stormy Lake, huh?”

Somehow he couldn’t get over his amazement at the difference between the Stormy Lake of legend and the real man. His eyes followed the trim little scout absently. Then Rud stiffened.

At fifteen hundred feet, Lake had pointed his ship toward the Front and with motor wide open, the SE-5 was disappearing westward.

It was a bellow from fifty feet away and Rud turned to confront Squads Right Shafer. The colonel was running toward him, his face bleak and cold and those stony gray eyes flashing.

“We’re going to chase that fool and bring him back here. Then he’s going to get what’s coming to him!” Shafer gasped savagely. “If I have to shoot him down myself! Come on, Riley, get going!”

Already two motors were roaring and a moment later Rud was in the cockpit of his ship. He felt as though he was in a dream. Nothing had happened right that day and worse things were in store; he knew it.

His eyes swept the instrument board quickly. The temperature was only sixty-five degrees Centigrade, but oil and air pressure was all right. Shafer took no time to coddle his motor. He was taking off cross-wind directly from the line and as the mechanic pulled the wheel blocks, Rud slowly shoved the throttle all the way ahead.

Lake was two miles ahead of them, climbing fast. He had almost five thousand feet now as Rud and the colonel drove the SE-5’s higher.

His own tachometer read 1,750 revolutions as the temperature crept up to eighty degrees Centigrade, but if anything, Shafer and he were losing ground.

Lake was bound on one of his insane individual sorties, there could be no doubt of that.

Rud glanced ahead of him. “They’ve started shelling each other again,” he thought numbly.

The last two days had been too good to be true. The sector had been comparatively quiet. An ever growing speck in the distance, old Salami came in sight and as he saw it, something seemed to click into place in Rud’s mind.

“That cuckoo is going to have a shot at old Salami!” he reflected swiftly, which meant that Lieutenant-Colonel Stormy Lake was going to inevitable doom. Rud found himself straining forward as though to help his ship along. But it was a hopeless chase. The altitude needle was at eight thousand feet and Lake was at least twenty-five hundred feet higher, pointed straight for old Salami.

Colonel Shafer, a few hundred yards ahead of him, must have throttled his ship because in a moment Rud was alongside of him. Shafer, his profile like that of some human vulture, was gesturing. He pointed at Lake’s ship and then at the balloon and shrugged his shoulders. Rud nodded. There was nothing they could do. They couldn’t catch Lake or warn him.

Around old Salami were placed enough anti-aircraft batteries to stop a dozen ships diving at the balloon at once. For two weeks it had been the target of the Allied flyers and not one had survived. Rud was like a frozen statue as he saw Lake, twelve thousand feet high, now reach a point directly above the balloon. Anti-aircraft bursts were already showing gray-white against the leaden sky. Eight or ten miles away, half a dozen specks took form in the sky. Fokkers were coming to the rescue too.

There was something tragic in Rud’s steady eyes as he watched Lake. The SE-5 flipped over on its back in a half roll. As it swooped out, it went into a vertical nose dive. The little scout roared earthward like a comet. Then, suddenly, it abandoned that straight dive. Lake was swooping from side to side, changing direction with lightning-like speed. Anti-aircraft bursts puffed out all around him, but ever the SE-5 came on like some darting dragon fly. Now the archies were giving their attention to Rud and Shafer. But Rud, gaining and losing altitude and dodging automatically, scarcely noticed them.

“How in the name of heaven has he lasted so long!” Rud groaned. He knew what a relentless gauntlet of withering fire that flashing ship was going through. Never had he seen an SE-5 show as much speed as Lake’s.

Now red spots were dancing from the muzzles of Lake’s guns. Rud was scarcely aware of the fact that he was diving, too, in sympathy with the madman he was watching. Suddenly a surprised exclamation dropped from his lips. Three men leaped from old Salami in quick succession and white parachutes were fluttering against the ground. The SE-5 was scarcely five hundred feet above old Salami now. On the ground the anti-aircraft crews were working desperately. But ever the SE-5 came on. A second later a dull red glow shone through the drifting smoke. Rud watched stupidly as the SE-5 curved out of its dive in a long arc.

“Lake must have both hands on the stick!” Rud was thinking. Would the elevators hold up under the strain?

Rud could scarcely believe his eyes as he saw the SE-5 streak across the front-line trenches and come speeding eastward, little more than five hundred feet high. The trail Lake had followed down toward the balloon was marked by the remnants of the archie bursts. Old Salami was a blazing mass in the sky.

“I saw it myself and still I don’t believe it!” Rud said as he banked around and started homeward. Half a mile behind, Colonel Shafer was following them homeward. Rud reached the airdrome half a minute before Lake. His momentary exultation at Lake’s unbelievable feat had died and there was nothing but a vague dread within him over what would happen when Shafer landed. He couldn’t tell exactly why he felt a premonition of disaster. After all, what was Lake to him? But he couldn’t forget those haunted eyes of Lake’s and the sadness in that lined face. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Lake was trying to get himself killed!

Rud landed smoothly on three points and swung the ship around to the line. From the corner of his eye, he saw Lake coming down for a landing. He was coming in in a very gradual dive. Rud watched him momentarily. He came over the edge of the airdrome, ten feet high with very little flying speed. Rud gripped the cowling of his ship convulsively as he saw the slowly moving scout level off.

“Good grief! He’s bringing the tail down!” Rud exclaimed aloud. He found himself tearing his belt off and leaping out of his ship as he saw the SE-5 hover and stall ten feet above the ground. Then the nose snapped down and the SE-5 plunged to earth amid a din of crackling wood and tearing linen. The fuselage seemed to break in half as the whole ship went over on its back.

Rud was tearing toward it now in great bounds. There was not a sign of life in the wreckage.

A stream of mechanics followed him and the ambulance was under way. Rud found himself praying that the wreck wouldn’t burn. A second later he was tearing at the mass of linen and wood.

Then he saw Colonel Stormy Lake. He was still conscious, but his face was white and beaded with sweat as he pointed wordlessly to the motor. One leg was caught under it and the cloth of his breeches was smoking as the hot motor seared them. For the moment Rud was like some madman himself who was careless of any consequences. Without a split second’s delay, he had gotten a grip with his bare hands on the hot motor. He scarcely felt the burning pain of it as his big body heaved and every ounce of strength went into one mighty lift.

The motor moved as the flesh of his hands cooked. Lake moved and his leg was free. Rud dropped the motor and suddenly his hands were paining him until his own face was white, and cold beads of moisture stood out on his forehead.

Colonel Shafer was landing now. As the C.O.’s ship trundled across the ground, Rud found himself bending over the wounded flyer.

He closed his eyes and remained limp as Rud dragged him out of the wreckage. Why Rud had said that he couldn’t tell himself. This he did know—that there was something abnormal about Lake—a mystery which he wanted to solve. The Texan felt as though menacing forces were at work which he couldn’t understand and he wanted a crack at Lieutenant-Colonel Stormy Lake before Shafer got in a word.

“Take him to my room. I don’t think he’s hurt very badly,” he told them.

“Great guns! Did you ever see such a landing?” Jerry Lacey was saying. “A perfect three-pointer—ten feet high!”

“Yes, he got old Salami,” Shafer said grimly, “but he’s going to get a general court-martial too! I want a meeting of all the officers of this squadron in headquarters right away.”

Shafer looked at them quickly. Great blisters were rising all over them. “Sure. Sorry,” he said gruffly. “Show up as soon as you can.”

Rud walked across the airdrome swiftly. The ambulance was in front of the barracks now and Lake was being carried in. Wizened little Captain Barker, the flight surgeon, was pattering over from headquarters with a bag in his hand. When Rud reached his room, Barker was leaning over Lake. Lake’s eyes were open and he smiled wanly.

Barker felt him over expertly. “Right you are,” he chirped cheerily. “What’s a burned leg to a balloon buster, eh?”

Rud stood quietly by as the captain applied some lotion to Lake’s burns, and then submitted to having his own bound up.

“Do you mind if I talk to him privately a couple of minutes, doc, right away?” Rud asked.

“I’m on my way,” the sparrow-like little doctor said brightly. He glanced at the orderly in the doorway and lowered his voice. “Want to fix up your stories for Squads Right Shafer, I know!” he said quickly and pattered out.

“Well, the doc’s with us anyway,” Rud remarked. “Glad you got out of the crash so easily.”

Lake shrugged his shoulders. His face was a lined mass and there was no trace of exultation or excitement discernible in it.

Rud got up and walked toward the bed. Suddenly his eyes were glowing and the inner fire which was usually masked by the stoical exterior seemed to be shining through every pore of him.

“Come clean, mister,” he said, clipping off his words. “You’re not Stormy Lake.”

“Because Stormy Lake wouldn’t have made that bum landing in a thousand years, for one thing!”

“Oh, you’ve become a detective, have you?” the other man said quietly, but his face was as white as a sheet.

“Maybe so,” Rud said evenly. The air was electric and something in the very repression of the conversation seemed to make it more deadly. “There was something phony about you, to start with, and when I saw that landing it got worse. You’re as far from the Lake we’d heard about as I am from the Pope. All right, who are you and what’s your game?”

For a moment there was silence and suddenly Lake seemed to be too weary to feel any more. His words seemed to be dragged out of him.

The other man nodded slowly. “Invalided out of the air service on account of my eyes,” he said quietly.

Pictures of Robert Barnes had blossomed in half the newspapers of the world for the first six months of the war and he could see in the haggard face before him the remnants of the countenance he had seen pictured so often. Major Robert Barnes had been America’s leading ace. When a German bullet had affected his eyesight he had been sent to the states to stimulate Liberty Loans.

“Say, what are you doing masquerading as Stormy Lake?” Rud asked as he strove to orient himself. His brain was like a racing engine and he could scarcely believe the evidence of his own senses.

“I got back to Paris a week ago,” Barnes said quietly. “I knew Stormy Lake last year and once he saved my life. He’s in Paris now, hiding away. Went on a terrible spree, got arrested under a false name, and all the rest of it.” He hesitated a moment. “I knew it would be the end of him if he didn’t show up for duty,” Barnes went on almost as if he wasn’t interested in what he was saying, “and I’m going blind.” He stopped again, his eyes staring at the ceiling.

Rud was unable to say anything but as he waited for Barnes to go on, every muscle was tense.

“So I figured I’d take a chance, knowing that he didn’t know anybody in your outfit, pretend to be him, and get myself bumped off. Stormy hasn’t got any folks but he’s got friends. It would be a lot better for them to think he’d died a hero than to be cashiered out of the army and maybe get Leavenworth, or worse.”

Barnes nodded. “As I said, I’m going blind and there’s nothing for me to live for,” he explained. “That was the reason for that landing. But forget me—Stormy is the important one. For a few years at least, after he gets out of this jam in Paris, he’ll have to go under an assumed name.”

“So you were going to go out and bump yourself off, eh?” Rud asked as though talking to himself. “And so completely that nobody could tell who you were or what you were, I suppose?”

“That’s the idea,” Barnes said and a wintry smile stole over his face. Then suddenly he turned his head and those peculiar eyes were shining with a white-hot glow.

“Listen, Riley,” he said, the words fairly tumbling from his lips and his face flushing hotly. “I’ve told you all this because I had to and because I think you’re a real guy. I’m begging you for one break.”

“What is it?” Rud asked. He was unable to turn his gaze away from the twin torches that were gazing at him from Barnes’ drawn face.

“I want you to give me your word that you won’t say a thing about this until tomorrow—and if I’ve disappeared by then, you’ll never say a word about it.”

“Meaning that you believe you’ll succeed in bumping yourself off before tomorrow?” he said.

“Exactly. This may sound funny to you, but get it right. I don’t want to live blind and if it was necessary, I’d owe it to Stormy Lake to do anything. Understand? Anything, whether I wanted to live or not.”

“Look here Barnes!” he said, as though talking to himself. “You’re asking me to help you kill yourself.”

“Listen, old-timer,” Barnes said quietly. “What’s the prayer of every flyer? ‘Kill me but don’t cripple me too bad!’ Would you be so keen about living blind? You’ll be doing me a swell favor——”

There came a sudden change in Barnes’ face. Suddenly his lips were drawn back in a snarl and there was something wolfish in those half-blind eyes.

“Anybody that’s a rat like that has got no business being alive!” he snapped.

Rud turned toward the door. Just then heavy footsteps clumped down the hall. In a moment Colonel Shafer, followed by an enlisted man, strode in. Hard eyes rested stonily on Barnes.

“You’re grounded, you’re under arrest, and you’re under guard pending a general court-martial, Lake,” he snapped. “Come with me, Riley.”

“O.K., sir,” Rud mumbled and without another word he followed the briskly-walking Shafer out the door.

“You’re officer of the day this afternoon, I see,” Shafer said metallically, “so it doesn’t affect you. Orders have just come in for the rest of the outfit to go over at midnight to protect some bombers that are going to try and get a munitions dump near Allaire.”

They were walking quickly down the stairs as the Colonel went on. “I want to go over the ships and equipment with you. I’ve never seen supplies in such lousy shape as this place!”

The afternoon was a long drawn-out ordeal for Rud. The colonel was like a devastating tornado, bawling out mechanics, upbraiding every officer from Rud down, finding fault with the records in headquarters, and throwing insults freely to right and left. It was not until a quarter of five that Rud, who had kept himself under control only by great effort, was able to get away to see Barnes once more.

As he came in, he ordered the soldiers stationed there to stand outside the door.

“Listen, Barnes,” he said slowly. “I don’t know that I can help you but I’m not going to stop you from doing anything you want. It’s none of my business, I guess, and if I feel like a murderer it’s my own affair. I just want to ask you one thing.”

“There are doctors over here,” Rud told him, “that have learned more in the last year than the guys back home will ever know. You’ve done your part for Stormy Lake and I’d think it over, if I were you.”

Shafer had appeared in the doorway without warning. Rud got to his feet, his eyes widening in surprise.

“You don’t say,” the C.O. sneered. “Well, this man is under arrest and isn’t having visitors, understand? Come over to headquarters. Sergeant—” the non-com at the door came to attention—“no one is to see Colonel Lake without a pass signed by me, understand?”

“I don’t know just what your sneaking around with Lake means, major,” he snapped, “but I don’t like the looks of it.”

Something inside Rud seemed to snap and he stopped in his tracks at the head of the stairs.

“Now listen to me, Colonel Shafer!” he snarled, his fists clenched at his sides. “Nobody can hear us now and those leaves don’t mean a thing to me. I’ve taken all I’m going to stand out of you this afternoon. If you ever make one more personal remark, I’m going to catch you alone and take you apart and see what makes you tick! In other words, I’m going to beat the life out of you!”

“Oh, yeah?” Shafer snarled, his head thrust forward until his face was only inches from Rud’s. “So that’s it, is it? I don’t need my leaves, mister, and I’m not going to court-martial you. But, major, you’re going to wish you were far away from Sam Shafer before I get through with you!”

Their eyes were locked in silent struggle when Jerry Lacey came up the stairs. Without a word, Rud turned and went down the steps, leaving Shafer alone.

Depressed and nervous because of Barnes, and harried to the breaking point by Shafer, the harassed Southerner’s mind was seething with combined misery and wrath. The rest of the squadron, the afternoon patrols over, were on the verge of mutiny as they appeared, shaved and properly uniformed for the evening mess. The air was blue with condemnation directed at the new C.O.

Shafer entered the mess hall just as dinner was being announced. Conversation stopped as though he had given an order not to talk and as they sat down to the table not a word broke the tense silence. Shafer looked at them with a sort of hard triumph in his eyes. For a while he didn’t offer to talk either. Finally though, it seemed that the silence was getting on his nerves. Several times he made a comment, but not once was he answered. Their eyes on their plates, the flyers paid no attention to him. A deadly half hour of this and suddenly Shafer pushed his plate away from him.

“Don’t like me, huh?” he snapped. “Well, that’s all right with me. I don’t like you, either. Don’t talk if you don’t want to, gentlemen, but don’t make it too tough for yourselves either.”

Frowning and resentful, he stuck through the meal but as soon as he had finished his coffee, he got up without a word and went out.

“Well, we got under his skin at that,” piped Somers. “He was getting sorer and sorer.”

“Before twenty-four hours are gone, there’s going to be a pitched battle in this outfit,” Rud summed up deliberately. “He’s going to run us ragged. I don’t know whether it’s going to pay to get him sore at that.”

“He’s going to get human or he’s not going to bother anybody much longer,” Ross said significantly.

The flyers gazed at each other and not a man objected to the half-formed thought behind Ross’ words.

“Not that I’d kill him,” Ross went on judiciously, “but don’t you boys think he’d look awful nice making speeches back in the states?”

Rud glanced at the door apprehensively. “Let’s talk about something else.” And something else proved to be Stormy Lake, which didn’t help Rud’s mental condition at all.

He couldn’t shake the load of Robert Barnes off his mind. At eleven o’clock when the squadron took off to join the bombers, he was sitting moodily in headquarters, peering dully at the wall, and thinking of the man who by hook or by crook was going to kill himself.

It was eleven-thirty and Rud’s mind was still a maze of depressed thoughts, when the shrill of the telephone made him jump. In the inside office he could hear Shafer, who was pawing over records, get to his feet and come to the door.

“Colonel Carey at headquarters!” snapped the man at the other end. “A Fokker just made a forced landing at Leone. We learn from the pilot that two other Fokkers slipped across with him and they have the dope that we’re concentrating men at Mancourt. They’re flying at about fifteen thousand feet, and their course will lead them five miles south of your airdrome. Get every available ship in the air and watch for them. Got it?”

“Listen, sir, the chances are we won’t fly close together. In view of the importance of getting these Heinies, I would suggest that Lieutenant-Colonel Lake be permitted to fly——”

For a second Shafer hesitated. The man was every inch a soldier now, and Rud could fairly see his mind working swiftly behind those long narrow eyes.

Two minutes later, as three ships strained at their wheel blocks as though anxious to be gone, Barnes came hobbling to the line. His sunken eyes flashed a brief message of thanks to Rud.

“Listen, Lake,” grated Shafer. “This is an emergency and it doesn’t affect your arrest, understand?”

“We’ll get as high as we can, spread a half mile apart and watch!” Shafer went on. “Let’s go!”

The exhaust pipes were spitting flames like blue-red banners, and up and down the Front searchlights were playing on the sky. The rumble of the guns provided a constant undertone for the whisper of the idling motors. Up above, the clouds had disappeared and a wan quarter moon rode high over the barren terrain.

Rud felt a surging thrill as his little SE-5 took the air. His bandaged palms did not affect his manipulation of the stick very much. As the chill night air swept past his face and his eyes probed the heavens for the enemy, he was living one of the moments which made life worth while to him.

