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 they first faced Roque, immediately after their delivery to the secret agent by the police authorities. The crawl through the drain pipe and the additional effort to give them the appearance of real victims of violent treatment, had served to convert the usually natty and trim youngsters into a couple of quite disreputable looking characters.

It is quite likely that Roque would there and then have put the returned wanderers through the "third degree" of questioning had it not been for a fortunate and welcome interruption in the shape of a messenger, who could not be denied, and who, it proved, brought tidings that wholly changed the line of thought of the stern chief.

"Take these chimney-sweeps to the tub and the clothesline," he gruffly ordered, and Schneider, half concealing a broad grin, accepted the service with celerity.

"You ought to have heard the boss when he found that you had not reported at quarters last night," said the red-topped aviator, when the trio were out of Roque's hearing. "He took the wind out of my sails, I tell you, and I am not considered slow in the cussing business."

"Where were you, anyhow?"

"In the hands of brigands, of course," gravely advised Billy, with a wink at Henri.

Schneider was so possessed with the prospect of some new and exciting move by Roque, indicated by the manner of the chief upon receipt of the message a few minutes before, that he did not burden the boys by forcing evasive explanations of their mysterious absence.

"If Roque had half a suspicion that we had been in company with his pet enemy, the prince of slyboots," confided Henri, when the chums were alone, "our joint name would be Dennis."

"Gee! If that fellow hadn't bumped in just at the right time, I think we both could have claimed the title of Ananias!"

Billy was a poor hand as a dodger of truth, and much relieved to escape the witness stand in this instance.

The kind of danger with which the boys best loved to toy was again speedily coming to them--the peril of aëroplaning.

Schneider brought the order to report forthwith at the aërodrome.

At the aërodrome an immense Zeppelin airship, as long as an ocean liner, had just been inflated. Roque was engaged in conversation with the captain of the great dirigible when Schneider and his young companions reached the grounds. The pilot of the huge craft and his assistants had already taken their places in the front gondola, the foremost end of which had been screened for their protection, and it was evident that sailing time was near. When the master mariner had exchanged a parting word with the secret agent he entered his room in the central cabin of the Zeppelin, which was in telephonic communication with the front and rear gondolas and other parts of the ship. In the meantime, Schneider had instructed the boys to give the No. 3's an inspection to see if the attendant helpers had properly prepared the machines for a long journey.

The young aviators then surmised that they were to travel as convoys of the monarch of the air, which even then was majestically rising.

Roque hastened to the machine in which Billy was already seated and waved a signal to the waiting Henri in the other biplane, containing also the redoubtable Schneider.

The swift flyers easily overcame the slight lead of the big ship, though it was making 40 knots, and took up the guiding positions. The flight was directly away from Lorraine and historic Strassburg.

"I wonder if our huckster friend is in the crowd back there?" was a mental question with Billy.

It was many a day before the young air pilot had a chance to again meet Anglin.

When this journey ended it was in territory remote from that of any former experience of the Aëroplane Scouts--a new battle landscape. It had snowed, and the drab, brown plain of Poland had turned to glistening white. The biplanes floated in a tarnished silver sky, which, pressing down, seemed hardly higher than a gray ceiling. The aviators landed on the clay bank of the winding yellow river, the Bzura, within 400 paces of the German trenches. Gun answered gun across the golden stream, shell on shell spattered into the soft earth, and rifles rattled unceasingly.

Schneider sniffed the powder smoke like a seasoned warhorse. "It's the life!" he exclaimed.

"And the death," added Roque.

He knew that men lay bleeding and broken on the banks of this yellow streak in the white picture.

"You're just right, boss," murmured Billy, nodding his hooded head, "the war map looks all red to me."

Roque, as usual, wherever he went or wherever he was, seemed to carry an Aladdin magic carpet on which to sail, for in the next flight of the biplanes a few miles distant he found a bright spot in this winter scene of rack and ruin--a clean, white lodgekeeper's kitchen, where a canary sang, and where the aërial wayfarers rested and were fed.

"I'll show you even better," he said, "when we break into Warsaw."

The chief also had a particular crow to pick with the defenders of the Polish capital. One of his men, for some time operating with the Russians, had been detected, and the end of a story of brilliant secret service achievement was marked by a little mound of earth in a Warsaw stable yard.

But for the present there were busy days ahead for the aviators in reconnoitering the Russian lines.

Most of the aërial work here was over a plain, flat as a floor. Black dots here and there marked isolated houses, and the Kalish road was bordered by a line of leafless trees with smooth trunks, which reminded the young pilots of a rank of grenadiers.

"What's that bunch over there?" queried Billy, nodding toward a group of horsemen, shrouded in long caftans, wearing lambskin caps shaped like a cornucopia, and bearing lances.

"They are Cossacks," replied Roque, from the observer's perch, "the strange fighters who never surrender."

Billy had later an opportunity for closer view of these reckless riders in the service of the Czar.

The flyers could see that the road below was this day crowded with the carts of refugees, trailing in endless procession, on the top of each vehicle the members of the family, the average one man to five women. The boys noted that there were not so many children here as they had seen among the homeless wanderers in Belgium. The same problem was here, however--what are they going to do?

"There they go again," cried Henri, referring to renewed outbreak from the long gray noses sticking out over the top of a brown gun emplacement--belching cones of death, and shooting red flare into the gray-white atmosphere. Then another noise out of the winter-worn copse of trees--pop, pop, pop, the notes of rifle fire, all raising a queer mist over the plain. With all this racketing no soldier could be seen at the point of fire.

