CHAPTER XII.
THROUGH FIRE AND FOG.
"YOU'RE a pretty pair, I must say."
True it was, the boys were not fixed for any dress parade when theyfirst faced Roque, immediately after their delivery to the secretagent by the police authorities. The crawl through the drain pipe andthe additional effort to give them the appearance of real victims ofviolent treatment, had served to convert the usually natty and trimyoungsters into a couple of quite disreputable looking characters.
It is quite likely that Roque would there and then have put thereturned wanderers through the "third degree" of questioning had itnot been for a fortunate and welcome interruption in the shape of amessenger, who could not be denied, and who, it proved, brought tidingsthat wholly changed the line of thought of the stern chief.
"Take these chimney-sweeps to the tub and the clothesline," he grufflyordered, and Schneider, half concealing a broad grin, accepted theservice with celerity.
"You ought to have heard the boss when he found that you had notreported at quarters last night," said the red-topped aviator, when thetrio were out of Roque's hearing. "He took the wind out of my sails, Itell you, and I am not considered slow in the cussing business."
"Where were you, anyhow?"
"In the hands of brigands, of course," gravely advised Billy, with awink at Henri.
Schneider was so possessed with the prospect of some new and excitingmove by Roque, indicated by the manner of the chief upon receipt ofthe message a few minutes before, that he did not burden the boys byforcing evasive explanations of their mysterious absence.
"If Roque had half a suspicion that we had been in company with his petenemy, the prince of slyboots," confided Henri, when the chums werealone, "our joint name would be Dennis."
"Gee! If that fellow hadn't bumped in just at the right time, I thinkwe both could have claimed the title of Ananias!"
Billy was a poor hand as a dodger of truth, and much relieved to escapethe witness stand in this instance.
The kind of danger with which the boys best loved to toy was againspeedily coming to them--the peril of aeroplaning.
Schneider brought the order to report forthwith at the aerodrome.
At the aerodrome an immense Zeppelin airship, as long as an oceanliner, had just been inflated. Roque was engaged in conversationwith the captain of the great dirigible when Schneider and his youngcompanions reached the grounds. The pilot of the huge craft and hisassistants had already taken their places in the front gondola, theforemost end of which had been screened for their protection, andit was evident that sailing time was near. When the master marinerhad exchanged a parting word with the secret agent he entered hisroom in the central cabin of the Zeppelin, which was in telephoniccommunication with the front and rear gondolas and other parts of theship. In the meantime, Schneider had instructed the boys to give theNo. 3's an inspection to see if the attendant helpers had properlyprepared the machines for a long journey.
The young aviators then surmised that they were to travel as convoys ofthe monarch of the air, which even then was majestically rising.
Roque hastened to the machine in which Billy was already seated andwaved a signal to the waiting Henri in the other biplane, containingalso the redoubtable Schneider.
The swift flyers easily overcame the slight lead of the big ship,though it was making 40 knots, and took up the guiding positions. Theflight was directly away from Lorraine and historic Strassburg.
"I wonder if our huckster friend is in the crowd back there?" was amental question with Billy.
It was many a day before the young air pilot had a chance to again meetAnglin.
When this journey ended it was in territory remote from that of anyformer experience of the Aeroplane Scouts--a new battle landscape.It had snowed, and the drab, brown plain of Poland had turned toglistening white. The biplanes floated in a tarnished silver sky,which, pressing down, seemed hardly higher than a gray ceiling. Theaviators landed on the clay bank of the winding yellow river, theBzura, within 400 paces of the German trenches. Gun answered gun acrossthe golden stream, shell on shell spattered into the soft earth, andrifles rattled unceasingly.
Schneider sniffed the powder smoke like a seasoned warhorse. "It's thelife!" he exclaimed.
"And the death," added Roque.
He knew that men lay bleeding and broken on the banks of this yellowstreak in the white picture.