With one of their ships forced down, the Germans would lose no time in getting back to safety. He felt that the chances of action were slight. And it would take time to reach fifteen thousand.

He had almost forgotten Barnes’ objective and as he ceaselessly watched the eastern sky, the pseudo Lake was not prominent in his mind. He felt safer somehow with Barnes in his ship a few hundred feet away from him. He would rather have a half-blind Barnes than an ordinary flyer with the eyes of an owl.

Suddenly an exclamation burst from his lips. The altitude meter read only five thousand feet as his eyes picked up four pin pricks of light two miles away. They were exhaust pipes and to his straining eyes it seemed certain that they were Fokkers. They were little if any higher than he was. Then the explanation burst upon him. The Germans had risked all for the sake of speed and were flying in a steady dive to reach the Front before ships could get in the air to stop them. Danger from the ground was minor.

Rud was rocking his ship from side to side in a signal. Five hundred yards east of him, and closest to the onrushing Fokkers, was Colonel Shafer. Almost alongside of him, and slightly higher, was Barnes. Then Rud caught his breath.

Fifteen hundred feet higher than either of them and diving grimly, was a third Fokker. There were three of them instead of two! The two lower ones were climbing now as they saw that they had a battle on their hands. Rud threw his ship into a bank and dodged warily. A Fokker was coming at him in a terrific dive. He forgot everything else in the world. Slowly he pushed forward on his stick.

He was diving now and the speedometer read one hundred and seventy miles per hour. He was flying at right angles to the German and there was an agonized wait for the Boche to start shooting. He was subconsciously aware that the other four ships were banking and diving dizzily, their guns pouring lead without cessation. The roar of the SE-5’s motor rose to a protesting scream.

There were little specks dancing in front of the German’s guns. Rud threw his ship into a vertical bank to the left. It darted down underneath the Fokker and then he pulled slowly and smoothly back on his stick. The German banked like a flash to the left until he was almost on his back.

The SE-5 darted upward with all the speed the dive had given it. Suddenly Rud jerked back on the stick and gave it slight right rudder. The SE-5 was standing on its tail now, almost at the top of a loop. His steady eyes were squinting along his guns.

His tracers poured madly into the Fokker. He pushed forward on the stick ever so slightly. As the Boche rushed out of his vision, he thought he saw the pilot slump. The SE-5 was fluttering down on its back now. It swooped downward and came level. But the Fokker hadn’t come out of its dive. Upside down, it was hurtling earthward, the pilot an inert mass in the cockpit.

The next second Rud was searching the sky for the others. He picked up three ships just as a great red flash lit up the earth where his victim hit the ground. Almost simultaneously there came another flash a quarter of a mile distant.

“They got another one!” Rud yelled exultantly, his voice unheard even by himself.

The three milling ships, two SE-5’s and one Fokker, were more than a thousand feet above him. Suddenly he strained forward. Number 2, Shafer’s ship, seemed to stagger for a moment and then Rud gasped. Shafer’s propeller had splintered into a thousand pieces and the colonel was gliding helplessly earthward. Five hundred feet above him, the Fokker banked and was darting down at him.

Coming toward the German from one side was the other SE-5. Rud strained against his belt. Barnes was pumping lead, but the Fokker pilot seemed unaware of him. The colonel was dodging as he glided downward. The Fokker followed him like some remorseless fate.

Barnes was less than two hundred feet from the German now, coming at him from the right side. But his guns were quiet!

“Why does he stop shooting now?” Rud raged. As another precious few seconds went by without a sign of a shot from Barnes, he realized what must be the truth. Barnes’ guns had jammed or he had run out of ammunition. But he was still diving toward the German. Why was he doing that?

“Gee, if I could only get there before the colonel goes down!” Rud raved. “He can’t last much longer!”

Then it seemed that his heart stood still. Barnes’ ship had never wavered in its course. Now the German was aware of him, apparently, and suddenly the Fokker tilted in a diving bank to get under him. A split second later the undercarriage of the SE-5 crashed through the uptilted wing of the Fokker. The German ship fell over and over in a sort of hideous cartwheel, the crumpled wreckage flapping limply and finally leaving the main body of the ship entirely.

A thousand feet below, Colonel Shafer, saved by that miracle, was gliding his propellerless ship toward the airdrome. Five hundred yards away, Barnes’ SE-5, the undercarriage dangling grotesquely, was gliding downward too.

“He saved old Shafer’s life, but he can’t seem to make that suicide business!” Rud thought to himself.

He couldn’t seem to think straight as he dived for the drome with his motor half on. The crippled Fokker crashed in an awkward tailspin, two miles from the drome, and he saw a truck stop and two men go over to the wreckage.

He landed directly behind the Colonel and sat in his ship without attempting to taxi to the line, as he watched Barnes bring his ship in. Never had he gone through a worse ordeal than that moment as the SE-5 glided slowly toward the ground. He was sure that Barnes would crash deliberately. And yet if he was going to do that, why was he coming in so carefully?

Nose into the fresh breeze, the crippled ship settled earthward in what seemed almost like a stall. At any second he expected to see it fall off in a spin. Then he saw that one wheel seemed to be all right, although the other was dangling. Barnes brought it in over the edge of the field and from a height of twelve feet the ship suddenly squashed to the ground. Rud could see that its adjustable stabilizers were cocked up to the limit. With a last burst of the motor, the SE-5 came down on three points. The other half of the undercarriage crumpled and it went up on its nose and over on its back.

“O.K., darn it!” Barnes grinned, and suddenly there was a new spirit shining in the man’s face.

Then as the mechanics surrounded them and the colonel, who had left his propellerless ship in the center of the field, came shoving through the crowd, it seemed that a curtain had dropped over Barnes’ eyes again and that he was the same tragic figure of the man Rud had known.

There was a curious glint in Shafer’s eyes and he seemed too mentally dazed to do anything but obey what amounted to a command from Rud. It was the first scrap for Shafer, Rud remembered, and the C.O. was evidently somewhat dazed by it. Twenty-five feet away from the group of mechanics, Rud stopped.

“Listen, Colonel,” he said. “You know that Lake here saved your life and how he did it, don’t you?”

Shafer nodded and wiped the sweat from his brow. “Well?” he said, but there was nothing belligerent in the way he said it.

“Well, I’m going to tell you something,” Rud went on. “Shut up, Barnes!”

“Right!” Rud said decisively, his eyes aglow. “Major Robert Barnes, a flyer after my own heart and a soldier after yours. Now, Colonel, you’re going to listen and like it.”

Out there in the middle of the shadowed airdrome with the rumble of the guns at the Front undertoning his words, Rud told his story simply.

“And listen,” he ended up. The big Texan was dominating them both now and Shafer’s eyes never left his face. “A man that did what Barnes did has got a right to ask for something in return. Furthermore, his record deserves it. I’m going to ask you for him, to do——”

“Now wait a minute! Let me talk!” the colonel interrupted crisply. “You’re cuckoo, Barnes, in more ways than one. I’ll get in touch with the M.P.’s in Paris and I’ll help that good-for-nothing Lake get out of his jam and get him down here where I’ll take great pleasure in knocking, kicking, and court-martialing some sense into him. I can do it. I used to run the M.P.’s in Paris myself. And you’re going to forget this suicide business and show the guts God gave you. They’ve doctors around this army that could graft eyes into your head that you could see something out of if necessary. You did me a favor—I’ll do you one. Is it a go?”

For a moment Barnes looked at him, then the smile that Rud had seen so briefly a few minutes before was once again visible.

“To tell you the truth, that scrap up there gave me a new lease on life,” the old flyer said. “If Stormy is going to get another chance I guess I’ll give myself another one.”

“There’s no man in this bunch of misfits around here that’s going to squeal, is there?” Shafer demanded.

“When they get back tonight, you tell ’em,” Shafer commanded. “And you can also tell them that this is no love feast. You can put that in your pipe and smoke it too. I am doing what I am, which may be crazy, for somebody that saved my life. But I’m going to make soldiers out of this bunch and there’s no quarter going to be asked or given. I’m going to run you ragged until you’re right and so far as I’m concerned at six o’clock tomorrow morning, what’s happened tonight is a thing of the past, understand?”

The iron colonel straightened. “Be sure you remember that,” he said metallically. Then, with relish, “And what I’m going to do to Stormy Lake!”

His shoulders squared and his gray hair ruffling in the breeze, the gaunt colonel strode toward the line. Rud’s eyes met Barnes’ and suddenly the big Texan chuckled.

“I don’t know whether your eyes are going to get right again or not,” he stated, “but no matter what happens you can be sure that you’ve seen the toughest hombre I ever ran into!”

Barnes nodded. “It’s a funny thing,” he said haltingly as they strode across the field, “but he’s right about me. It took that scrap to make me realize that I was pretty much of a quitter. Darned if I don’t believe anything now—even that I’ll be able to read a newspaper a year from now.”

“I’ve got a hunch you will,” Rud told him. “Any guy that can do what you did today is hung with too many horseshoes to have to worry about anything in this pleasant world of ours! I’ll bet that you’ll be knocking ’em down for years to come—those eyes of yours ought to be as good as new in a couple of months.”

But Rud Riley was too optimistic and Major Robert Barnes’ desperate venture, on behalf of Stormy Lake, was the last flying that Barnes was to do for many months.

Barnes turned to Rud as they entered their quarters. “Say, Rud,” he said apologetically, “take it easy on Lake when he comes up to the front—he should be here in a few days if Shafer does what he promises and helps get him out of his jam. He’ll repay you a hundred per cent—he’s a flying fool if there ever was one and is worth five ordinary flyers.”

Rud Riley nodded his red head. “I’ll remember, Barnes. Lake must have a lot that’s good in him to cause a man like you to do what you’ve done for him. Meanwhile take care of yourself.” Rud patted Barnes on the back as he spoke. “We need you down here too, no matter how many Stormy Lakes are handed to us!”

Barnes smiled a bit wistfully. “Well, I’m hoping that my eyes will get better,” he said, “and that I’ll be with you again. Meanwhile, don’t forget to give Stormy Lake a hand on his way up—that is, help him get squared away with headquarters and keep Shafer from riding him too much.”

As the observation ship turned for home, Rud Riley swung his little SE-5 westward with a sigh of relief. If there was anything he hated, it was the job of escorting practically helpless DeHavillands over the German lines. If there was anything he hated more, it was to have an unknown quantity in his companion SE-5, which same situation he found himself in now. He wasn’t at all sure of the capabilities of Jim Garelli, the new flyer. He would have much preferred even Major Robert Barnes with his bad eyes but marvellous flying skill. Rud’s face became stern as he thought of his friend waiting hopefully—grounded—always thinking that the next week would show an improvement in his sight. It was tough to have flown so long and then have bad eyesight keep one on the ground.

And then if anything more was needed to make the trip far from a bed of roses, Rud realized that gray clouds were scurrying across the sky, two thousand feet above them. The Germans had a coy habit of popping out from behind any cloud at any moment in a highly annoying manner.

He strained his eyes southward. Some thirty miles or more away, Baron Augustus Baer and his circus had just moved in.

“Which means,” Rud reflected for the hundredth time, “that the Thirty-first is going to catch trouble as soon as Baer gets operating!”

The Baer flying circus was the most famous one of the German air service at the moment. It was not so much that the flyers were better than those in Von Richthofen’s outfit, or Wolff’s; but Baer himself was a species of nut and he had nothing but crazy flyers who seemed anxious to break their necks under him. Legend had it that signs were prominently posted all over any airdrome which might be Baer’s base—“Abandon hope, all ye that enter here.” That motto was also on their ships.

All Baer’s ships were painted a bright red as though to carry out the daredevil idea.

“Well, thank heaven he’s not out today, according to all signs;” Rud thought to himself.

There were twenty miles to traverse before they reached the comparative shelter of the Allied lines and the big, redheaded Texan was far from his usual tranquil self as he divided his attention between the instrument board before him and the menacing clouds above him. The chill air whipped against his face with a hint of moisture in it.

“Ye gods!” he breathed suddenly. In a trice he had whipped his ship around and automatically shoved the throttle all the way forward.

Streaking down from behind a cloud came three Fokkers like so many deadly projectiles, paralleling each other. It didn’t take a split second for the gray-eyed Texan to decide that chances for survival were slim. Those three Fokkers had altitude. They were three scouts—not Baer’s however—against two single seaters and a “flaming coffin.” And Garelli was an unknown quantity.

“Great guns, he doesn’t even see ’em!” Rud thought, and suddenly he forgot his fear in white-hot rage. There was only one thing to do. The Fokkers were but a thousand feet above him now, and he began dodging automatically as his ship dived slightly to gain speed. Then his square face became immobile except for wide eyes that stared unbelievably from behind their gnome-like goggles.

From out of the middle of a dirty gray cloud, a fourth ship catapulted into sight.

“And it’s a Spad!” Rud told himself stupidly. “The Germans must have captured one——”

For a few seconds he forgot the emissaries of destruction which were hurtling toward him. Spads could dive. He knew that. But never had he seen one flash downward the way the ship he was looking at now was coming. It was overtaking the Fokkers by the second. Surely the Spad was flown by some German hurrying to join his mates.

Then Rud gave a whoop which was compounded of joy, astonishment, and the relief of a reprieve from death. One German’s guns were speaking now but that seemed minor to Major Rud Riley. For the Spad, but two hundred feet higher than the three widely separated Fokkers, was sending a spray of bullets at the middle one. For a few seconds its guns spoke, and then it swooped upward and to the left. It went almost on its back, and the muzzles of the guns glowed red again. Rud was subconsciously aware of the fact that the middle Fokker was in a spin.

The unknown pilot in that upside down Spad didn’t fire for more than three seconds at the right Fokker. For those few seconds he held the Spad on its back. A burst of black smoke from the enemy ship was his reward.

Suddenly Rud snapped to himself. The universe was a thunder of roaring motors and whining wires. He could see the DeHaviland maneuvering desperately and Garelli in the SE-5 was doing exactly the wrong thing. He was climbing steeply, his slow-moving ship a perfect target. The third Fokker had abruptly turned tail and Rud banked after him. Then for a second his eyes left the fleeing Fokker as he watched the Spad. From its upside down position, it flipped over until it was right side up. So smoothly and quickly was it done that one maneuver fairly flowed into the other. Cleanly and swiftly it reached the top of a loop and once again, with effortless smoothness, it came right side up, now four hundred feet higher than the Boche. The next second it went into a dive.

“The crazy coot is going to chase the Fokker!” Rud thought, his body one warm glow of mixed admiration and astonishment. “That guy’s nutty—but he’s the best flyer I ever looked at!”

For a second, he too took up the chase, his big body a-tingle with the joy of battle. Then abruptly he came to his sensible self. They were still over Germany and by what miracle there had been only three Fokkers in the formation, he didn’t know. Those pictures were important and his job and Garelli’s was to get the DeHaviland safely home. It would soon be dark anyway. That didn’t prevent Major Rudford Riley, however, from feeling like a louse for turning tail and letting that mad master flyer wing recklessly and alone after his prey.

As he caught up to Garelli and the DeHaviland and they sped toward the Allied lines, Rud’s mind was a riot of emotions. Where in the name of heaven had that Spad come from? The nearest Spad outfit was the Forty-second, based a hundred and fifty miles away. And who was that flyer? His eyes shifting from his instruments to the darkening sky, he lived over again that tense moment when the unknown pilot had come like an angel from heaven to save them all. Suddenly an idea struck him.

“I’ll bet fifty to one, it’s Stormy Lake!” he thought to himself. “He was going to ferry a ship from Paris. They gave him a Spad by mistake, instead of an SE-5. It just couldn’t be anyone else.”

As he remembered how Major Robert Barnes, almost blind, had subbed for the wild man of the air known as Stormy Lake and had almost been killed, Rud wondered what manner of man this much discussed young flyer really was.

Then the square-faced Texan sobered and the warmth within him chilled. It wasn’t the fact that archies were popping harmlessly five hundred yards or so away. In a moment they would be over the Allied lines. It was rather the knowledge that if that was the famous Stormy Lake, due to join the Thirty-first Squadron that day and already a week overdue, he had nothing but trouble ahead of him. What the entire squadron was going through with the new commanding officer, would be nothing to what the most famous—and most notorious—flyer the American Air Service ever boasted, had ahead of him.

“I know he never landed at the airdrome. Instead, he took a little tour of the Front on his own hook,” Rud thought.

A light mist was falling as the DeHaviland and its escort hurtled above the Allied lines. The photographic ship turned southward to its base. Somewhere over the German lines, a lone Spad was flying. Somehow to Rud, the approaching nightfall, the light rain and the chill day, plus conditions in the Thirty-first Squadron, made the thought of that famous youngster flying his lonely way seem tragically sad. His days were numbered, although the American Air Service had been saying that for the last six months. Now it seemed that his very minutes were numbered.

“Why, he doesn’t even know his way around this part of the Front!” Rud thought as he realized that darkness was less than a half hour away.

He strove to shake off those thoughts. “I act as though I knew it was Stormy Lake,” he thought to himself. “Well, here we are. Another day, another dollar!”

The converted pasture lot, rimmed with sheet-iron hangars, was spread below him. The windows of the barracks were already aglow as he cut his eight-cylinder Hispano-Suiza motor to a thousand revolutions, closed the shutters, and started in a gradual dive for the tarmac.

Garelli still maintained his altitude. “I suppose he’ll spin down and cool his motor too fast just to show he’s good,” Rud thought resentfully. “He talks the best dogfight I’ve ever heard but he’s sure a duck with a broken wing when a Heinie is after him!”

He hadn’t liked the cut of Garelli’s jib from the first time he had seen the new man—which had been yesterday.

Garelli didn’t spin down, but he cut his motor dead and sideslipped in theatrically. Rud watched him as he taxied to the line. “When his motor goes dead over No-Man’s-Land,” he thought, “he’ll get some sense!”

To the Texan, a motor was more than something on which his life might depend. It was almost human. It literally hurt him to see one abused.

Garelli was climbing out of his ship fifteen feet away. Rud had turned off the gas to run out his motor, but Garelli cut the switches and his Hispano Suiza backfired protestingly.

“Well, we certainly got ourselves some Fokkers!” he said in his rasping voice. He smiled a wide smile but the deep wrinkles between his black brows didn’t disappear.

“What do you mean, we got some Fokkers?” Rud asked him as they walked toward headquarters. He turned at the noise of motors and saw five specks coming up from the south. “What do you think of that! They all got home!”

“I certainly popped that second one pretty,” Garelli said loudly, his black eyes challenging Rud’s impudently. “One day at the Front, one ship——”

“What do you mean?” snarled Garelli and suddenly there were red spots in his eyes. His heavy eyebrows met above his flat nose. “I suppose you’re going to say you were the big shot.”