If trouble was contagious, the biplane Henri was driving suddenly caught some of it; something went wrong with the motors, and it was a case of get down quick in the long slide, in which performance the young pilot excelled. He landed safely enough, but without choice of place.

The machine was stranded in Sochaezev, a city of the dead. Pale faces were still peering from some of the doors and windows, though almost every roof had been battered in, leaving only the stringers, reminding one of skeletons.

Billy had instantly volplaned in pursuit of the disabled biplane of his partner, and the two experts, assisted by Schneider, were speedily at the work of repair.

Roque impatiently moved about among the ruins, acting as a sentinel, and occasionally turning to the laboring aviators with muttered insistence for haste.

"Hist!"

With the chief's sibilant warning the boys softly laid down the tools and motor parts they were handling, and stood at attention. Schneider drew a revolver from his belt.

Roque, in crouching attitude, held an ear close to the frozen earth surface, and the others took example.

"There's a cavalry troop headed this way," hoarsely whispered Schneider. The pounding of many hoofs, growing louder and louder, was a sound apparent to each listener.

Then as a new diversion, out in the open field to the right of the road, down which the horsemen were galloping, rang out the rapid blows of pikes and spades on the ice-covered soil.

"They're throwing up kneeling trenches."

Schneider had a true ear for war moves.

The grating noise of the closing of a gun breech preceded a tense moment.

By the shifting of sound it was impressed upon the listeners that the oncoming cavalry had left the road and had swung into the plain on the left.

"We'll be between two fires in a minute or so."

This from Roque, as he rejoined his companions standing by the aëroplanes.

"Give us a precious ten minutes and we need not care," volunteered Henri, who had discovered the defect in the machinery which had brought them down.

"Get at it, then," urged Roque.

The boys did "get at it" so vigorously that they raised a perspiration, despite the frigid air.

"It's all right now," triumphantly announced Billy, hastily repacking the tools.

That they had been spared the time required to meet the emergency was due to the fact that the cavalrymen had diverted their course so as to make a sudden frontal charge on the artillerymen from the cover of the ruins.

"Now for a move backward," ordered Roque in low tone; "even though the gunners to the right may wear the gray we would have no show for recognition if we bounced up like a flock of partridges."

So the aviation party cautiously wheeled the biplanes in the deserted street as far as they could from the supposed line of the coming clash.

None too soon were they out of range, for with savage yells the Cossacks rode full-tilt from cover at the German guns and gunners in the shallow trenches.

Amidst the roar of desperate conflict the biplanes whizzed away like great arrows.

"Some speedy tinkering we did in that ghost town, Mr. Roque?"

"Nothing slow," assented Roque, leaning forward to give Billy a pat on the back.

"Where away now?" asked the pilot.

"Back to the lodge for the night," directed the chief.

No such comfort for the boys in the next flight.

They were booked for a journey to Przemysl, the vast underground fortress of Galicia, about which the Russian right end was then snapping like the tip of a whip around a sapling, and later surrounded on all sides by the Muscovite forces.

While viewing the first back-wash of the Austrian forces from the high tide of Russian invasion, the aviators had hurtled through a maelstrom of noise. The yells and shoutings of wagon drivers, the rattling of thousands of wheels over stony roads, the clatter of horses' feet made an indescribable tumult, and to this were added the sounds of infantry fighting.

Roque had reliable advices during one of the stops in the flight that the fortress defenders were still holding their own, and no Russian charge had as yet crossed the barbed wire mazes that circled the city.

Never since the memorable race at Friedrichshaven had the No. 3 type of biplane attained such velocity as in the finish of this forced run to the Galician stronghold, the final dash over the black-plowed farms through a wet fog and under fire of a Russian battery posted in the hills.

"I feel like I had been hauled through the lower regions by a nightmare," complained Billy, as he later sat with Roque, Schneider and his chum in the Steiber Coffee house.

"I will say," confessed Schneider, "that I never hit the wind so hard before in my flying experience. My eyes must look like two burned holes in a blanket."

"I might say, Schneider," remarked Roque, "that if it had not been for that timely fog you would have hit the ground harder than you ever did before. Those gunners on the hill could not have missed us if given fair sight."

"It has just occurred to me that they came pretty close, anyhow."

"They sure did, Buddy," laughed Billy, following this assertion by his chum. "I almost collided with a shell that sounded like a dozen factory whistles. By the way, Mr. Roque," he continued, "it looks like you were tied up here for some time to come. I don't see any way out of it."

"Do not lose any sleep over that problem, young man; if we got in we can get out. You ought to know by this time that there is always a hole in the air that cannot be blocked."

"You bet he's right," exclaimed Schneider, slapping his knee for emphasis.

"Hustle for bed, all of you, and stay there until you are called."

With this the chief faced the fire and lighted one of his big, black cigars. He had some thinking to do.

The boys were awakened the next morning by gunfire.

"Oh, lawsy," sleepily murmured Billy, "is there another battle started already?"

Schneider at the first report had gone on his bare feet to the nearest window.

"Nix, fellows," he cried, after short observation, "they're not shooting at men this time, it's wild geese they're popping at."

The besieged garrison was adding to its store of eatables by bringing down wildfowl, which flew in abundance over the town.

"Let me in on that."

Henri owned the idea that he was something of a full hand as a Nimrod.

A voice in the doorway: "You will be 'let in' on bigger game than that."

Roque smiled at the youthful enthusiast, and added:

"There is a man's size job for a half-sized man waiting until you shake the sleep out of your system."

"Get up, you snowbirds, and sing for your salt."