"You're just right, boss," murmured Billy, nodding his hooded head,"the war map looks all red to me."
Roque, as usual, wherever he went or wherever he was, seemed to carryan Aladdin magic carpet on which to sail, for in the next flight of thebiplanes a few miles distant he found a bright spot in this winterscene of rack and ruin--a clean, white lodgekeeper's kitchen, where acanary sang, and where the aerial wayfarers rested and were fed.
"I'll show you even better," he said, "when we break into Warsaw."
The chief also had a particular crow to pick with the defenders ofthe Polish capital. One of his men, for some time operating with theRussians, had been detected, and the end of a story of brilliant secretservice achievement was marked by a little mound of earth in a Warsawstable yard.
But for the present there were busy days ahead for the aviators inreconnoitering the Russian lines.
Most of the aerial work here was over a plain, flat as a floor. Blackdots here and there marked isolated houses, and the Kalish road wasbordered by a line of leafless trees with smooth trunks, which remindedthe young pilots of a rank of grenadiers.
"What's that bunch over there?" queried Billy, nodding toward a groupof horsemen, shrouded in long caftans, wearing lambskin caps shapedlike a cornucopia, and bearing lances.
"They are Cossacks," replied Roque, from the observer's perch, "thestrange fighters who never surrender."
Billy had later an opportunity for closer view of these reckless ridersin the service of the Czar.
The flyers could see that the road below was this day crowded with thecarts of refugees, trailing in endless procession, on the top of eachvehicle the members of the family, the average one man to five women.The boys noted that there were not so many children here as they hadseen among the homeless wanderers in Belgium. The same problem washere, however--what are they going to do?
"There they go again," cried Henri, referring to renewed outbreakfrom the long gray noses sticking out over the top of a brown gunemplacement--belching cones of death, and shooting red flare into thegray-white atmosphere. Then another noise out of the winter-worn copseof trees--pop, pop, pop, the notes of rifle fire, all raising a queermist over the plain. With all this racketing no soldier could be seenat the point of fire.
If trouble was contagious, the biplane Henri was driving suddenlycaught some of it; something went wrong with the motors, and it wasa case of get down quick in the long slide, in which performance theyoung pilot excelled. He landed safely enough, but without choice ofplace.
The machine was stranded in Sochaezev, a city of the dead. Pale faceswere still peering from some of the doors and windows, though almostevery roof had been battered in, leaving only the stringers, remindingone of skeletons.
Billy had instantly volplaned in pursuit of the disabled biplane of hispartner, and the two experts, assisted by Schneider, were speedily atthe work of repair.
Roque impatiently moved about among the ruins, acting as a sentinel,and occasionally turning to the laboring aviators with mutteredinsistence for haste.
"Hist!"
With the chief's sibilant warning the boys softly laid down the toolsand motor parts they were handling, and stood at attention. Schneiderdrew a revolver from his belt.
Roque, in crouching attitude, held an ear close to the frozen earthsurface, and the others took example.
"There's a cavalry troop headed this way," hoarsely whisperedSchneider. The pounding of many hoofs, growing louder and louder, was asound apparent to each listener.
Then as a new diversion, out in the open field to the right of t
heroad, down which the horsemen were galloping, rang out the rapid blowsof pikes and spades on the ice-covered soil.
"They're throwing up kneeling trenches."
Schneider had a true ear for war moves.
The grating noise of the closing of a gun breech preceded a tensemoment.
By the shifting of sound it was impressed upon the listeners that theoncoming cavalry had left the road and had swung into the plain on theleft.
"We'll be between two fires in a minute or so."
This from Roque, as he rejoined his companions standing by theaeroplanes.
"Give us a precious ten minutes and we need not care," volunteeredHenri, who had discovered the defect in the machinery which had broughtthem down.
"Get at it, then," urged Roque.
The boys did "get at it" so vigorously that they raised a perspiration,despite the frigid air.
"It's all right now," triumphantly announced Billy, hastily repackingthe tools.