Rud’s words were cool and level but very deadly. Furious temper showed in Garelli’s snarling mouth and flushed face, but nevertheless he stopped talking.

“The only one that got any Fokkers was that hombre in the Spad,” Rud went on quietly. “You just try and get credit for one!”

For a moment, the lieutenant’s eyes burned into Rud’s. Then they dropped. “All right,” he said vindictively. “You’re a major and I’m only a new lieutenant. So I didn’t fire a shot, huh? My guns will prove that——”

“Say, you hung on your prop like a dead goose waiting for some German to eat you!” Rud told him as they went up the steps of headquarters. If there was anything he detested it was a braggart in the first place and a false alarm in the second, and Garelli was pretty much both. He’d been telling all about the achievements, inside secrets and personnel of the United States Secret Service men the night before, until Jumbo Ross, who had been one, had punctured his bluff. How those birds had clashed was nobody’s business, Rud remembered with enjoyment.

“I’ll make the report,” he said aloud as he heard Jumbo Ross’s voice from Colonel Shafer’s office.

“Doggone it, Colonel, I tell you those ships aren’t fit to fly anywhere until the motors are overhauled!” he boomed.

“Don’t use that tone to me, sir!” came the clipped phrases of Colonel Squads Right Shafer.

At that point, Rud made his entrance. Huge, shaggy-headed Jumbo Ross was leaning over the desk, his brown eyes stormy, and his heavy jaw thrust forward pugnaciously. Behind the desk, tall and gaunt and gray-looking, the hard-boiled C.O. was looking up at his engineer officer with a glint in his eyes like sparks struck from a flint. Shafer transferred his attention to Rud.

“Knock at the door and announce yourself before you come into my office, sir!” he snapped.

Rud took the rebuke quietly. The entire squadron had become accustomed to that martinet in the last week. His verbal eccentricities they could stand. It was his merciless driving of them and the mistakes he made because of his very limited knowledge of flying that were slowly forcing them to the verge of mutiny.

Rud took off his helmet and his red hair fell over his eyes. Tanned, square-faced and competent, he looked like one’s composite idea of the All-American fullbacks of all time. Ross relaxed and straightened up. The turbulent giant was always sounding off and was almost always right. He was as superficially belligerent as he was inwardly sentimental.

“Mission successfully completed,” Rud drawled, “but here’s what happened,” and he told the story briefly. “Has Lieutenant-Colonel Lake arrived?” he ended up significantly.

Colonel Shafer’s clenched fist made the desk shake. “No!” he snapped, “but when and if he does——”

As though the words had been a signal, the drone of motors reached them. The patrol had already landed. Rud’s trained ears caught an unusual note in that growing drone.

Footsteps rushed across the outside office and the door was swung open unceremoniously. Little Red Somers, every hair in his wispy mustache standing out like an excited spike, was breathing hard.

With one accord, the three men leaped for the door. A few seconds later, Rud was watching a Fokker gliding peacefully into the field and behind it, commanding it with its guns, was the Spad which had saved him less than an hour before.

The Fokker and the Spad taxied to the line and as every flyer in the Thirty-first Squadron and most of the mechanics milled about the Fokker, a stocky, pink-and-white cheeked young German stepped out of his ship and waited uncertainly, his china-blue eyes glancing over the group warily. Rud noticed that his gun had been crippled by bullets.

“A very little,” the German said with a guttural accent. Then he ceased to be the center of attention for the moment as all eyes turned to the lanky young man who was vaulting out of the Spad.

He took off his helmet as he strode toward the group, revealing curly black hair. Below it, his face was lean and hawk-like. Despite pouches beneath long narrow eyes, he didn’t appear to be more than twenty-two years old. There was something fierce about him, and very hard. He looked over the group as he walked toward them and there was a hint of scorn in his appraisal.

Then, as his eyes caught the German’s, he grinned; the change was magical. His mouth seemed to expand to twice its normal size. Laugh crinkles came around his eyes and the thin nostrils widened a trifle. There was an electrical quality about him then.

“You’re a poor benighted heathen, but a first-class fighting man!” he laughed at the German. The captive stared at him uncomprehendingly, but returned his smile uncertainly.

Colonel Shafer appeared to resent the fact that the strange flyer was paying him no attention. The other airmen, silently interested, watched as the colonel pushed himself forward.

As the C.O. came up to him, the famous Stormy Lake’s face changed. He was like a wary wolf, surrounded by enemies and wondering what they would do next.

“I thought so,” the colonel sneered. “Ross, take the Heinie over to the barracks with a couple of the others until I get time for him. Lake, you come with me. You too, Major Riley.”

“I have always wanted to bag myself a German for my own use!” Lake said flippantly, but Rud felt it was a forced flippancy. Now that he could inspect the famous Stormy Lake’s face at close range, the Texan could see that Lake looked as though he had been pulled through a wringer.

The chattering group of flyers made their way toward the barracks, the bewildered German in the center. Colonel Shafer led Rud and Lake toward headquarters. He stopped when he was out of ear-shot of the busy mechanics and turned to face Lake. Rud felt like an onlooker and wondered why he should be there.

Lake looked like the daredevil adventurer and untamed mustang of a man which the world thought him. In the belief of the entire world, this famous twenty-two-year-old pilot was the freak of the air service. As wild as a March hare, flouting discipline at every turn and getting away with it because of just such aerial coups as the one Rud had seen, he had been the stormy petrel of the Western Front for months.

“All right,” snapped Shafer, “you come in with a German prisoner. What of it? You fly all over Germany risking yourself and what’s more important, a badly needed ship, to bring back some dumb Boche that won’t do anybody any good anyway. I suppose you’re proud of yourself.”

Lake’s eyes flashed and they were as hard as the colonel’s. His mouth opened but no words came. As his lips closed, his slightly freckled face seemed to whiten with the strain of controlling himself.

“What right did you have to go out flying over the Front without orders and without reporting here—a week late?”

“I didn’t think it would matter,” Lake said with an outwardly apologetic air which didn’t carry conviction. He was still the alert stranger uncertain of his position.

“Oh, you didn’t,” snarled the colonel. “Well, now let me tell you something. You know that I know all about you—that you went to Paris on the way here, went on a spree and got yourself in a jam that ought to have kept you in jail and in disgrace for life.”

“How you ever got yourself a friend like that fellow who came here and pretended to be you, I don’t know!” the colonel went on. “The only reason you’re getting a break is because that bird saved my life and asked me to help you. But that break ends here and now, understand?”

Shafer’s harsh face was within inches of the ace’s and it was as hard as granite.

“The first false move you make you’re not only getting court-martialed, but the fact that you were A.W.O.L. in Paris, under arrest for assault and all the rest of it will come out and you will be broken into nice little pieces. Orders are orders around here and one false step means you’re out of luck.”

A soldier approached through the gloom hesitatingly. Shafer, his gray hair in a belligerent top-knot on his head, turned quickly.

“Oh, hello, Cooper,” Lake said and then turned to Shafer. He seemed more himself now that the die was cast and he, guilty of a serious crime, was assured of his status. Nevertheless, it seemed that his face had become a mask.

“Colonel Shafer, this is Sergeant Cooper. He’s on leave from the Fifty-seventh after being slightly wounded. We come from the same town back in the States. I can guarantee him as fine a mechanic as ever monkeyed with an engine. He’d like to transfer to this squadron.”

The colonel stared at them both as though wondering if there was any trick to it.

“We need mechanics,” Rud said quietly. “Almost as bad as we need ships. Will they let the sergeant transfer?”

“That’s all arranged on the other end, sir,” put in the soldier, coming forward.

He was in his late twenties and he had a smooth, well-cut face that had scarcely a wrinkle in it. His glossy black hair was combed smoothly and beady black eyes glinted in his face like shoe buttons. His thin lips barely moved when he talked and there was a suspicion of talking out of the side of his mouth.

“We’ll see,” the colonel said curtly. “That’s all, gentlemen.” He strode off toward headquarters without another word.

Rud noticed with mounting surprise that there seemed to be an edge in Lake’s voice when he spoke to Cooper. In fact, there seemed to be positive enmity between the men.

“You might as well hang around with the boys, George, until we see what can be done,” Lake went on.

The sleek young sergeant’s thin lips twitched mirthlessly. “I’m sure I can depend on you to do all you can for me,” he said, and walked off whistling.

“Well, welcome to our city!” Rud drawled as they started for the barracks. “I’m certainly glad you broke all the laws of the general staff by being out there this afternoon. Thanks for the buggy ride.”

“I hear this outfit’s catching the dickens from Shafer,” Lake remarked as though he was not thinking of what he was saying.

“Sure is. No fun, work all day at everything from policing the post to helping mechanics. It’s a combination of West Point and a Spig jail with the worst features of each. Add on to that the fact that the dumb guy has us flying ships that never should get off the ground and practicing formation flying in our off moments, and you’ve got a rough idea of a madhouse!”

“Migosh!” the hawk-faced Lake breathed. “You know my spot of course. I don’t dare move hand nor foot!”

“For once in your life, Lake, you’d better be a good boy,” he said as they went up the steps to the combination mess hall and lounging room. “One mistake and you’re through. Was there any truth in that stuff about assault and all that in Paris?”

Lake stopped and turned toward the towering Texan. They were of about equal height, each being a little over six feet, but the wide-shouldered Rud seemed to be twice as heavy as the rangy Lake. Lake’s face was suddenly demoniac. Rud was startled as he gazed into heavy-lidded steel-blue eyes that seemed to be a mass of little sparks.

“I was framed!” he rasped, “and I think I know the guy responsible for it. I was A.W.O.L.—yes. The rest of it was a frame.”

The door at the head of the steps opened and Lake quit talking as though a hand had been clapped over his mouth. Jumbo Ross and Garelli came down the steps. As they came closer, talking in low but savage tones, Rud could see that the Italian’s eyes were burning with rage and that Jumbo Ross’ jaw was thrust forward belligerently.

“You lay off me, Ross, or I’ll beat you to a pulp!” Garelli burst forth as they faced each other at the top of the steps careless of the men below.

“If I can’t do it with my hands, I’ll do it with a club,” raved Garelli.

“Oh, shut up!” Ross told him. “Don’t talk so much and you’ll be better off.”

He vaulted over the railing of the steps and walked slowly toward headquarters. Garelli looked after him for a moment and without a word went inside again.

“Don’t pay any attention to them,” Rud drawled. “Garelli’s got a big mouth and Ross shuts him up every time he opens it. This war’s got him buffaloed. Come on in and meet the gang.”

As they came down stairs for mess, the colonel was entering and soup was being brought to the table. The conversation seemed guarded and spiritless. A curious pall hung over the room. The kidding of the German was half-hearted. Suddenly the door swung open and Garelli rushed in.

His black eyes were wide and starey, his face white as a sheet, and he was trembling in every limb. He gulped as though trying to speak, but no words came.

Rud’s heart seemed to stop beating but he found himself walking toward Garelli swiftly.

“What about him?” he said very slowly and quietly. The words seemed to reverberate through the hushed room.

“What?” snapped the colonel. The other flyers were immobile statues. “Get hold of yourself, man!”

“A knife—he was stabbed and—he’s—dead,” the overwrought Garelli stammered.

Out of nowhere came Stormy Lake and suddenly he seemed to have taken command of the situation. “He was knifed?” he asked coolly.

Garelli nodded wordlessly. Suddenly there was a rush of the flyers toward the door and bedlam reigned. Rud was like a man in a nightmare, for Jumbo Ross had been his closest friend, next to Jerry Lacey.

Fifty feet away, behind a ramshackle frame storehouse which was unused, the colonel’s flashlight illumined the lifeless body of Jumbo Ross, his breast a mass of blood. The weazened old flight surgeon bent over him as Rud, his face a death-like mask, looked down at the contorted face of his friend.

“Clean through the heart,” the medical major said, his voice professionally calm.

The stricken group looked at each other wordlessly. Death was their daily diet, but this was different. Then the colonel’s voice rang out.

“Lacey, give orders to the sergeant major that the guard is to be tripled and not a man is to enter or leave this post. Gentlemen, that goes for you too. Also give orders, Lacey, that every man in the outfit will be expected to prove his exact whereabouts for the last half hour. That also goes for you, gentlemen. Major Riley, you will make a tour of the guards immediately and find out whether anybody has entered or left this post. Come on, get busy! All officers back in the recreation room except Lacey and Riley.”

Rud was as cold as ice and his brain seemed numb as he went around his duties mechanically. He knew what his findings would be. Not a single stranger had been seen to enter or leave the airdrome with the exception of Cooper.

Rud’s heart was like a dead lump within him. Life would have held no sweeter solace for him than to kill the murderer with his own hands. In his mind one thought was growing. The murderer could be no one but the loud-mouthed, four-flushing Garelli!

As he entered the mess hall, he realized that every other man in the squadron was thinking the same thing. Garelli, like a rat in a trap, was at one end of the funereal table, his face twitching and his black eyes darting around him with a look of mingled fear and defiance. As Rud came in and Garelli met the Texan’s haunted eyes, something seemed to break inside him. He leaped to his feet as though a coiled spring had just been released inside him.

“Say what you think!” he shouted hysterically, “every one of you! Why don’t you arrest me? Say something, don’t stand there looking at me!”

It was Lake, who was sitting next to Garelli. He must have tripped the flyer because Garelli sat down as though knocked down. He dropped his head in his hands for a minute while deadly silence overhung the table. Then his head came up. His face was hard and defiant, his black eyes glinting murderously.

Lake shoved back his chair. “I was just about to ask permission to do the same thing,” he said, his unreadable eyes on Shafer.

The flyers looked at each other with frightened eyes. Garelli’s face whitened until it was a pasty gray. In that curt permission to Lake was the colonel’s condemnation of the man whom he refused to let out of his sight.

Lake went up the stairs and as the flyers went over and over the possibilities, the grief-stricken Rud said not a word. Garelli, it had developed, after coming into the lounging room, had gone out the other door. He went over to headquarters to get his mail, he claimed, and showed the mail he had received in proof of his statement. “I never saw him!” he raved. “We fought—yes. I didn’t like him, I admit, but I didn’t kill him!”

Lake’s footsteps sounded in the corridor above and he came down the steps as Garelli was finishing his tenth hysterical defense of himself. His eyes were like two pools of fire as he leaned on a chair alongside the overwrought Italian.

“Don’t take it so hard,” he said. “Your nerves are all shot. I see no positive proof yet, and if you didn’t do it, there won’t be any.”

“Garelli, you’re under arrest,” Colonel Shafer said suddenly. “Lacey, tell the sergeant major to line up the men outside. We’ll question them in here in the presence of you all. The first man I want is Cooper!” He looked at Lake, his stony eyes challenging him. “For your own sake, I hope you haven’t brought a criminal to our post. For Garelli’s sake, I hope you have.”

Jerry Lacey was going out the door as Lake locked eyes with the colonel. Then it seemed that he decided not to answer. He sat down, but his very silence was a more effective retort than any words could have been. Colonel Shafer, in his chair at the head of the table, leaned forward.

“For the benefit of you all,” he said savagely, “I’ll say that the whole spirit and atmosphere of this squadron has been and is wrong and this is just the climax of days of insubordination, shirking of duty, internal dissension, and sneaking disobedience of orders! The morale is shot to pieces—anything can happen! The whole spirit of this outfit is going to change and I’m going to get coöperation or I’ll break you all, understand?”

His hard eyes swept the table. “I know everything from your roistering upstairs against orders to your mutinous talk with enlisted men. About half of you gentlemen are right on the edge of a cliff, with me ready to kick you off, understand? There happens to be a war on and insubordination is a serious offense. Now on the murder of Ross. I want from every one of you——”

“I guess you’re not going to question Cooper, sir,” he said, his voice vibrant.

Jerry Lacey hesitated as though to collect himself. Rud felt as though he was in a state of suspended animation unable to breathe until Jerry’s next sentence.

“Because he was just found back of the barracks just about drowned in his own blood!”

For a second there was absolute quiet. Then came bedlam. Hoarse exclamations, excited questions, the scraping of chairs, all combined to turn the mess hall into a good imitation of an insane asylum.

Only Riley didn’t add to the din. One thought was uppermost in his mind. Two murders within half an hour. Somewhere on the post, there was either a spy or a madman—but why would either one pick on such diversified people as Lieutenant Jumbo Ross and Sergeant Cooper, the latter not even a member of the flight?

He looked up quickly as Garelli, his voice crackling, screamed to cut through the maelstrom of conversation. He was on his feet, walking up and down, and trembling all over. His sullen face was contorted and his eyes were like two windows through which could be seen a raging conflagration within him.

“I suppose I killed Cooper too!” he shouted as the room grew quiet. “Come on, Colonel Shafer, arrest me over again! I did it with my little hatchet! Of course I was sitting at the table, but that don’t make any difference!”

He stopped near the door, his white lips twitching. Shafer, like a granite statue, could seem to find no words as he gazed stonily at him.

“Well, why don’t somebody say something?” Garelli snarled, mouthing his words and wetting his lips with his tongue. “Of course you haven’t got any proof. Of course I was sitting right here at the table, but I’m a murderer! You said so yourself. I really prefer a knife to a club——”

“Come on. Steady, old man,” Lake said quietly, but his appearance belied his tranquil tones. His eyes were two lines of light in his face and there was something radiant about him as he walked forward. Garelli looked at him, then without a word, he turned and dashed out the door.

“Wait a minute!” Rud yelled as half the flyers started automatically toward the door. “He’s just cracked under the strain of being at the Front, and all this trouble,” he went on deliberately. “He can’t get past the guards. Leave him alone for a minute.”

“Let’s take a look at Cooper,” the colonel said harshly. Apparently he had dismissed Garelli from his mind for the moment.

“This means that no officers are mixed up in this in any way,” Rud pointed out as they trooped out of the barracks. “But why anybody’d want to kill those two——”

He stopped as he saw the long line of enlisted men waiting to be questioned. They were talking in low undertones. Bewildered faces showed gray through the gloom. Shafer stopped beside the sergeant major.

“How did Cooper get out of the barracks to be killed?” demanded Shafer harshly.

“I don’t know, sir,” the sergeant major acknowledged, “but I was talking to him in barracks ten minutes ago. He must’ve got out a window——”

Rud stiffened and his head came back like a startled animal as a motor burst into life on the line a hundred yards away.

“Get after him and bring him back!” shouted Shafer. “There are three ships on the line. Riley, Lacey——”

“Wait a minute, sir!” Lake cut in, his voice vibrant. “I can get him in my Spad, alone.”

“Get into the air, Riley, Lacey and Sims!” the colonel commanded. “Come on, some of you men, get out and help!”

Garelli’s SE-5 was streaking across the shadowed airdrome now, his exhaust pipes spitting bluish flames.

“We can’t overtake him,” Rud thought to himself as he ran toward the line. “Lake can though. That Spad of his is a two-twenty. What’s he doing now?”

A shadowy figure was rushing from ship to ship pausing for a moment alongside each one. The two hundred and twenty horse power Hispano Suiza in the Spad—the SE-5 motors were only one hundred and eighties—was idling.

Then, just as he reached the line, Lake vaulted into his Spad and without helmet or goggles took off. Garelli was one thousand feet high now, circling the drome. The squat, sturdy Spad was taking the air as Garelli swung his ship to the left at the lower end of the field.

Suddenly a horrible thought gripped Rud and he stopped alongside the nearest SE-5. Garelli was undoubtedly out of his head at the moment or else he was the murderer of Jumbo Ross. In either event would he use his machine guns to keep pursuing ships from taking the air?

Garelli was diving now and Riley waited in a trance as the SE-5 darted toward them. Over the other side of the field, Lake was gaining altitude rapidly. Suddenly Garelli’s guns spoke and the bullets kicked up the ground in the center of the field.

Garelli had zoomed up now until he was more than a thousand feet high. Then he banked until he was headed for the German lines and sent the SE-5 plowing steadily eastward. For a moment, Rud forgot the two ships in the air as he comprehended what Stormy Lake had been up to.

“Guns not worth a nickel,” Sims yelled back. “It’ll take five minutes to fix up this mess!”

The mechanics were swarming around now and the armament men had started working on the guns. Rud, his brain working in circles which got nowhere, watched the two ships in the air absently. They were a mile east of the field now and at that moment as though by pre-arrangement, the clouds parted and the moon shone through.

The two scouts were shadowy bulks against the sky. He could see the SE-5, ahead of the gaining Spad, suddenly turn as though to give combat.

“Why didn’t Lake want help?” Rud was thinking over and over again. “Or is he in this mess some way? Cooper was his friend.”

Then he forgot to think. The Spad had turned back toward the field nearly two thousand feet high and was flying toward it banking and zooming and diving to dodge the bullets which were pouring from Garelli’s guns.

“Lake isn’t shooting at all!” Rud thought in utter amazement. Suddenly he decided to go up without guns. Something extraordinary—he had no idea of what it might be—was taking place in the Thirty-first Squadron and he felt as though he must have action as an outlet. His motor was already running.

Without a word, he leaped into the cockpit and shoved the throttle all the way forward. The little ship bounded forward, its wings like those of a bird, poised to fly. The motor ran swiftly in the cool night air as Rud climbed it to the limit. Never did he take his eyes from the two ships above him. They were but half a mile from the field now and no longer was Lake simply fleeing before the madman in the SE-5. They were locked in battle going round and round. Rud was certain, however, that Stormy Lake hadn’t fired a single shot as yet.

“If the guns had jammed, he’d run,” Rud thought, wondering whether he was dreaming or not. “Gee whiz! He could’ve knocked Garelli down then as easy as falling off a log!”

Not only once was that the case, but a dozen times within the next minute. Garelli was no more of a match for the master flyer in the faster ship than a midget would be for Jack Dempsey. Lake was on Garelli’s tail more than half the time and the rest of the time he was diving down at him or coming up from a blind spot underneath the Italian. The two ships were like aerial monsters striving to shake off their riders in that wild mêlée. Garelli was throwing his ship around recklessly and Lake’s sole objective seemed to be to keep from being hit. They were gradually losing altitude too.

Down below, the other two SE-5’s were taking off and flood lights lit up the airdrome with a wan glow. The whole scene was like a glimpse into a Satanic world, the ships breathing fire and the men on the line like gnomes of the nether regions.

“Lake isn’t trying to run away!” Rud thought. “Gosh, look at him fly!”

As Garelli brought the nose of the SE-5 up to take a shot at the oncoming Lake, it went into a bank and seemed to sideslip upward. Before he could get the nose up again, the Spad, in a vertical dive, had flashed in front of him. It was curving underneath the Italian’s plane now, safely out of danger. Up it came behind the SE-5’s tail. Garelli banked around, but the Spad had passed above him. It turned until it was on the SE-5’s tail again.

“He wants to get Garelli alive!” he thought to himself. “He jammed up our guns for fear one of us would shoot!”

He was but five hundred yards away from the fighting ships now, and at the same altitude. Lake was hanging tantalizingly three hundred feet above the comparatively amateurish flyer below him. The ships were flying in the same direction. They were almost exactly parallel.

Suddenly Garelli went into a vertical bank and the SE-5 shot through the air in the opposite direction. For a second Lake held his course, then he too banked like a flash after Garelli. Garelli threw his ship on its side and turned back for his pursuer. As the nose of the SE-5 came up for a shot, the Spad came down. The stubby French plane was diving toward the SE-5 head-on now and Lake, shielded by his motor, was flying straight into a hail of bullets.

Then for the first time red flecks danced in front of the Spad’s nose. The next second a new note—that of an unharnessed motor—was noticeable.

Rud saw Garelli’s propeller splinter into a thousand pieces. The Spad went into a nose dive and banged underneath its crippled enemy.

“He waited until he could make a head-on shot so he could ruin the propeller without much chance of hitting Garelli,” he told himself. And suddenly he found that he was limp in his seat.

He stayed in the air and watched Lake as he sped for the drome. There wasn’t a single possible landing field except the tarmac for miles. Bleak forests, tiny fields deep in mud and shell holes—the terrain was a flyer’s nightmare. So Garelli was gliding for the drome too.

Lake landed a minute ahead of the powerless SE-5. Coming down gradually, Rud saw Garelli surrounded by a tiny sea of men.

“They’re lifting him out of the cockpit, so he must’ve been wounded,” Rud thought. “Not very badly though, because he landed all right.”

For some reason, Rud found himself diving the last five hundred feet as though his life depended on landing quickly. Just over the airdrome, his motor still turning up seven hundred revolutions and the shutters closed, he came down in a steep sideslip, fishtailed to kill his speed and landed within a few feet of the line. He hopped out of the cockpit and spoke curtly to the approaching mechanics.

He reached the milling group of flyers just in time to hear Lake say, “If you please, sir, I’d like to talk to you and Garelli alone.”

His eyes shone through the darkness like a cat’s. There was an irresistible magnetism about the lanky young pilot and it seemed as though he was dominating the situation by sheer force of superior physical vitality. His eyes fell on Rud shoving his way through the field of onlookers.

Garelli was between two soldiers who had a grip on each of his arms. He seemed barely able to stand up. His head flopped forward, his face was ashen, and he was breathing hard as though he had just survived a terrific ordeal. As he raised his head to look at Rud, his eyes were so different from those Rud had known that it was a shock. There was a look like that of a dumbly suffering dog, pleading for mercy.

“By Jingo, even the old war horse doesn’t know whether he’s afoot or on horseback,” Rud reflected.

“Let’s have a look at Cooper first, eh?” Lake said, and it was as though he were the commanding officer instead of Colonel Shafer.

Shafer assented automatically and without a word they marched off, Garelli still in the grip of the two soldiers.

Garelli shook his head silently, stumbling along as though he were barely able to move his legs.

Trouble seemed to vitalize Lake. Gone was any suspicion that he was laboring under a strain. It seemed as though the pouches had disappeared from beneath his eyes and the wariness gone from them. Long strides which were matched by the colonel’s, carried them over the ground so fast that Garelli and the two soldiers fell behind. Lake was humming a lilting tune.

Cooper was a gory sight. He was lying in the shadow of the barracks, his head in a clotted pool of blood, one side of it almost caved in. That smooth, hard, lineless face was contorted; and the wide open eyes seemed to be staring grimly in death as they had in life.

“I’ll bet ten to one we’ll find a little trail of blood here,” Lake said quietly. “Who’s got a flashlight—let’s see.”

An enlisted man produced one and sure enough four feet away from the body they found a splotch of blood. Silently like a hound on the scent, Lake started back over a trail which led to the place where Ross’s body had been found and at intervals along that path dark stains on the ground told their own story.

“I thought so,” Lake said. “Cooper was stabbed at the same time Ross was only he didn’t die right away. He was able to go a little ways before he collapsed.”

Rud had thrown off the numb feeling which had grown out of shock after shock. He was tense now with anticipation of what was to come. The Colonel’s eyes were glinting.

“You seem to have had a pretty good idea of what happened all the while,” he said harshly.

“If that knife that was found near Cooper is the one I expect it to be I’ll say I do know plenty about it!” Lake stated. “Let’s take a look at it.”

Everything had been left undisturbed during the quick climax of Garelli’s sudden flight and the short dagger-like weapon was lying on the ground a few feet to one side of the blood-stained trail. Lake didn’t even pick it up. He nodded, his face a bit white.

“Q.E.D.,” he said. “I didn’t lay a hand on either one of these men, Colonel, but I guess I’m responsible for their both being dead.”

“There’s no doubt in my mind what happened,” Lake said grimly. “That knife belonged to Cooper. He tried to kill Ross, Ross somehow got it away from him and stabbed Cooper first but didn’t kill him. Cooper must have got hold of the knife again—or maybe Ross being so much stronger grabbed Cooper’s hand and made Cooper stab himself so to speak—but anyway after Cooper was wounded he got in one stab at Ross and it happened to go right to Ross’s heart. Then Cooper, with the knife in his hand, ran a ways, dropped the knife, collapsed, and finally died.”

“Because I should have tipped you all off about Cooper in advance,” the pale-lipped Lake said steadily. “Instead of that I figured that I’d make a grandstand play all by myself, take all the credit, and make myself a big shot instead of being in bad with Colonel Shafer because I was A.W.O.L.”

“Oh, no, it isn’t,” Lake told him with finality, “and it’s quite a story. I was being closed in on from all sides so I decided what the dickens? ‘The wages of sin are death,’ and all that stuff. Anyway, you see now why I wanted to get Garelli myself. Who could figure the guy would go cuckoo? I knew he was innocent as a baby, and I didn’t want him shot down because he was in a panic.”

“If this is true, Lake, you’ve come to the end of your rope!” the colonel said harshly. “Anything you say will be used against you.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Lake interrupted again. “And as I said before, I’m sick of running around scared all the time and I’d like to get it over with.”

There was something so audacious and poised in the famous young airman’s attitude as he stood above the maimed body of Cooper, that he seemed almost unhuman.

“I’m responsible for Cooper’s being on this post,” Lake went on. “I’m sunk and I know it. But listen. In the first place I made a fool of myself in Paris, but I was framed besides. I never got mixed up in any serious trouble while I was there, but my record wasn’t so hot and it sounded bad—worse than it was.

“Now about this guy Cooper. He was the man that framed me. We come from the same town back in the States, see? I’ll put all my cards on the table. I killed a man back there when I was nineteen. It was self-defense, but that doesn’t matter. Under the circumstances, I could have got plenty for it and this Cooper was the only one in the world that knew I did it. So when he starts reading about me in the army, he makes it his business to get close to me. I found that he’d gone to the big city, become a bootlegger, a gangster and a no good.”

“Plenty,” Lake said calmly. “Anyway when I ran into him in Paris he had this killing back in the States and my trouble in Paris on me and I may say that I could have been stuck for plenty more than I was in Paris if Cooper had wanted to open his mouth. Then came his proposition. As I said, he’s a louse who’s done a year’s stretch in Sing Sing for manslaughter and in his right name is wanted for everything from extortion to murder. Consequently you need not be surprised when I tell you that he had connected up with the Germans and was getting plenty of money from them as a spy. His proposition to me was to sponsor him because he felt that a lot of people were getting suspicious of him. He claimed to me that he was just pretending to give the Germans information, that he really was loyal and that eventually he and I working together could do plenty of good for the Allies by getting the Germans false information. I knew that was the bunk, otherwise he wouldn’t have pulled the blackmail stuff on me.”

“And yet,” snapped Shafer, “you brought him to this flight and vouched for him!”

“Right,” said Lake, “and I’ll tell you what I was going to do. I was going to bide my time, catch him with the goods on him and turn him in. I figured this. When we had proof that he really was a spy, we’d have him dead to rights and could force him to send in false information to the Boche and do ourselves some good all around. There are two reasons why you ought to believe what I say but you probably won’t. One is that I’ve knocked down a lot of German ships and haven’t acted exactly as if I was interested in protecting German spies. The second is that I could have killed this bird Cooper any one of a dozen times and by doing so be relieved of his threats to expose that old killing and what I was framed for in Paris.”

“Of all the lunatics,” rasped Shafer. “I don’t believe you’re a spy—no, but you’re responsible for Ross’s death and the idea of sponsoring Cooper even for a moment without letting anyone else know the truth is a dereliction of duty and——”

“I know,” nodded Lake. “I admit it. I’m just a fat-headed grand-standing false alarm! I was going to wait and then all of a sudden knock you all dead with the truth and take all the credit for it. As a result Ross is dead——”

“Ross used to be a secret service man, didn’t he?” Lake asked. “He probably recognized Cooper as a criminal or something and Cooper in desperation killed him.”

Rud squatted down on his haunches. The murmur of the flyers pouring into the mess hall came to their ears. Far away on the Front, the continuous boom of the guns was a constant undertone to Lake’s story. Garelli, his heart in his eyes, was gazing unwinkingly at Lake’s curly dark head.

“And that’s the truth, gents, one and all, and it won’t be any trouble to prove it. Which jail are you going to send me to, Colonel?”

“You hadn’t seen or heard of Cooper for years until you ran across him in Paris?” Shafer asked as though his mind was far away.

“Right,” Lake said, “but no sooner did he run across me than he attached himself to me and framed me as I said. Believe me he had plenty of money to work a frame, too. Then, as I said, I brought him along with the idea of eventually getting him.”

Colonel Shafer was staring at the amazing stripling who was so young in years and so old in experience, as though Lake was some astounding new form of life. Lake shifted his attention to the dazed Garelli.

“What made you go haywire?” he inquired. “You acted more guilty than the man who’d done it.”

Garelli shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I had no plan—I went crazy, I guess. It’s all like a dream to me now. I’m telling the truth.”

“You’re not such a bird of a flyer in the first place,” Lake told him candidly, “and your nerves are all shot in the second. I guess you’ll have no trouble getting sick leave.”

Rud, the silent onlooker, felt the tension in the air growing despite Lake’s airy persiflage. For a moment there was quiet, and then Lake took a determined step forward.

“Listen, Colonel ‘Squads Right’ Shafer,” he said in level tones. “You just can’t be such a bad guy as you make yourself out to be, or I wouldn’t have been here. And I’ve got something to say to you man to man.”

“ ‘The Devil he got sick and the Devil a saint would be,’ ” Lake quoted. “Consequently, it doesn’t mean a thing when I say that the last few months of continual jams have taught me my lesson. I imagine I’d be a fairly good boy if I were given a chance but that’s neither here nor there. Baron Baer and his cuckoo outfit have moved up in this sector, haven’t they?”

“It would be quite a thing to knock ’em off, wouldn’t it?” Lake went on.

He hesitated, as though expecting a reaction to his words. None came—in words, but the silence was more eloquent. “Here’s what I’d like to do—tonight, if you boys are with me,” Lake went on.

He explained his scheme, his enthusiasm growing as he talked. “In other words, I’ll be the decoy and you’ll get the ducks!” he ended up.

“What of it?” returned Lake, “and maybe it won’t be. Anyway, I’d rather go down with a good clean bullet in my guts than to be in jail. What about it, Colonel? Will you give me that chance?”

For a second the colonel didn’t answer. Then he straightened; but he seemed to be older somehow.

“This outfit’s got me dizzy!” he said slowly. “War does funny things to loads of people, but these last few days have been the craziest I’ve ever gone through.”

Suddenly the eyes of the colonel were glowing as he looked at Lake. He took a step forward.

“You know, young fellow, in spite of myself, I sort of like the cut of your jib,” he said in staccato syllables. “You really mean you’re willing to go through with that?”

“Of course. Don’t give me credit. I’m sunk as things are. It’s just a grandstand gesture.”

“Then the Thirty-first Squadron is going Baer hunting just before dawn!” Shafer said, a new tone in his voice.

As “Squads Right” Shafer spoke, the hard-boiled martinet seemed to have thrown off the shell beneath which he had been hiding. In his voice, his eyes and his whole attitude there was suddenly shining forth the spirit of the adventurer which the old soldier had buried within him.

“Baer hunting!” he repeated with a grim chuckle in his harsh voice. “Let’s go!”

Ten minutes later he had assembled the squadron. Like an eager youngster he talked over the plans with them and his words seemed to blaze and kindle enthusiasm in the younger men. This wasn’t the martinet they had known and hated!

“It will be the doggonedest thing ever done on this Front,” Rud was thinking, his eyes on Stormy Lake. Through Lake they could get Baron Baer and his outfit of daredevils.

For all the world like the top sergeant which he had once been, Shafer shooed his command into bed as though they were children. Rud felt that he wouldn’t be able to sleep, but nature took its toll and as his tired nerves relaxed, he drifted off into dreamless slumber.

Four hours later with fourteen ships, their motors idling, stretched in a row on the ghostly line, Rud wondered that he had been able to sleep. With the attempted coup several hours away, it hadn’t seemed real somehow. But now as he saw Stormy Lake walking to the line, the imminent tragedy became a thing of immediate horror. Conservatively speaking, there wasn’t a chance in a million for that sardonic smiling curly-headed flyer.

The colonel, over all protests, was going to lead Flight B. Rud himself was to take charge of Flight A. The atmosphere which hung over the line as the motors strained against their wheel blocks in one last tuning up, was as dark and heavy as the clouds above them.

The flyers glanced at Stormy Lake, now helmeted and goggled, stooping low to squint at his instrument board. Riley, next to him, saw him nod to the mechanics. They jerked at the wheel blocks and Lake took one last look about him. Rud’s heart tightened as he saw Lake’s face, dim in the light of the exhaust flames. Gone was that devil-may-care grin. His mouth was a thin line; his face was drawn, haggard and white. The next second he was off.

A few seconds later, Rud gave his SE-5 the gun and the buoyant scout rushed across the ground. The flight took off behind him in formation, Jerry Lacey, the Manhattan Madman, on one side and Red Somers on the other. Soon fourteen ships were circling the airdrome for altitude.

Ten minutes later, fourteen thousand feet up, they turned eastward, led by the Spad. Never would Rud forget that chill ride high in the night air.

It was 3:30 a.m. but Rud was searching the sky constantly for signs of enemy ships. They were over German territory now and the clouds below them seemed to become thicker as though to help them on their mission. Every man in the two flights, except Shafer and Lake, knew every foot of that territory below. The airdrome where Baer’s squadron of flying maniacs was based, could have been found by most of them blindfolded.