That they had been spared the time required to meet the emergency wasdue to the fact that the cavalrymen had diverted their course so as tomake a sudden frontal charge on the artillerymen from the cover of theruins.
"Now for a move backward," ordered Roque in low tone; "even thoughthe gunners to the right may wear the gray we would have no show forrecognition if we bounced up like a flock of partridges."
So the aviation party cautiously wheeled the biplanes in the desertedstreet as far as they could from the supposed line of the coming clash.
None too soon were they out of range, for with savage yells theCossacks rode full-tilt from cover at the German guns and gunners inthe shallow trenches.
Amidst the roar of desperate conflict the biplanes whizzed away likegreat arrows.
"Some speedy tinkering we did in that ghost town, Mr. Roque?"
"Nothing slow," assented Roque, leaning forward to give Billy a pat onthe back.
"Where away now?" asked the pilot.
"Back to the lodge for the night," directed the chief.
No such comfort for the boys in the next flight.
They were booked for a journey to Przemysl, the vast undergroundfortress of Galicia, about which the Russian right end was thensnapping like the tip of a whip around a sapling, and later surroundedon all sides by the Muscovite forces.
While viewing the first back-wash of the Austrian forces from the hightide of Russian invasion, the aviators had hurtled through a maelstromof noise. The yells and shoutings of wagon drivers, the rattling ofthousands of wheels over stony roads, the clatter of horses' feet madean indescribable tumult, and to this were added the sounds of infantryfighting.
Roque had reliable advices during one of the stops in the flight thatthe fortress defenders were still holding their own, and no Russiancharge had as yet crossed the barbed wire mazes that circled the city.
Never since the memorable race at Friedrichshaven had the No. 3 typeof biplane attained such velocity as in the finish of this forced runto the Galician stronghold, the final dash over the black-plowed farmsthrough a wet fog and under fire of a Russian battery posted in thehills.
"I feel like I had been hauled through the lower regions by anightmare," complained Billy, as he later sat with Roque, Schneider andhis chum in the Steiber Coffee house.
"I will say," confessed Schneider, "that I never hit the wind so hardbefore in my flying experience. My eyes must look like two burned holesin a blanket."
"I might say, Schneider," remarked Roque, "that if it had not been forthat timely fog you would have hit the ground harder than you ever didbefore. Those gunners on the hill could not have missed us if givenfair sight."
"It has just occurred to me that they came pretty close, anyhow."
"They sure did, Buddy," laughed Billy, following this assertion by hischum. "I almost collided with a shell that sounded like a dozen factorywhistles. By the way, Mr. Roque," he continued, "it looks like you weretied up here for some time to come. I don't see any way out of it."
"Do not lose any sleep over that problem, young man; if we got in wecan get out. You ought to know by this time that there is always ahole in the air that cannot be blocked."
"You bet he's right," exclaimed Schneider, slapping his knee foremphasis.
"Hustle for bed, all of you, and stay there until you are called."
With this the chief faced the fire and lighted one of his big, blackcigars. He had some thinking to do.
The boys were awakened the next morning by gunfire.
"Oh, lawsy," sleepily murmured Billy, "is there another battle startedalready?"
Schneider at the first report had gone on his bare feet to the nearestwindow.
"Nix, fellows," he cried, after short observation, "they're notshooting at men this time, it's wild geese they're popping at."
The besieged garrison was adding to its store of eatables by bringingdown wildfowl, which flew in abundance over the town.
"Let me in on that."
Henri owned the idea that he was something of a full hand as a Nimrod.
A voice in the doorway: "You will be 'let in' on bigger game than that."
Roque smiled at the youthful enthusiast, and added:
"There is a man's size job for a half-sized man waiting until you shakethe sleep out of your system."
"Get up, you snowbirds, and sing for your salt."
Our Young Aeroplane Scouts in Germany; or, Winning the Iron Cross Page 12