As they came close to their objective, slipping along through the night like so many ghosts, a growing tension gripped Rud. Every nerve was jumping.

One hundred feet to one side of him, Stormy Lake pointed to a hole in the clouds. From an edge of it, Rud could get a slanting vision of the quiet tarmac below.

He signaled to his men. They climbed higher, followed by Shafer’s flight while Rud himself stayed down at the opening of the cloud to watch. The Spad, its motor partially cut, was streaking downward like a comet. On and on it went until sometimes Rud could barely see it except when a quick burst of the motor sent an eruption of flame from the exhaust pipes.

Rud took out his night glasses and, flying with automatic skill, strove to watch every detail of what was going on below. He had raised his goggles and the air stream compounded of his speed and the propeller wash seemed striving to tear the glasses from his eyes. The Spad was but five thousand feet high now and on the airdrome tiny figures were rushing between buildings and hangars.

Suddenly two searchlights were sweeping the air and flood lights made the little field stand out like a white handkerchief. Men were running toward the line where ships were waiting.

Three places—smudges on the ground which had looked to Rud like so many clumps of trees—suddenly changed their appearance. The Spad was outlined in the beams of the searchlights now, and from every one of those places came the flame and smoke of anti-aircraft batteries. Two ships were rushing across the field. Five others had their motors going on the line.

He did. An inaudible shout came from Rud as he rocked his ship from side to side. The other SE-5’s came down to join him. The first Fokker plunged to the ground from a height of fifty feet into a clump of trees at the edge of the airdrome. The Spad swung to the right and the second ship glided quickly back to the field. It had been hit. Five others were streaking across the field now, as Rud, his SE-5 in a terrific dive, led his men downward at more than two hundred miles an hour.

“If he can only last through—but how can he?” Rud’s prayer stopped short as he saw five more ships take off.

“He might save himself by running for the lines!” Rud thought. “Oh, the crazy nut!”

As though supremely disdainful of the five Fokkers which were in the air, circling toward him, Stormy Lake dived back at the airdrome, where the second five were taking off. One of the rushing ships became a mass of flames. The pilot leaped out just in time. Another crashed in the trees at the far side and still a third did a fast ground loop; a wing smashed. Now Lake’s Spad was the center of a milling mass of ships.

Just then, apparently, Baer and his men saw the swarm of SE-5’s which were hurtling down toward them. There were seven Fokkers in the air now, but in a moment more there would be at least ten others if the SE-5’s didn’t get there in time.

Five thousand feet high, the wires were screaming in the wind. The eight-cylinder motor before Rud was turning at more than two thousand revolutions a minute. It seemed as though from all points of the line, ships were taking off. Then he saw the Spad spinning earthward a mile west of the airdrome.

He saw the Spad, followed down by a Fokker, come out of the spin and hover over a shell hole alongside of a flat, straight road. It crashed on one wing and there was no sign of life from the wreckage.

One Fokker circled it watchfully for a moment, then rushed back to join its comrades.

The orders to the Thirty-first Squadron had been explicit—a quick onslaught, a brief attack, and scurry for home.

Rud picked out his Fokker. Behind him the others should be doing the same thing. Five hundred feet below, zooming up desperately to meet him, was a German. With both hands on the stick, Rud banked his SE-5 to the left. The German’s bullets sped harmlessly past him and then he had banked like a flash to the right. For a long fifteen seconds his hand was clamped on the gun control lever on his stick. He saw the German ship waver and go down. Then Rud was levelling out, praying that the elevators would hold. With all the extra speed which the dive had given him, his ship darted westward. He looked behind.

The anti-aircraft guns had ceased firing. Three Fokkers were gliding toward the airdrome.

Now the swarm of Allied ships, flying at a terrific speed, were scooting for the lines. Nine Fokkers had been turned into wrecks in that rapier-like sortie, and Stormy Lake was the only Thirty-first casualty.

As the thought of Lake flashed into Rud’s mind, he looked below and behind him. He was fifteen hundred feet high now, flying straight westward along that road. Perhaps three hundred yards in back of him, lay the wrecked Spad. Somewhat higher than he was, the flock of Allied planes rushing westward were coming closer together for protection. A mile behind four Fokkers were left in the air.

He looked back at the Fokkers. Three of them were speeding toward the two Allied ships.

Climbing automatically, he circled back despite the oncoming Fokkers which were five hundred feet lower. He saw the SE-5 hit the road and roll along safely. He saw a tall, gaunt figure leave the cockpit as the ship stopped rolling almost beside the Spad wreck. Then the figure of Stormy Lake burst from the wreck and ran toward the SE-5 with long strides.

“Lake’s playing possum!” Rud shouted aloud. “And I’m a son of a gun if that isn’t the colonel!”

At precisely that second something which had happened to Rud several times before happened again. It was as though some switch had been turned on. Like magic, the big, competent Texan was turned into a raging demon. He was incapable of feeling fear, and able to fly with a dashing skill which wasn’t normally his. As he saw Stormy Lake fling himself on the fuselage of the SE-5 and the colonel take off, he began climbing higher to meet the onslaught of the Fokkers. He would hold the fort, until that overloaded SE-5 had a fair chance.

He was diving on the leader now. His guns spoke, and all three Fokkers separated widely. Turning, they scurried back toward the drome. Three more ships were rising there, less than a mile away.

Then the puzzled Rud saw the reason for the retreat of the Boche. Against all orders, three other SE-5’s had hurried back to the scene of action. Baer’s men, believing that the attack was to be resumed, were rising from the tarmac like flies. But the overloaded SE-5 below was successfully staggering into the air and Rud fell into the SE-5 formation.

Fifteen hundred feet high, the procession rushed along, motors wide open. They were shot at from the ground steadily, but somehow Rud felt that they were under the personal protection of the flyers’ gods, and that nothing could possibly happen to them now. He searched the sky for Fokkers which might have been called to the rescue, but could see none. A mile behind him, keeping up a stubborn chase, were seven or eight of Baer’s men. Up at the lines, however, watchful Allied planes would be waiting for the return of the raiding party.

Fifteen minutes later, seven bullet holes from the ground guns in his wings, Rud joyously passed the Allied lines and saw a dozen planes, several thousand feet higher, dipping in salute.

Dawn was just breaking as he dropped his ship down alongside of the colonel’s. His body sprawled on top of the fuselage, gripping the cockpit cowling with his hands, was Stormy Lake. The rangy young man used one hand for a moment to wave a salute to Rud.

Suddenly, Rud felt himself weak with the reaction from those tense minutes and for the first time the full realization of what Colonel Shafer had done came to him. He had known that the old man had guts despite his lack of flying experience but that landing in an effort to save Lake had been as audacious a feat as Rud had ever heard of.

The line was the scene of a celebration which reminded him of college days. When Colonel Shafer and Lake came taxiing in, it took on the aspect of an insane asylum on a spree. Rud was pounded on the back until he shrank from an upraised hand, and the world in the chill dawn was suddenly good after all.

Rud saw Jerry Lacey thump Shafer’s back and the martinet seemed to like it! Unbelievable as it seemed, the iron colonel seemed to be enjoying the sudden camaraderie and warm admiration of the subordinates with whom he had fought a savage battle for days.

“Well, Stormy Lake,” Rud drawled with enjoyment, “I don’t see why a guy with your luck was ever unlucky enough to get in the air service!”

“Oh, it isn’t so bad,” Lake grinned and then added impudently: “Look at all the fun we have!”

“Thanks for sticking by, Riley,” Shafer said as he loosened his coveralls. “I had an idea Lake here was camouflaging a little and I didn’t want him to be a prisoner if I could help it.”

For the first time in Rud’s experience with Shafer, the man’s light gray eyes were curiously soft.

“I reckon,” he said, “you’re going to attend a reform school run by me!”

“Telephone message, sir,” said an orderly. Breathlessly, he shoved a slip of paper into the colonel’s hands.

“Quiet everybody!” bawled Shafer, and slowly the din died away. “Message from the old man,” the colonel told them with forced calm. “ ‘Great work. A three-day leave for the entire flight starting after you get some sleep. Congratulations. Mitchell.’ ”

Rud didn’t join in the cheer. He was aware of the fact that words were unnecessary between the flyers and the colonel, or even between Lake and Shafer.

“Well,” Stormy Lake said with relish, “we certainly did give Baer and his merry men a little to think about. I guess we’ll need that leave.”

“Because as long as we’re in the same neighborhood, Baron Baer and his outfit of merry men will certainly aim to make life interesting now!” Lake said as a flashing, boyish grin lighted up his face.

As Major Rudford Riley started to descend from two thousand feet to the airdrome of the Thirty-first Squadron, the manner of his descent was indicative of the new spirit in that same outfit. Ordinarily, the big redheaded Texan would have brought his trim SE-5 down in a conservative glide without any aerial monkey-shines. As it was, however, he came down in a series of vertical banks, wingovers and an occasional loop, not to mention a turn or two of a tailspin to lend variety. The very real love for flying, that many months of strenuous duty on the Western Front had buried fairly successfully, seemed to have had a new birth. There was sheer joy in feeling his hundred-and-eighty horsepower scout turn on its own tail without slip or skid, and it was good to feel the airstream rush against his face and to hear the wires sing with the speed.

It might have been the result of the three-day leave that the entire squadron had just enjoyed, and it might have been partly the fact that the squadron was temporarily the most famous on the Front and the wide-shouldered, tranquil Texan one of its most famous flyers. However, the main reason for the magical change, Rud realized as he sideslipped into the field, was none other than Lieutenant-Colonel Stormy Lake.

Lake was then engaged in barrel-rolling through the sky, one thousand feet above the converted pasture lot which was the airdrome. If Rud himself was one of the most famous flyers of the Thirty-first Squadron, Colonel Stormy Lake up there was the most famous flyer on the Front.

It was almost dark. On the line nearly two dozen ships, all of which had just been taken up for test flights by the returned pilots of the Thirty-first, were being worked on by mechanics.

That three-day leave had given the enlisted men their first fair chance in weeks to get the battle-scarred airplanes into shape, Rud thought, as he taxied to the line. He watched the master flyer above him spin down within three hundred feet of the ground, sideslip in, fishtail to kill his speed, and land as lightly as a feather.

The combined mess hall and lounging room of the officers was ablaze with light. Despite the dull booming of guns, thirty miles away at the Front, Rud felt a comfortable, homey feeling as he waited for Stormy Lake. The spirit of that mess hall tonight would be in distinct contrast to the poisoned atmosphere which had pervaded it for a week before the leave.

“I’m feeling too good to live!” Rud drawled to Lake as they walked into the lounging room.

“Three days in Paris is what you needed,” the rangy flyer grinned. “Darned if I’m not glad to be back on the firing line myself, Baron Baer and his cuckoos ought to be ready for action about now!”

Rud removed his helmet. The tousled hair that fell over his forehead made the Southerner look younger. The big fellow’s bronzed face, level blue-gray eyes, square jaw and softly slurred words—all exuded tranquillity and confidence. He would have been the last man in the world to admit that the devil-may-care Lake’s reference to Baron Baer found an echo in his own heart. Beneath the surface, Rudford Riley had as deep a zest and as intense a delight in crises as the famous ace beside him did.

They were about the same height, just a trifle over six feet, but as they stood there Rud looked almost twice as broad as Lake, and Lake looked much taller because of his lankiness. Whereas Rud Riley gave a soothing impression of warmth and dependability, Lake was a flashing rapier of a man, whose crisp, black hair seemed to crackle with vitality and whose careless audacity and blazing enjoyment of life for its own sake seemed to vitalize the very air around him.

As they opened the door of the mess hall, the odor of food on the fire was pleasantly in the atmosphere. Lights, warmth, carelessly jovial banter—all combined to give an atmosphere which was so foreign to what the distant booming guns implied, that it was almost a shock.

“How times have changed!” Rud murmured as his eyes sought Colonel Squads Right Shafer, the C.O.

“And there’s the old war horse. Seems to be having a good time himself!” Stormy Lake remarked, a gently sardonic quality in his somewhat lopsided grin.

The fox-faced little Red Somers was coming toward them. He stopped and planted himself on wide-spread legs as was his wont. His tooth-brush mustache wiggled as he stated: “The new man has arrived. He’s over there with Teller. Shake his paw and make him feel at home.”

Rud joined Jim Teller, a startlingly thin flyer who introduced him to Williams, the new replacement. Rud shook hands with the curly-haired, laughing-eyed young fellow who didn’t look to be more than nineteen.

Suddenly the Texan froze into immobility. The dull drone of an airplane motor sounded from afar. Outside there was a gray twilight that would be darkness within a few minutes. The drone changed into a shattering roar. For a second the noisy room was quiet as death. Rud’s trained ears could tell that a diving ship with its motor cut had suddenly put on full power and that now it was zooming away. He found himself leading the procession to the door, and as he burst out into the air, his eyes sought the sky over the airdrome.

“It was a Fokker!” he bawled, and from somewhere in the plunging mob of khaki-clad flyers, Stormy Lake’s voice cut through the din.

As Rud reached the line ahead of the band of twenty-odd flyers, half of them still bewildered, Sergeant Blaine was running in from the airdrome with a three-pound rock in his hand. A paper was tied around it.

The tall ex-infantry man was bareheaded, his iron-gray hair waving in the breeze above a hard face that always reminded Rud of some harsh old eagle.

“Lacey!” he snapped. “Get to headquarters and notify G.H.Q. Here, let me see that, sergeant.”

In the rear of the group, thin, sardonic Jerry Lacey tarried, against orders, to hear the news. Stormy Lake pushed up alongside Rud. In the half light, a ring of tanned young faces with overbright eyes and a sort of wolfish look, common to them all, were surrounding the old martinet. They had once hated him; now they had an uneasy affection for him. The deep furrows around Shafer’s compressed lips seemed to deepen as his stony gray eyes darted over the words on the paper. Behind the flyers, a second audience of enlisted men were waiting tensely. The roar of the Mercedes had died to a barely audible hum, and the Fokker was only a speck in the sky as it hurried toward the lines.

“Listen!” barked the colonel and then read slowly: “ ‘Commanding Officer, Thirty-first Squadron—It is indeed a pleasure to have you back. We are preparing a suitable welcome for you. Baron Freiderich von Baer.’ ”

“I knew it!” yelled Stormy Lake, a note in his vibrant voice that sent shivers up and down Rud’s spine.

“Boy, did we bite ourselves off a chunk of something!” Red Somers piped excitedly. “Von Baer and his nuts won’t ever rest until they’ve got even.”

Excited talk filled the air as the colonel silently stalked back toward the mess hall. The flyers fell in behind him, scarcely conscious of what they were doing. Some were tense, others were glowing-eyed and flushed with excitement; others were reveling in ferocious anticipation of what that note might bring on. All reacted in their separate ways.

“What did I tell you right after we got back from raiding the Red Devils?” Stormy was crowing into Rud’s ear.

His boldly curved nose seemed thinner as the nostrils contracted, his wide mouth wreathed in a smile of sheer enjoyment that had an almost cruel quality in it. The wind ruffled his curly black hair so that the ends stood up on each side of the part in the middle. He looked like a mocking Mephistopheles. His head was thrown back, his lean dark face turned toward the sky, as though he wished the battle were already on and that he was up there in the center of it.

“Do you mean to say that was Baron von Baer himself?” came young Williams’ voice eagerly.

“Maybe it wasn’t him in that ship,” Rud told the transfigured youngster, “but it was one of his crazy crew, anyway!”

“Gosh, you ought to have heard the excitement at Issoudun when the news came that you guys had gone over and shot up Baer’s circus!” Williams said quickly.

“Most of the credit belongs to Colonel Lake, here,” Rud drawled. “He went over low and all by himself, as a decoy, and the rest of us just popped down and knocked them off like so many clay pigeons!”

“Is all they say about von Baer and that Red Devil circus the truth?” the awed Williams asked excitedly.

“All they say isn’t more than half the truth, from what I can find out!” Rud told him thoughtfully. “Von Baer is a sort of nut who doesn’t know what sense, or fear, or anything else is in the air, and after he got such a record for himself and his outfit, the Heinies let him pick his own men. Every bird in the German air service who don’t give a darn what happens to him has an ambition to get into the Red Devils.”

“And boy, can they battle?” Stormy Lake cut in swiftly. “As for the baron—they say he’s the greatest combat flyer in the world!”

As though there were electricity in his words, the air seemed to pulsate with the energy bottled up within him.

“Have you ever run into them, Colonel?” Williams asked. Even in his excitement, there was a trace of the awed respect due America’s most famous pilot.

“Once,” Lake told him. “I came down with a bad motor, and I watched that outfit hop thirteen Allied planes. The Heinies were all over the sky. They just spread and came at our ships from underneath, both sides and on top. Old Baer sat up high, and came popping down to pick off any ships around the edges. I never saw such a madhouse. Those guys fly better on their back than they do right side up. Their idea of a dive is straight up and down and they can drill in the air like West Point cadets on the ground.”

His eyes shifted to Rud. “You know what I mean. You had the feeling that every man in every ship was the best flyer in the world. And are they nuts!”

“Well,” Rud said as they entered the mess hall, “if anybody should be the judge of lunatics, it’s you!”

They had fallen behind most of the others. When they entered the room, Colonel Shafer was reading a message which an orderly had evidently just brought to him. His voice reverberated from the walls as he spoke in clipped metallic phrases.

“Silence, if you please, gentlemen. Orders are that every available ship rendezvous at Collaire at 2 a.m. to escort the Fifty-eighth on a bombing trip. Lake, you’re officer of the day. Riley, I’ll need you here. All others take a nap after dinner and be on the line at one forty-five sharp. Lieutenant Monroe, give orders accordingly to the mechanics—immediately.”

The sudden orders, Rud observed, didn’t even dent the consciousness of the flyers. Some as excited as boys, others grim-faced and apprehensive—all were thinking of only one thing: Baron von Baer and his Red Devils had challenged them to a squadron duel. They knew that trouble with a big T, as Rud remarked to Stormy Lake through a mouthful of stew, was going to pop louder than it had in these parts for some time.

Curly-headed Williams was sitting opposite them at the table. He had been listening respectfully to the veteran flyers around him but now he could hold in no longer.

“Gee, I’m glad I’m with this outfit!” he told Rud. “The whole Front and maybe the whole world is going to watch this!”

“I had an idea when we slipped over and shot ’em up in their brand new airdrome that there’d be more to it than met the eye,” Lake said beautifically.

“I don’t see what that meant to you,” Shafer said from the head of the table and his harsh face lighted up a trifle, his eyes glinting and his firm mouth relaxing. “No one ever figured you’d come back to help out!”

What Lake had done that night deliberately would have been suicide for anyone except a flying genius and a fool for luck! Lake’s boyish grin flashed. That grin appeared of late and it transformed the hard boldness of his face to the glowing youth.

“I knew my papa would take care of me!” he stated. It was a gently jeering remark which would have resulted in an outburst from Shafer three days before. But now Shafer only smiled back at Lake’s reference to his rescue of the younger man.

Rud, Lake and the colonel got up an hour and a half before dawn with the rest of the squadron, and Rud succeeded in packing away a good meal. As dawn broke, the three of them were sitting around headquarters over a pot of coffee. While the colonel worked on some reports, Stormy Lake played plaintive tunes on the harmonica and Rud wrote some letters. The morning mist was just beginning to rise when Rud and Lake in the outside office heard the drone of a motor.

Nevertheless, it seemed that he and Rud were thinking the same thing as their eyes met. Shafer came through the open door between the two offices as they started for the door. Rud took one look at the sky. The incoming ship was swathed in mist and it was unmistakably a DeHaviland.

“One of the bombers. Maybe he got lost in the mist,” Rud drawled. “I’ll go out and meet him.”

A moment later, the Texan, along with two sleepy-eyed mechanics, was greeting the tall captain who alighted from the front cockpit.

“Oh, I’m from the Fifty-eighth. Captain Shaw.” He thrust out his long-fingered hand as a thousand wrinkles deepened around his bold green eyes. “This is Lieutenant Masters,” he went on, as Rud shook hands.

A chubby-faced young man with yellow hair, cut in a stiff spike pompadour, and china-blue eyes bobbed his head as he shook hands with Rud.

“Come over to headquarters and have a shot of coffee,” Rud invited him. “Got lost, huh?”

“We are, all but three of us, including the commanding officer,” Rud told him gently.

Captain Shaw looked back at the line as they walked toward headquarters. His upper lip was long and well cut, his nose thin and straight. His eyes were shielded by heavy lids, and there were deep wrinkles around them, as there were around his wide, firm mouth when he smiled. There was a genial warmth in that smile, but his face had a harsh quality, like that of Colonel Shafer’s face, when it was in repose. He spoke with something of the clipped meticulousness which was also a characteristic of Shafer’s.

Long and lean and square-shouldered, he walked as though a poker had been thrust down the back of his perfectly fitting blouse. Rud matched him, stride for stride, with chubby little Masters pattering along like some overfed Newfoundland pup, half a pace behind them.

Stormy Lake and the colonel were watching them from the doorway and stepped back as Rud led the visitors inside. Shaw acknowledged the introductions with a smile and as he looked at Lake his green eyes seemed to glow like a cat’s and his bushy ash-blond eyebrows were raised quizzically.

“Quite a stunt you boys pulled, shooting up von Baer!” Shaw smiled. “I drink to you!” He bowed, and there was an effect of clinking his heels together as he bent from the waist.

“You know, it seems to me I’ve seen you before, Masters,” Stormy Lake remarked to the round little lieutenant.

Masters’ eyes wandered to Shaw’s. Suddenly the captain’s green eyes were like those of a cat’s at night, and Masters’ round youthful face seemed to turn to stone. Rud was aware of some agonized feeling like that of helplessness in a nightmare. For a second, there was something knocking at the doors of his mind. It was then that Shaw moved.

Both hands darted through the air at once and with an effect of absolute magic, two Lugers were in his hands as he backed toward the door, Masters with him.

“Not one move, gentlemen!” he said with a click of ice in his words. That smile was the grin of a wolf’s, and it was as though he were licking his chops in preparation for a good meal.

Three Thirty-first squadron men literally couldn’t move. Now Masters, his baby-like mouth suddenly thin and set, had a gun in each hand, too.

Shaw kicked the door shut and said urbanely, “You seem surprised. Search them, Lieutenant Masters!”

Shaw seemed about seven feet tall to Rud then. Poised and smiling, he was as calm and unflurried as a summer’s day. But there was something in those eyes that prevented Stormy Lake from making the slightest resistance as Masters searched them. Their eyes were on Shaw, as though held there by magnetic attraction. He had removed his helmet now. His pompadour of light brown hair looked as though it had just been combed and brushed a moment before. The habit of command was in every word and line of him.

Shaw smiled and bowed as he said precisely, “Baron Freiderich von Baer, at your service!”

“No!” The word dropped from the colonel’s lips as though jolted out of him. Lake snarled wordlessly. Rud was in a state of suspended animation. The three Americans stood and glared.

“Where did you get that ship?” Colonel Shafer finally snapped, and Rud could feel the white-hot rage that the C.O. was controlling with bitter effect. “And those uniforms, and what are you doing here?”

“Ah! But not so fast, Colonel Shafer,” von Baer said with mocking politeness. “The ship—it was captured; the uniforms—they were made; we are here to get another ship——”

“Why, Colonel Lake, you don’t believe us? Now, as one man to another——”

“Pardon me for interrupting, baron, old boy,” Lake said with sudden blitheness. “You may have use for another Allied ship, but what you’re really trying to do is to get even with us for what we did to you!”

“That will come,” von Baer told him with a smile. “Will it be too much for a guest to ask for another bit of coffee?”

“Not at all,” Lake told him airily as he bowed in mocking imitation of von Baer.

Rud was trying to persuade himself that what was going on couldn’t be the truth. In the very midst of his enemies, Baer was as cool and poised and quizzical as if he were in his own Rhine castle. Stormy Lake, alight with some inner fire, matched him jibe for jibe. Shafer was plainly trying to struggle out of the same mental fog as Rud. It just couldn’t be so—in the very headquarters of the Thirty-first Squadron, with two hundred mechanics within one hundred and fifty yards of them, and the Front nearly forty miles away——

The colonel raised his coffee cup, his eyes flashing beneath heavy lids. Rud noticed that the eyelashes were long and curved upward like those of a girl.

“To the Thirty-first!” The nobleman gave a mirthless laugh. “May as few of you be killed as is compatible with the welfare of the Red Devils!”

“Where did you learn English so well?” he asked, his tongue running over his lips and a queer light in his eyes.

“Here and there over the world,” smiled von Baer. “But enough of this so pleasant chat.”

His cup clicked down on the desk. As though in instantaneous answer to his chief’s change in mood, the cherubic young lieutenant wiped the vapid grin from his face and became cool and watchful. Von Baer’s eyes ran over the three Americans coldly.

“You shall have your choice,” he said. “In a moment, before we accept your so kind offer of loaning us a ship, we can tie you up and leave you here helpless, or——”

He paused and it seemed that those heavy-lidded eyes were probing deep the thoughts of each man before him.

As Rud met that look he thought, “Darned if I don’t believe this guy is as nutty as they say he is!”

“Or we can accept your word of honor as officers and gentlemen that for five minutes after Hans and I take off, you will make no move of any kind to interfere or pursue us.”

For an instant there was silence as von Baer bent one long leg and put a perfectly booted foot on the chair which held the single captured Colt. Colonel Shafer had been the only one with a side-arm. Rud could scarcely believe his ears. His eyes moved to Lake, and that irrepressible youth’s face was literally shining. The colonel was studying von Baer with blank disbelief at the very existence of such a peculiar creature.

“You seem surprised,” von Baer said, with a slightly disdainful smile. “Time is short——”

“Now, I should say that was handsome of you, baron, old bean!” chuckled Lake. “We’re caught dead to rights, Colonel Shafer. Why get tied up and thrown in a corner?”

“I give you my word,” said the colonel as though every syllable had been wrenched from within him.

Rud literally gasped as he saw von Baer present the still loaded gun to Colonel Shafer, butt first. Shafer looked at it stupidly as Stormy Lake’s laugh ran through the room.

“We’re going to be the laughing-stock of the Front for a day or two, but I’ll be darned if it isn’t a pleasure to meet you!”

“Thank you, sir,” von Baer said with that perpetual smile. Nevertheless, the theatrical German seemed to accept the compliment as though it were his due. “Very well, for five minutes, you will not endeavor to interfere with us in any way whatever. The thanks and felicitations of the Red Devils, gentlemen.” He bowed at the doorway.

As Rud accepted his drink, Stormy Lake raised his cup. “Till we meet again,” was his toast.

“Hoch!” said von Baer. The two pairs of eyes which met across their cups were so keen and so calculating, and the glint in them was so cold that the outward amenities seemed suddenly horrible.

Von Baer set down his cup and snapped out an order in German to the lieutenant. The chubby young man went out the door like a seed squirted out of a lemon. A last bow from the waist and Baron von Baer, his head held high, his lean face expressionless, was stalking toward the line.

“Great guns!” Lake exploded. “If we were tied up, we could at least try to get loose. Now we’ve just got to stand here!” He looked as if he would burst with suppressed activity.

“There’s as much chance of that as there is of the war being over today!” snapped Shafer, pacing up and down, the image of a tiger in a cage.

“What do you know about the guts of the guy?” Lake said, commencing to walk likewise. “I’ve met some funny birds in my time, but he takes the cake!”

“Boy, how this story’s going to spread around!” Rud reminded them, and he grinned in spite of himself. “I’ve just got to hand it to von Baer, that’s all there is to that!”

“Me, too!” Lake agreed. “What are ya gonna do with a bird like that? I’ll be darned if I wouldn’t hate to kill him!”

“Well, whether you know it or not,” Shafer said, his voice gritting, “he’s made a bunch of monkeys out of us!”

Rud and Shafer joined him. The German ace and his vapid-looking companion were as calm as though they were on their own airdrome. A Thirty-first Squadron mechanic was warming up their ship and another one suddenly spun the prop of one of the two serviceable SE-5’s the Thirty-first had left.

They watched with silent rage as the two Germans calmly took off in the two Allied ships. Despite himself, Rud felt a leaping admiration for the tall German. There had been a theatrical quality about everything that Baer had done, as though he were dramatizing, thinking himself a very remarkable fellow, but that didn’t alter the facts of his breath-taking audacity and matchless record.

“There are two minutes left before we can even telephone!” the colonel snarled as he began his pacing again.

“He wanted the glory of this more than he wanted a ship!” Stormy Lake said suddenly. “This is a story the Germans can tell now, and the honor of the Red Devils and Baron Friederich von Baer is satisfied!”

“Well, of course,” Rud pointed out, “getting another Allied ship in apple-pie condition won’t hurt them any either. You can do a lot of stunts, if you can look like something you’re not. Even if they don’t use them, it’s a threat.”

“Gosh! I wouldn’t have believed it possible! We were helpless—or at least we thought we were!” Lake said swiftly. “If I never do another thing until I’m knocked off, the baron and I are going to meet again!”

A moment later, Shafer was telephoning wildly, giving notification up at the Front about the two ships.

“Not that it’ll do any good,” he told Rud as he hung up the phone, “but at least we can try!”

He stormed out on the line, and Rud told Lake in a throaty chuckle, “The poor mechanics are going to get plenty now for no reason.”

The colonel didn’t return to the office, and Lake and Rud continued to talk in marveling circles about the fact that Baron Freiderich von Baer had been in their midst. A lot of coffee and the tension generated by the German’s remarkable visit combined to make the two flyers sleepless and charged with nervous energy. So it was, that when a far-away shout came to Rud’s ears from the direction of the line, he jumped as though he had been shot and leaped to the window.

He lunged for the door, and Lake beat him by three yards as they burst out on the steps. His shout could have been heard for half a mile.

The German even had his helmet off, as though to identify himself to his enemies. He was taxiing swiftly out on the airdrome, looking back at the two enlisted men who were running after him. He seemed to take delight in staying fifty yards in front of them as he swung his ship to the left and continued to taxi across the ground at a high rate of speed.

“He’s doing that to warm up the motor,” Rud thought, running with giant strides fifteen feet in back of Lake.

For the moment, Rud’s numbed mind was absolutely incapable of formulating even the most fantastic explanation for von Baer’s second appearance. The Texan would not have been surprised had it been proven that the polished German had appeared out of thin air. Nothing seemed too bizarre to happen this misty, dizzy morning.

The mechanics had given up the chase. Von Baer was at the eastern edge of the field turning his ship, as Lake, shouting something indistinguishable, stormed toward the line. That was just what he was doing, storming. Rud got the impression of a human tornado as he saw two mechanics leap for the single Spad and one of them swing the propeller while Lake was still fifty feet away from them. Lake seemed a giant in stature now, and he scarcely faltered in his stride as with both hands on the cowling, he vaulted into the cockpit.

Von Baer was taking off now, the SE-5 skipping across the ground almost in the exact center of the airdrome.

“Lake’s crazy!” Rud thought as he came alongside the Spad. Lake was snapping his belt on when von Baer left the ground and the SE-5 was curving away from them in a steep climbing turn.

“He’ll pop you before you leave the ground!” Rud bawled into Lake’s ear.

“Well, let him!” yelled Lake. As the long narrow eyes burned into Rud’s, there was a different Stormy Lake behind them than the easy-going Texan had ever seen. He was like a man possessed. His face was white; his jaw seemed to quiver with the excess of his emotion. It was as though all the dynamic nervous energy within the man had suddenly burst bounds. Every muscle was tense, and the flame within him seemed to have burned away every thought and idea but one. One of the two mechanics seemed to stumble, his foot going through the linen of the elevator. In a moment, however, he had scrambled back.

Lake did not notice the incident. He jammed on the throttle, and Rud had to leap backward to keep from being swept off his feet by the tail surfaces. The Spad got under way rapidly. The SE-5 was five hundred feet high now, flying eastward along the southern edge of the field. The Spad was headed directly toward it as it sped across the field. Fifty yards from the line, his black hair whipping in the airstream, Lake swung the Spad to the left. Now, with its tail high in the air, it was scudding along a course which would bisect that of the climbing SE-5.

Rud didn’t notice the awed mechanics, who were standing like so many statues along the line, nor did he see Colonel Shafer, also frozen into immobility on the steps of the barracks. Rud’s mouth and throat were dry; his muscles had become tight, constricted cords within him. The SE-5 as though to taunt them, did not continue its course toward the German lines. Instead, von Baer swung to the left again. In obedience to that maneuver, the Spad, which was now going a hundred and twenty miles an hour, barely a foot above the ground, skidded slightly to the left. Von Baer was seven or eight hundred feet high now, and as he turned, Rud groaned aloud. In another second, the SE-5’s nose would come down, and with ease and precision, Baron von Baer would proceed to knock off his enemy.

No, evidently he was going to play with Lake as a cat would a mouse. The nose didn’t drop——

“He’s going to circle around and get him from behind!” Rud thought numbly.

Von Baer was almost above the Spad now, flying in directly the opposite direction. He’d bank in a minute—the shot would be a cinch——

Then Rud literally held his breath until his face was as red as a beet and his lungs labored. Lake had held the Spad level until the stubby little ship had terrific speed. Now from the altitude of one foot it arched upward smoothly. There was a terrific zoom—it was more than a zoom! It was not the ordinary loop, for the Spad still had more than a hundred miles an hour of flying speed. Lake flew it upward until he was half on his back. Less than two hundred feet above the ground, three quarters of the way on its back, its guns were spitting lead at von Baer.

A thousand thoughts flashed through Rud’s mind as he saw the SE-5 start dodging. Lake must crash, of course—that insane maneuver from right off the ground would kill all flying speed only a few feet above the earth——

Rud’s awed exclamation was almost a prayer as he saw the SE-5 hover and a spurt of smoke come from it. He saw it sideslip rapidly downward, but for a moment the fact that Germany’s mad ace of aces was in that SE-5 didn’t even occur to Rud. With his heart in his throat, he was watching the Spad, poised on its back for its death dive. He saw it start turning right side up, the maneuver very sluggish as the heavy-nosed ship dropped earthward. Fifty feet above the ground, its nose falling rapidly, it was in a vertical bank. Now it was rushing toward the ground with hideous speed!

The SE-5 hit on the left wing, the left wheel, and the nose. It did a cartwheel, the din of ripping linen, clanging metal and breaking wood rising above the roar of the Spad’s Hispano-Suiza.

The mechanics were streaming on the field now, but Rud never moved. The next second, Lake crashed in almost exactly the same position as the SE-5 but the Spad hit with sickening speed. Now Rud found himself dashing across the field. Dark smoke, shot with red, poured from the wreck of the Spad. The SE-5 hadn’t caught fire——

“It’s von Baer!” now came from Rud’s white lips as he saw a tall figure rushing across the twenty-five yards which separated the two wrecks. In that cloud of red smoke was Stormy Lake, and no move had come from him——

Rud was still fifty yards away as he saw von Baer tear into that slow fire like an All-American halfback into a line. His body was obscured by the smoke, as he tore like a terrier at a rat hole. The first two mechanics got there just in time to remove Lake’s body from von Baer and to catch the German as he collapsed into their arms.

Ten frantic minutes later, Rud, along with Colonel Shafer, saw Stormy Lake’s eyelids flutter and then open. Very minor burns, unless there was concussion of the brain, had been the flight surgeon’s opinion before he had been hurried off to attend to the possibly mortally wounded von Baer.

“Got him, didn’t I?” Stormy asked eagerly, his eyes shining with as vital a glow as ever.

“Sure did!” the colonel barked gruffly. “We’ll know in a couple of minutes whether he’s going to live or not.”

“I thought I saw him crash before I did, but I was busy!” grinned the irrepressible Lake. “Oh, you inquired after my health?”

“O.K., but I seem to have some cooked spots. Did the wreck burn?” Lake asked.

“You didn’t,” announced the wizened flight surgeon as he pattered into the room, “but he’s got a severe concussion of the brain and a bullet wound in his side that must’ve lost him a gallon of blood already. He’ll pull through, but he’s going to be our guest for some time.”

For the next few minutes, he and Shafer went over and over what had happened for the benefit of the jubilant Lake. He was as different from the flaming-eyed madman whom Rud had seen take off for that desperate combat as a freckle-faced boy would be from a middle-aged man.

It was not until the doctor went out and the far-away drone of the home-coming squadron had reached their ears that Rud brought up what he had seen.

“Listen,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to go off half-cocked, or get a Nick Carter imagination because of what’s happened, but I’ve got some questions to ask to see whether I’m crazy or not.”

“You probably are,” Lake told him airily. “Give me a cigarette and then shoot!”

“In the first place,” Rud said deliberately, as though trying to think things through himself. “It was bad enough for von Baer and that Hans guy to come popping in here, acting as though they knew the whole squadron was away and were pretty sure of themselves. It comes under the head of being remarkable, doesn’t it?”

“And when you have that long, lean devil appearing out of thin air ten minutes later and by himself,” Rud went on, “it becomes practically a miracle——”

“I’ve got the dope on that!” Shafer said incisively. “They must have had a third man hidden in the back of that DeHaviland—also a parachute. Not ten miles from here, von Baer and his uniform commandeered a motorcycle side-car and was driven within a quarter of a mile of here. It was easy enough for him to get into the post after that. There being no landing field near by, it looks as though he came down in a chute, and there were no troops or residents, as you know.”

“Well, it strikes me,” Rud went on slowly, “as though von Baer knew more than he should have. Not even he would dare come in here unless he knew most of the squadron was away. And by golly, it doesn’t sound to me like anything short of an absolute maniac would come back a second time unless he was sure of some coöperation!”

Lake was sitting up in bed now, naked except for the dressings on his burns. It was as though he had come up—prepared for immediate action.

Somehow, as always, Rud found his gaze attracted to Stormy Lake as though the young ace were more important than Shafer. “Do you realize that when you took off, one of your elevators had a big hole in it and that it looked to me as though a certain mechanic had deliberately tried to cripple it entirely so that you couldn’t take off?” Rud asked slowly.

“No!” breathed Lake. “I guess I don’t know yet just how lucky I am——”

“I think there’s a darn good chance,” Rud drawled, “that one or more of our mechanics is giving information to von Baer in particular, or the Germans in general, and when von Baer landed on this post he was sure of coöperation from one or more of our mechanics. The man that just missed ruining Lake’s elevators so he couldn’t take off did it deliberately, if I’m any judge, although he pretended to stumble. It wasn’t logical for him to be there right in the airstream——”

“Yes, sir. Corporal Allison, right back of him, almost knocked him down to save the Spad. It was Greene.”

“Oh, that smart alec, huh?” Lake said mechanically, as though his thoughts were entirely different from his words.

“As I said,” Rud went on as though thinking aloud, “after what’s happened this morning, it would be very easy for a man to get so hepped up and excited and scared, that he’d believe in ghosts or something, but I’ll be darned if I think I’m crazy——”

“But listen here,” Shafer cut in. “No one could foresee the mad maneuver that Stormy pulled. It would be to the advantage of our enemies to have Lake take the air and have von Baer knock off America’s leading ace, wouldn’t it? Why would the Boche want to hurt his ship?”

“I thought of that,” Lake said quickly. “What do you make of the colonel’s suggestion, Watson?”

The squadron ships were roaring around the airdrome now, and the colonel suddenly went to the window to count them. The strain of watching for his men to come back was already beginning to work on the iron old-timer’s mind.

“All right. Now I can put my mind on this!” Shafer said quickly, his mouth set and the bushy iron-gray eyebrows bristling belligerently. “What explanation can you figure out for an enemy not letting Lake go like a lamb to the slaughter?”

“Assuming that this Greene, who’s a peculiar duck, anyway, was helping von Baer,” Rud said doggedly, “remember that he’s pretty young and all that. He might’ve done it without thinking—instinctively, you know. In the second place, that Spad is a 220 horsepower, which is thirty miles an hour faster than the SE with only 180 in it. He could’ve figured that there might be a chance of von Baer’s being caught, if he flew right on toward the Front. In the third place—now don’t laugh, Stormy.”

Stormy Lake, as Rud had long since perceived, only tasted the real wine of life when he was the center of wildly scrambled events, which held menace every moment. Excitement and danger were the breath of life to him.

“It’s just this,” Rud said. “We’re not children, and this is a war, and just because a guy is an enemy or a spy or something doesn’t mean that he isn’t as human as any of us. You know, colonel, and I know, and whether you know it or not, Stormy, I’m telling you now. The enlisted men worship the ground you walk on because you’re what you are. Greene is no exception. He might not’ve wanted you knocked off by the baron, and maybe there are a lot of other reasons, but the mere fact that——”

“Pardon me, sir,” came a deep voice from the doorway, and Rud stopped talking as Corporal Allison stood in the doorway.

The man who had knocked Greene away from the Spad’s elevators was a handsome dark-haired youngster whose millionaire father sent him three hundred dollars a month and who had constant difficulty in remembering that his social position in Baltimore didn’t extend to the army. “Just the man we want to see, Allison,” the Colonel told him. “First what do you want?”

“It’s such a joke, I couldn’t help telling you, Colonel Lake,” the poised youngster chuckled. “For some reason or other, there didn’t happen to be a single bullet for that SE’s guns—the one the baron took, I mean. He was just helpless. There was in the other one, and how it happened, I don’t know.”

“I don’t know, sir, for sure, but I don’t think he did. Wasn’t it a joke?” chortled Allison.

“Yes, sir,” said Allison, and strode off down the hall, still chuckling to himself.

“All right,” the colonel snapped. “Now listen! As it stands, we’ve got nothing but circumstantial evidence on Greene; maybe we’ve got none. Not one word is to be said or implied about him. That’s the reason I didn’t ask Allison about that foot through the elevator business. If he’s a traitor, his work isn’t over yet. Without letting him know that we suspect him at all, I’ll see that he’s watched day and night. If he is what we think, maybe we cannot only catch him red-handed, but perhaps we can do a little double-crossing of the Heinies ourselves!”

That was the way it was left, and orders were passed on to the most delighted, astounded group of flyers on the Western Front five minutes later. Oil-grimed and tousel-haired, the personnel of the Thirty-first squadron listened with jaws agape. Then, grinning, they discussed the new developments excitedly.

They were feeling their oats, Rud observed, and the fact that what had happened that night would be flashed from one end of the world to the other was not forgotten by the motley crew. To the last man, they tiptoed through the room where the unconscious German lay under heavy guard. Rud finally took a look, and as he walked in, the sight that met his eyes was a shock. Baron von Baer’s face was turned against the pillow, and it was bronzed so deeply that it looked almost like that of a negro against the pillow-case. His features outlined boldly, he looked like the lean-faced, long-nosed eagle of the air that he had proved himself to be.

“He looks as though he had spent more wild hours in the air than anyone in the world—except you!” Rud drawled to Stormy. The curly-headed Lake’s hawk-like face was a study. It was as though he were dreaming of mad hours when he had been cleaving the upper air in a quivering ship, fighting for his life.

“You know,” he said as he went out, “this is just a sample of what we’re going to catch from the Red Devils. If the colonel’s smart and the big bugs give us a break, there’s not going to be a minute of the day or night when the whole sky isn’t watched.”

That was exactly what happened. As the word of what had happened rushed along the Front that night and the next morning, extra patrols days and night were ordered in the air; searchlights worked during the hours of darkness. It was a minor individual war and acted as a diversion, for all but the participants, from the struggle between nations.

Two entirely separate and distinct things made the next day tense. In the first place, telegrams and telephone calls of congratulation poured into the squadron from all sides. Newspapermen hot-footed it to the scene of action, and more than one famous war correspondent hung around the post, to take a peek at the German eagle. The other and more important thing was the secret orders which Colonel Shafer communicated to them at dinner that night. Rud had felt that day had been a sort of lull before the storm, and he was right.

Even the rumble of the great guns up at the Front seemed to carry an ominous note. There was an air of expectancy on the face of every officer and enlisted man in the squadron. There was a nervousness—a desire to get started no matter where the road led. And death was to stalk the tracks of many of those excited flyers in the next few days.

The greatest attack of the war on that Front was scheduled for five days ahead and a tremendous concentration of air and ground troops and equipment was being made in preparation. Tanks and trucks were rumbling toward the Front, aircraft were to swarm in the sky to see to it that no German plane got a glimpse. Along with it, men and equipment were to be conserved to the utmost.

“It means you don’t fight unless you have to!” Shafer said tersely to the men gathered around him. “We’ll need every ship, every bullet, and every man five days from now!”

Rud was officer of the day. At eleven o’clock that night he found himself alone in headquarters when Stormy Lake walked in. The tranquil Texan and the stormy petrel of the American Air Service had fallen into a habit of spending a great deal of time together, and as far as Rud was concerned, it was time well spent. Following Stormy by less than a minute, came Sergeant Munson, one of the three men assigned to watch unobtrusively every move of Greene’s.

“Nothing except this,” the grizzled sergeant said doggedly. “Not ten minutes ago, Greene turns on me and explodes all over the place that he’s being followed and all that stuff. He sure was sore, and if I hadn’t reminded him of my stripes, he’d have taken a sock at me.”

“That’s bad!” Rud drawled. “If there is any dope to be gotten, we won’t get it now.”

Without warning, Private George Greene stepped inside the door. He saluted the two officers mechanically, but his burning black eyes were on the sergeant.

“That will be all, sarge,” Rud drawled quietly, jerking his head toward the door. The sergeant hesitated, saluted and walked out, his eyes and Greene’s fighting a wordless battle as he left.

For a moment the big mechanic stood there. His dark face flushed dully, and his full lips twisted in a sneer. He was plainly under a great strain, and there were red flecks in his bold black eyes. His mane of jet-black hair was tousled, and his jaw was clamped tightly.

“I mean no disrespect, sir,” he said, articulating with difficulty, as though his fury choked him, “but I know I’m being followed and I know I’m being thought of as a spy, and I’m sick and tired of it!” He took a step forward. “Understand?” he shouted as his fist banged down on the table. “Colonel or no colonel, major or no major, it’s lousy, and I won’t stand for it!”

“Now hold your horses, son, hold your horses!” Rud told him very deliberately.

The tolerant Rud was not disposed to be severe with the overwrought soldier, so he let him go on.

“Don’t you think I know what you guys think?” Greene rushed on in a torrent of words. “Because Allison bumps into me and I stick my foot through the colonel’s elevators here, I’m a spy or something. Well, I don’t give a hoot what you think, understand? Why don’t you arrest me? Why don’t you court-martial me? Sticking a lot of flatfoot dumbbells following me around.”

“Oh, be yourself!” the calm Riley said quietly. “Nobody thinks that you’re a spy.”

“Oh, no?” raved Greene. “I suppose that tinker ain’t skulking around outside this very building now, waiting for me to come out, so that he can follow me around!”

For a moment the big mechanic stood there, his heavy black brows drawn down over eyes that glared into Rud’s like those of some trapped beast. His ham-like fists were clenched at his sides, and he was breathing in great gulps. Then, without a word, he turned and rushed out.

“Well, what do you make of that, Watson?” inquired Lake—that question having become one of his stock favorites in the last few hours.

“Unless I get that hombre wrong, he got out of here to prevent himself from hanging a punch right on my beezer, or maybe yours, or both!”

Lake nodded. “He’s not so easy to handle, as the sarge so sapiently remarked,” he stated. “But at that, it’s kind of a tough break, in case he is innocent, to be followed around. I wonder if any of our suspicions got out?”

Suddenly Rud chuckled. “Those dudes that’re following him have got all the subtlety and finesse of an elephant tramping through a church, and are just as hard to spot!” he remarked.

“Any news about von Baer?” Rud inquired as though to rid his mind of the unpleasant thought of Greene. That sullen hot-tempered mechanic had affected Rud strangely. There had been a streak of wild ferocity in him which had depressed the Southerner, and made him wonder, too.

Lake shook his head. “He did come to for a moment or two today, otherwise, he’s just laid there. I had kind of an idea those Red Devils would make some break to get him out.”

“We’re pretty well protected,” Rud pointed out. “The thing that gets me kind of shivery sometimes, is that we know they’ve got a couple of our ships. If they find out the new markings we’ve put on, how is anybody going to know who to shoot?”

“Search me!” Lake said cheerily. “And if all our spy talk was anywhere near right, they know, or will know about the markings. And say, the more I think of it,” he went on judiciously, “von Baer and the other bird didn’t come over here on speculation. They had news!”

They went on talking, and hour after hour slipped by. Up at the Front, the guns were quiet for once, and there was scarcely a cloud in the sky. A full moon rode serenely behind an occasional fleecy, cumulus cloud, and there was sheer beauty in the quiet night, as though nature was trying to silver the horror of the world.

It was two-thirty in the morning. Lake, a born nighthawk, was showing no intention at all of going to bed. In fact, he was just embarking on a prowl for a cigarette, when Rud jumped a foot. Lake himself sprang from his chair with a force which turned it over.

Ringing through the quiet night, came the sudden bellow of a motor wide open on the line. As Rud plunged for the door, a second one roared into life. Shouts rang out above them from the line, as the two flyers plunged through the darkness. Not one word did they say except Lake’s snarl; “Greene, ten to one!”

A guard, bent almost double and clinging to his side, was stumbling toward them.

Window after window was blazing with light, and in the twinkle of an eye there was pandemonium at the post as two SE-5’s took off.

“Greene!” gulped the soldier, sinking to the ground. A widening pool of blood was staining his tunic.

“Come on, Rud,” yelled Lake. “We’ll have warm motors, and maybe we will be able to catch ’em!”

Several other motors were warming on the line now as the panic-stricken mechanics started them, in case they were to be used.

As they left the wounded soldier, Stormy Lake gasped excitedly. “One of ’em’s coming back!”

“Going to stay to pot anybody that tries to take off, maybe!” the dazed Rud said breathlessly. “So Greene can fly. He must be a spy!”

Thirty seconds later, they were both in their ships. A barked order to one of the soldiers to attend to the wounded man, and Rud was giving his ship the gun and streaking across the field, followed by Lake.

It seemed that the rush of the cool night air cleared his head. Why was one fleeing ship going steadily toward the lines and the other hovering over the far edge of the airdrome as though inviting pursuit? Now it was going eastward—Rud breathed a great sigh of relief as the buoyant little SE left the ground and took the air.

“They’re going to beat it home and not bother to pot us!” Rud told himself. In his heart he felt that it was a wild goose chase, but, nevertheless, every atom of mind and body was concentrated on the fugitives so tantalizingly close to him.

Head bent, he momentarily studied his gauge—air pressure, oil pressure, gas gauge—always as it should be. There was plenty of ammunition, too.

“I think we’re catching them!” he told himself. “Maybe his motor isn’t so good.”

Two thousand feet above the ground, Lake one hundred yards to one side of him, he turned and waved at the dark-haired flyer. Lake pointed ahead and then at their own ships and nodded.

“He thinks we’ll catch up,” Rud told himself quietly. “As long as Stormy Lake’s along, if he’s got any of the Lake luck with him, I’ll be darned if I don’t think so myself!”

They were approaching the lines now, and Rud constantly searched the sky for signs of Allied ships. Where were all those watchful planes that were supposed to be guarding Allied territory?

As they crossed the lines, ten thousand feet high, some of Rud’s natural good sense returned to him.

The other one was way ahead and out of danger, but there was no guaranty that the nearest one held Baron von Baer. It might be Greene.

As they passed the German lines like two babes in the woods, Rud strove to think logically. “All we could do would be to knock him down. What’s a flyer more or less, even von Baer?”

He forgot the sky for a moment as he slid over close to Lake. He was shivering, having not even a pair of coveralls on to protect him. He signaled that they should go back, but Stormy Lake shook his head decidedly. It was true that within another minute or two they would be in a position to shoot at the fugitive ahead of them. However, Rud knew they were doing a mad thing.

There were signs of excitement on the ground now, and at any second Fokkers were due to appear.

“Stormy’s as crazy as von Baer!” Rud raved, and for just a second, he considered going back by himself. Then the realization flooded him that not for anything in the world would he leave that flashing flyer to his own devices. He would rather go down with Stormy than to desert him, no matter how mad the enterprise in which the young rascal was engaged.

With a start, the Texan came to himself. His eyes searched the sky as though warned by some sixth sense.

“I knew it!” were the words his ashen lips formed as he sat motionless in his cockpit, his astonishment too great to permit of any room for fear.

Back of them, diving like mad from three thousand feet above the SE’s came three Fokkers. To their left, mere specks in the sky, five more were like so many bats limned against the moon. To the right were three more, bulking darkly against the silver sky. Ahead of them, others were on their way.

His body seemed feverish, and the blood was pounding through his veins. He looked over at Lake, his face white. There was absolutely nothing they could do. A dive and a scurry back to the lines would mean nothing; there were Fokkers behind them that would get them anyway. Even Lake seemed utterly nonplussed at the situation as they flew along level and straight and watched their fate overtake them.

“Well, this is the finale!” Rud told himself fatalistically, and suddenly he seemed to become a new man. With all hope gone, his lips thin and his eyes narrowed, he made one pact with himself. Those planes must be the Red Devils, and some of them would bite the dust before he and Stormy did.

The Fokkers were converging from all sides now in those terrific dives, and ahead of him and Stormy, the captured SE-5 was just out of range. Rud felt there was nothing to do. There was no sense in dodging—they couldn’t dodge them all——

Never had he gone through moments of such horrible suspense. Now some Fokkers were within range, but some peculiar instinct kept Rud from making a move. They were swarming on all sides of the two Allied flyers. They were painted red from nose to tail, and they were like a swarm of mosquitoes—above, beneath, and on either side of the trapped Americans.

Twelve thousand feet high in the moonlit sky, shivering and almost incapable of thought, Rud felt that he was stalking through some dream. With overbright eyes, he watched the SE-5 they had been chasing. It circled back in the midst of that roaring mess of enemy planes and a moment later slid between him and Stormy, as Fokkers flashed past them. Some were diving, some zooming, others flying straight and level above and below them. And in that SE was the tall figure of von Baer, his hand raised in salute to them both.

He pointed ahead, gestured at the Red Devils all around him and patted his guns significantly.

“That fiend wants to capture us alive!” Rud thought, and suddenly it seemed as though the pressure on his heart and mind was relieved. Perforce, he followed von Baer’s leadership as the Red Devils conducted a private aerial circus of their own. The SE-5’s were the center of a maelstrom of ships.

“Just because he was a captive he wants Stormy as one!” Rud told himself with vast excitement. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is his motto!”

For a moment there was actual exultation. Anything was better than being knocked down like a clay pigeon with just as little chance to fight back. Then, in a sickening wave, came the realization that there were spies—or at least had been—back at the Thirty-first and that the big push would be prepared for by the Germans. The Allies were going to stick their heads in a noose and didn’t know it——

“Maybe there’s something we can do,” Rud thought wildly. “If I get my hands on Greene!”

So many things above and beyond the realms of probability—even possibility—had happened, that for the moment it didn’t seem at all surprising that a trap had been laid for him and Stormy. It must have been set beforehand. Greene, in some manner, had helped von Baer escape at precisely the right time, and the German must have been faking that he was so sick. What a man!

Ten minutes later, closely guarded, they were diving into the airdrome. Flood lights came on momentarily to help them. Rud saw the SE-5, which Greene had so surprisingly proved himself able to fly, already on the line. He had hurried on ahead while Baer, with throttled motor, doubtless, had led him and Stormy into the trap. After they taxied to the line, Rud merely sat still in his cockpit. Baron von Baer was on one side and Stormy Lake on the other.

“Looks as though we’re going to be your guests!” Lake yelled above the whisper of the idling motors.

Now the Red Devils were gathering around the three ships. Guttural congratulations poured from their lips as they surrounded von Baer and then clustered curiously around the two Allied flyers.

The famous Red Devils ranged from boyish-faced nineteen-year-olds to hard-bitten, reckless-looking men from thirty-seven to forty. They were a grinning, happy lot and exclamations in German were thrown at Rud and Lake in what seemed to be a spirit of friendly admiration, rather than derision— In one or two cases, Rud thought he saw animosity in their expressions and words, but he was not sure.

Rud got out of his cockpit to join Lake, as von Baer approached them. There was silence as von Baer bowed.

“Welcome,” he said with that wolfish smile. “This is, indeed, more than a pleasure.”

“We just dropped in to leave our cards!” Lake said blithely, but Rud could see that it was forced.

Stormy’s eyes were lighted with cold fury, and his dark face was a pasty white. Rud sensed that Stormy Lake had just begun to fight.

“You treated me so considerately that I’ve eagerly anticipated a chance to reciprocate,” von Baer smiled. He was limping slightly as a result of the bullet wound in his side, but otherwise seemed to be in perfectly good condition. Suddenly he snapped out some commands in German. Then he turned to the Americans.

“I don’t blame you,” said von Baer. “We shall work on that assumption.”

A tall hawk-faced, sandy-haired young man whose blouse was loaded with decorations joined them, as the remainder of the exultant Germans streamed toward the barracks. A couple of minutes later, they were in the Spartan quarters of von Baer.

There was nothing but geniality now in von Baer’s smile. He was very expansive in the moment of his triumph, and sheer enjoyment of the occasion glowed through his poised exterior.

“I didn’t dream that such a pleasure would come to me,” he said. “Two distinguished guests, the Fatherland relieved of the menace of Colonel Lake and Major Riley—it is, indeed, a coup d’état!”

“He who laughs last laughs hardest!” stated Stormy Lake. “And likewise a stitch in time is worth two in the bush! Maybe this little squadron scrap isn’t over yet, baron, old boy!”

“I don’t understand you exactly,” von Baer smiled, “but I gather your meaning.”

The other officer, who was introduced as von Landhof, was as genial as his chief, although he said little.

“I hope you’ll enjoy knowing my men, although they know little English,” von Baer said. “In the air—ah, there they express themselves.”

As they walked toward the mess hall, the curious mechanics staring at them and nudging each other and grinning, Stormy Lake said: “I certainly would like to know how you got loose, baron. You’re slipperier than an eel covered with grease!”

He bowed low, and suddenly his greenish eyes became different again. A momentary stab of fear went through Rud. For a second time, he saw some perverse devil peering forth from von Baer’s eyes. As he and Lake entered the mess hall ahead of the Germans, both Americans stopped dead.

Lounging against the tables and benches were the Germans, and silence fell as though every mouth had been gagged at once. In the very middle of the group, leaning tensely against the end of the table, was Private George Greene of the Thirty-first.

In dead silence, von Baer and von Landhof entered behind the two Americans. Greene seemed to be half crazed, his eyes burning with an unholy glow, his lips twisted in a sneer, and his head bent forward. Lake had drawn back, his face white as a sheet, as he said with slow deadliness, “So there you are, you——”

“And there you are!” said Greene tauntingly. “How do you like these apples, Colonel Lake and Major Riley?” It was as though the entire personnel of the Red Devils was sitting and watching to see what would happen next, and the silence was ominous.

Greene got up and took a step forward, still in that half crouch, his fists clenched at his side.

“The Thirty-first!” he snarled. “Following me around making a bum out of me! Well, I’ve made bums out of you, haven’t I, and I’m going to get even for everything, and quick!”

Rud roared it out with no conscious thought. As he looked at Greene, a spasm of murderous hatred swept over him. Beside him, Lake was quivering in every muscle as he faced the spy. Rud’s shouted command seemed to make Greene quail for a second. His turbulent eyes shifted momentarily, and then, hard and defiant, they shifted to Stormy Lake.

“Do you know what I think of you?” Lake said in a voice that shook a trifle. “I think you’re—” A slow horrible, stream of deadly insults poured from the lips of the enraged flyer. The shaking Greene was being flayed alive before the silent ring of Germans. They might not be able to understand the words, but they could sense the burning hatred in the air as the stream of verbal lava flowed from Lake’s lips. The Germans, in silent excitement, watched with glinting eyes for what would happen.

Suddenly, an inarticulate animal-like shout came from Greene. He leaped forward as though a hidden spring had been released. Stormy Lake sprang to meet him like a panther, and his fist crashed to the big mechanic’s jaw.

Greene staggered back slightly, and Lake swarmed all over him like some avenging fury, his fists working like piston rods. Only for a second did the big enlisted man falter. Lake’s blows seemed to rebound from him like bullets from marble, and in a second he was pressing forward, his face a snarling mask, his eyes flaming with the lust for battle.

Somehow, Rud couldn’t move, and the Germans watched with absorbed attention. Not one of them offered to interfere.

Rud had never seen such a deadly battle. Greene was like a huge bear. Lake a panther-like fighter who rushed in and out with lightning-like speed, dancing around his heavier opponent like a windblown feather around a monument. He got in four blows for Greene’s one, but they didn’t seem to affect the spy in the slightest. Greene’s nose was streaming blood, and there was a cut over one eye, but doggedly he pressed his lighter foeman backward. Once his ham-like fists crashed into Lake’s stomach, and Lake’s face, flushed now, went white.

They fought without cessation, and the air seemed full of crashing fists. Most of Greene’s blows went wild, but when they landed, they sent Stormy Lake back on his heels. Lake seemed to coil and uncoil like a whip-lash, boxing with practiced skill. What made the battle unlike the ordinary fight was the spirit of the combatants. Stark murder was in their eyes.

Rud sucked in his breath as Greene suddenly landed a right to the jaw, that started from the floor. Lake seemed to leave the ground and the blow hurled him back against the wall with a sickening thud. As Greene leaped in to finish his prey, Lake shaken to the heels, made his supreme effort.

He seemed to bounce off the wall. His left foot came forward, and his body bent at the waist like a flash, swerving to the left. With all his bodily momentum and every atom of strength in his steel and rawhide body, his right sank to Greene’s midriff.

The big fellow staggered, and his face went white. Lake, bleeding at the mouth, straightened like a flash. Lefts and rights beat a tattoo on the staggered Greene’s jaw. The mechanic, his mane of black hair falling down over his forehead and screening his eyes, hit the floor. Without an instant’s hesitation, Lake hurled himself on his prostrate opponent. Before Rud or anyone else could interfere, they were locked in each other’s arms, kicking and clawing as they rolled over and over on the floor. Never had they seemed so much like two animals in mortal combat.

Suddenly, the bigger, stronger man came on top of Lake, who was fighting like a wildcat. Rud saw him lift Lake’s head and crash it to the floor. Stormy lay still as Rud leaped in, picked Greene up bodily and hurled him to one side. Greene staggered as he tried to keep his feet. Then he stood quietly and looked down at the unconscious Lake. The look of madness in his eyes had disappeared.

He seemed bewildered for the moment. He was bloody and bruised; his barrel-like chest heaved convulsively. A great sigh seemed to come from all the flyers.

Rud turned to von Baer. The German’s long, narrow, cat-like eyes were gleaming.

“Now,” he said smilingly, “we shall bring Colonel Lake back to consciousness and have supper, eh?”

Rud nodded. He didn’t help the German doctor work over Stormy nor notice the fact that Greene, after a word to von Baer, had gone out. One question was pounding unceasingly through his mind. Why had the Germans let that fight go on, and why had they looked at each other so significantly after it was over? There was more to the situation than met the eye—of that he was sure.

Lake recuperated from that vicious battle with all the physical resilience of a rubber ball. Only one or two of the Germans could speak any English at all, so the Allied flyers were left almost completely out of the picture, except for von Baer’s suave hospitality. He was to the manor born, Rud realized, as he watched the gaunt German eagle preside over that table. The faces of his men showed the wild recklessness which had made the Red Devils a legend wherever soldiers gathered. In their laughter and conversation, there was the strained abnormal hilarity of men who didn’t expect to be able to enjoy food and drink much longer.

Greene didn’t return, and Stormy and Rud had had no opportunity to talk to each other until they were shown cots in a small, bare room.

“You won’t give your word of honor?” von Baer asked courteously as they entered the room.

“I’ll do that, too,” von Baer answered. “If you won’t give your word of honor, which I should be delighted to accept, you will have to be guarded.”

A shouted command, and footsteps clumped up the hall. A moment later, guarded by two soldiers inside the room and another one outside the door, von Baer left them with a salute and a mocking “Auf Wiedersehn!”

“Well, here we are,” he stated. “I know I ought to talk to you for hours, but we ate so much I can barely keep my eyes open.”

“Me, too,” breathed the almost exhausted Riley, and less than thirty seconds later, his worries blurred in a wave of utter fatigue, he was sound asleep with all his clothes on.

That didn’t prevent him, however, from snapping into possession of all his faculties as he felt himself being shaken. He stared into Private Greene’s dark, sullen face. The rays of a flashlight lighted the dark room.

“Ssh!” whispered Greene. “Don’t say a word. Between the three of us, we can turn these Red Devils into pale pink pansies!”

For a moment, Rud just lay there and stared up into the remarkable countenance illuminated so strangely by the flashlight. The dark face was like that of some demon of the night. “Stay quiet until I wake up Lake!” Greene was whispering.

A few seconds later, Lake alert and sitting alongside Rud on the bed, was listening with grave interest.

“Look,” Greene told them in a subdued crow of triumph, and swept his flashlight around the room. Three Germans lay inert and unconscious, very thoroughly bound and gagged.

For the first time, Rud noticed that the amazing Greene wore the uniform of a German officer.

“The biggest stunt that has been pulled so far!” the dynamic Greene told them. “Listen——”

Rud felt himself suddenly tingling all over. Nothing seemed strange to him now——

“This is no time for questions!” whispered Greene. “But I’ll tell you this. I beat it because I knew I didn’t have a chance back at the Thirty-first. If I had the name of a spy, I was going to have a game, and on the right side. I helped the baron, but nobody was sure of me until I had that battle with you, Stormy.”

Even at that moment, Rud’s lips twitched at the familiarity of the big man. He felt himself a big shot—maybe he was.

“Now, I’m in right,” Greene went on swiftly. “I found out they knew pretty much—all there was to know—about the attack we’re going to make. After my fight with you, I was in big, see? They all believed me. Anyway, I tell them even more about it, and some of the things I told them checked up with what they had heard, so they knew I was on the level with them. I gave them all the dope I knew, and that was plenty. I overheard the colonel talking. What harm could it do? We can’t make the attack now, anyway. They’ll be ready for us, and listen, babies, we can save a good many thousand lives, if we want to and little Georgie Greene is gonna show some people!”

As he outlined his scheme, Rud felt himself literally on fire. Stormy Lake’s eyes glowed through the darkness.

“This Rumpler is all set to lay her eggs on the Thirty-first tomorrow night, see?” Greene snapped. “Come on now, get on those uniforms. I came up here and knocked ’em off as pretty as you please, and they thought I was going to get some information out of you guys.”

Less than two minutes later, Lake and Rud were dressed in ill-fitting German uniforms. A quick look around the shadowed airdrome, a tense wait for the near-by sentry to turn the corner, and they had dropped the ten feet to the ground. By a devious route which kept them invisible to the sentries they reached the lower edge of the airdrome.

“See here? She’s on the line now. There isn’t hangar space for her,” Greene whispered. “Leave everything to me. I’ve found out how she works.”

The sturdy light bomber was a shadowy bulk on the line. They were fifteen feet from the end of the hangar, before which it stood, hidden in some bushes.

Greene waited by the corner for the sentries to come around. Rud, his heart in his mouth, saw the sentry pass slowly down the long side of the hangar toward that corner. As he turned, Greene sprung like a snake, and the sentry lay still. He waved to them and they ran quickly to the ship.

“You pilot, Stormy. Rud and I will take the back and handle the bombs!” Greene said swiftly. “I’ll swing the prop. I sure hope she catches!”

Sentries were coming on the run as the motor roared into action and Stormy Lake wasted no time. Rud and Greene were standing in the back as the ship took off. Lake banked at twenty-five feet off the ground and swung around toward the first hangar. Now the airdrome was in a state of bedlam.

Lake swung back to the point where he and Rud had landed and started straight down the line of hangars, two hundred feet high. Rud was peering through the bomb sight. He jerked the bomb release lever and one of the four bombs went straight downward. Suddenly the sky was lit up with the glow of the great flare. A moment later a second bomb went down on the second hangar. The Rumpler was tossed about by an explosion, but Lake steadied it, and the third bomb found its mark as did the fourth.

“Three quarters of their ships shot to blazes!” Greene bawled above the roar of the motor, and the shining-eyed Rud looked back of them.

All four hangars were raging infernos of fire. Explosions of gas tanks caused periodic balls of fire to add to the sight. Stormy Lake turned to look at them. Never in his life had Rud seen a face which mirrored such utter bliss.

“Nothing can stop us now!” Rud thought. “We’re in a German ship, but what do we care?”

Somehow the danger of Allied ships when they reached the lines didn’t occur to him. He was peering back at the vanishing airdrome. The few undamaged Fokkers were rising now. But they were safe—two hundred yards ahead. Lake was flying two thousand feet high, motor wide open, as they sped toward the Allied lines.

Suddenly Greene was shaking Rud. He cupped his hands and yelled into Rud’s ears, “You can handle a radio, can’t you?”

Rud nodded and a moment later was unwinding the antennae and tapping out the signal of the Thirty-first squadron. Then came his message. Over and over again he sent it as the Rumpler rocketed safely across the lines.

They were five miles into Allied territory when Rud’s searching eyes picked up pin pricks of lights in the sky above them. A formation of Spads was diving down at them. At the same moment, Stormy Lake turned and gestured at the ships. Then he gestured again, a very significant one. For a second Rud hesitated, then he nodded. Without hesitation, Lake scanned the ground below. Then he sent the Rumpler into a terrific dive. It was brutal territory to land in, pitted with shell holes and intersected by rough roads, but Lake never faltered.

The Spads were two thousand feet above them, following them down as they leveled out two feet along a straight stretch of rutted road. The wheels touched in a perfect landing. For a second Rud thought they were safe. Then one caught in a rut. The Rumpler swung and plunged into a ditch. Rud flinging up his arms to his face and eyes, finally lifted his head as the turn of the ship ceased and the Rumpler was quiet, its tail in the air.

The Spads were circling around them now watchfully. An ambulance, its lights gleaming, was coming down the road, and the first flush of dawn was in the eastern sky.

“If some cockeyed American don’t kill us,” the exultant Stormy remarked as he lit a cigarette, “this will give the boys something to shoot at, including von Baer.”

“And Private George Greene is going to get his chance for some more flying instruction and a commission!” remarked the deliriously happy private. “I sure showed them something they’ll not forget!”

“Cadet in the states. Busted, damn ’em. I could fly better than any cadet in the class,” the self-confident Greene told them.

“Watch out now, boys,” Rud said quickly, “before somebody gets gay with us!”

The ambulance never stopped, but two minutes later a hurrying platoon of infantrymen did.

By the time they had been brought as captives into the presence of Squads Right Shafer, the news had spread, and despite their German uniforms, the old colonel almost kissed them.

That very same evening, the mess hall of the Thirty-first squadron blazed with lights and rocked with loud and slightly hysterical laughter. Private George Greene, his black hair sticking up belligerently, a becoming consciousness of his own importance visible on his dark young countenance, was speaking as guest of honor of the officers.

“So I think, what’s the difference?” he was saying, “I’m in bad here, and I’ve got to do something to get myself in right. So I tell the baron I’m with him, and I help him get away. I was figuring that I’d get a chance to get loose with some real information about what the baron and his boys was plannin’ to do to you. And I did, too—and I don’t think I did so bad.”

He sat down amid tumultuous applause. The gang yelled for Stormy Lake. The daring curly-head stood up and grinned at his fellow officers.

“Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking,” he began, amid loud hoots, “I must say that Greene moved in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform. For ways that are dark, and tricks that are bane, the heathen Chinee is peculiar, and Greene is more so. He darned near cracked the whole works up, but he finally gave us a chance to do the baron in, and I assume you cannot take away from him the fact that he prevented an attack that would have cost plenty of lives. As for me, I think he deserves a shot at a commission. But after what he’s done as an enlisted man, I’d just as soon he’d be an officer in another squadron. That’s not against you, George, old boy—it’s just self-defense!”

“Give me my wings and a gold bar, and I aim to be tough to follow!” Private Greene said modestly.

“As for the baron,” Lake concluded, “I guess he and his outfit will be up to some tricks to get even soon. Consequently, I make a motion here and now that Greene gets his commission fast! Let’s turn him loose on the baron all by himself and save ourselves a lot of trouble!”

But Rud Riley and his pals get in and out of much more trouble in their next adventure, FLYING BLACKBIRDS.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Because of copyright considerations, the illustration by Joseph Clemens Gretter (1904-1988) has been omitted from this ebook.

Some pages of advertising from the publisher were excluded from the ebook edition.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I	A New C.O.
II	Court-Martial
III	A Plea for “Stormy”
IV	Murder
V	A Confession
VI	The “Baer” Hunt
VII	Von Baer Retaliates
VIII	A Spy
IX	Revolt
X	Captured
XI	A Triumphant Escape

CHAPTER I
A NEW C.O.

CHAPTER II
COURT-MARTIAL

CHAPTER III
A PLEA FOR “STORMY”

CHAPTER IV
MURDER

CHAPTER V
A CONFESSION

CHAPTER VI
THE “BAER” HUNT

CHAPTER VII
VON BAER RETALIATES

CHAPTER VIII
A SPY

CHAPTER IX
REVOLT

CHAPTER X
CAPTURED

CHAPTER XI
A TRIUMPHANT ESCAPE

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

CHAPTER I A NEW C.O.

CHAPTER II COURT-MARTIAL

CHAPTER III A PLEA FOR “STORMY”

CHAPTER IV MURDER

CHAPTER V A CONFESSION

CHAPTER VI THE “BAER” HUNT

CHAPTER VII VON BAER RETALIATES

CHAPTER VIII A SPY

CHAPTER IX REVOLT

CHAPTER X CAPTURED

CHAPTER XI A TRIUMPHANT ESCAPE

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

CHAPTER I
A NEW C.O.

CHAPTER II
COURT-MARTIAL

CHAPTER III
A PLEA FOR “STORMY”

CHAPTER IV
MURDER

CHAPTER V
A CONFESSION

CHAPTER VI
THE “BAER” HUNT

CHAPTER VII
VON BAER RETALIATES

CHAPTER VIII
A SPY

CHAPTER IX
REVOLT

CHAPTER X
CAPTURED

CHAPTER XI
A TRIUMPHANT ESCAPE