Читать книгу The Fighting Scouts - Edgar Wallace - Страница 3

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LIEUTENANT BAXTER was writing letters home and, at the moment Cornish came into the mess-hut, was gazing through the window with that fixed stare which might indicate either the memory of some one loved and absent or a mental struggle after the correct spelling of the village billets he had bombed the night before.

Cornish, who looked sixteen, but was in reality quite an old gentleman of twenty, thrust his hands into his breeches pockets and gazed disconsolately round before he slouched across to where Baxter sat at his literary exercises.

“I say,” said Cornish in a complaining voice, “what the devil are you doing?”

“Cleaning my boots,” said Baxter without looking up; “didn’t you notice it?”

Second-Lieutenant Cornish sniggered. “Quit fooling. I say, what are you writing letters for? Good Heavens, you are always writing letters!”

Baxter withdrew his gaze from the window and went on writing with marked industry.

“I say,” said Cornish again, “there was a fellow of the American squadron in here to-day.”

Baxter sighed and put down his pen. “I am told that America is in the war,” he said politely. “This fact would probably account for the phenomenal happening.”

“He asked for rye whisky,” said Cornish, nodding significantly.

“Poor fellow.”

“When I told him that we hadn’t any rye whisky,” Cornish went on, “he asked, whether we weren’t fighting for civilization and the free something or other of peoples.”

Baxter swung round on his chair, his hands folded on his lap. “All this is very fascinating,” he said; “why don’t you write a book about it? And what are you doing here, may I ask? I thought you were going into Amiens?”

“I wish I’d gone,” said the gloomy young man; “it is blowing eighty miles an hour up-stairs. Depledge went up and was buffeted about all over the shop and nearly crashed. Saw a Hun and couldn’t get near him.”

“What was the Hun doing?” asked Baxter, interested in spite of himself.

“That’s the very question Depledge asked me.”

“But you didn’t tell him?” said Baxter. “You’re a reticent devil, Cornish! And now, if you don’t mind my communicating with my fond parents, perhaps you will go out into the garden and eat worms.”

“Oh, that reminds me,” said Cornish: “This American chap, a most excellent fellow, by the way, wanted to know what has happened to Tam.”

“Did you tell him?”

“No,” confessed Cornish.

“Do you know?” asked the patient Baxter.

“No,” admitted Cornish.

Baxter groaned. “Good-by,” he said.

“I say,” said Cornish.

“Good-by,” said Baxter loudly.

“This fellow,” Cornish drawled on in his even, monotonous voice, “this American fellow. I mean, the American fellow I saw this morning—”

“I thought you were speaking about the Spanish fellow you saw yesterday,” said Baxter wearily.

“No, this American fellow said that he had heard that Tam was coming back. Some brass-hat told him.”

“He was pulling your leg, my dear Cornish,” said Baxter; “these Americans stuff people, especially the young and the innocent. Now go to bed or go out and buy me some stamps or take my motor-bike and joy-ride into Amiens or go down to the workshop or—or go to the dickens.”

“You are very unsociable,” said Cornish, and wandered out.

He strolled across to the workshop and stood for a few minutes in that noisy hive watching the mechanics fitting a new tractor screw to his “camel,” then walked back to his quarters through the drizzle.

THE wind was blowing gustily. It slammed doors and sent gray clouds of smoke bellowing from the stove, it rattled the windows and whined and sobbed about the corners of the hut.

Then suddenly above the sigh and moan of it rose a shrill “whee-e-e!”

Cornish was in the act of sitting down as the sound came to him. He checked the action and, half-doubled as he was, leapt for the door and flung it open.

“Wh—oom—oom!”

The force of the explosion flung him back, the windows crashed outward, the ground beneath his feet rocked again.

Even as he fell he heard the shattering of wood where the bomb fragments ripped through the casings of the hut. He was on his feet in an instant and through the door.

High above the aerodrome, appearing and disappearing through the hurrying cloud-ruck, was a machine that swayed and jumped most visibly.

Cornish started at a run as the antiaircraft guns began their belated chorus.

He met Baxter struggling into his padded jacket before his hangar.

“We’ll take a chance,” said Baxter rapidly; “who’d ever imagine the swine would come over on a day like this?”

“Think he’ll come back?” asked Cornish.

The other shouted something unintelligible as he turned to climb into his tiny one-seater and Cornish guessed rather than heard the answer.

Three minutes later he was zooming up behind his superior, his machine dancing like a scrap of paper caught in the wind. The little scout climbed steeply, heading eastward, and Cornish, strapped to his seat, saw nothing but the gray race of cloud above him, until the altimeter registered eight thousand feet. Then he began to take notice.

A little below him and a mile away was Baxter’s machine, while a mile ahead of him and running across his bows was a Hun plane of respectable size and unusual lines. He observed with joy that the enemy was making bad weather of it, and banked round to run on a parallel course.

A rapid glimpse of the country told him that the adventurous enemy was making for home, and the proximity of the machine was probably due to the fact that the bomber had attempted to return against the wind to repeat his good work when he had sighted the chasers.

Baxter’s scout swung round behind the enemy. Cornish closed to his flank. The astonished but interested infantry in the trenches eight thousand feet below, heard above the purr of the engines the “ral-tat-tat-tat-tat!” of machine guns and saw the Boche side-slip. It was a scientific side-slip, wholly designed as an advertisement of the slipper’s distress, but it was not the weather for artful maneuvers. Suddenly the big machine began to spin, not a well-controlled spin, but rather following the motion of a corkscrew driven by a drunken hand.

The two scouts dived for him, their guns chattering excitedly, and the big Hun flip-flopped earthward, nose up, tail up, wing up—till he made a pancake crash midway between the line and the aerodrome of the Umpty-fourth.

Baxter followed and made a bad landing, but the Providence which protects the child was kinder to Cornish, who lit “like a blinking angel,” to quote a muddy and unprejudiced representative of the P.B.I.*

[* The infantry is invariably referred to by all other arms as the “Poor Blooming Infantry.” or words to that effect.—E.W.]

Luck was not wholly against the enemy (for the two German airmen were alive when their machine reached bottom) except that the friendly hands which had strapped them to their seats had done their work a little too effectively. By the time they had freed themselves from restraint, but before they had fired the incendiary bomb which was intended to destroy the machine, Baxter was out of his chaser and was standing on the under-carriage.

“Don’t fire the machine unless you’re awfully keen on a military funeral,” he said, and four gloved hands arose over two leather-helmeted heads.

“Don’t shoot. Colonel,” said the cheerful pilot, “I’ll come down.”

Baxter watched his prisoners descend before he restored his Colt automatic to its holster.

“Sorry and all that sort of thing,” he said to the pilot, “but you’ve got some nerve.”

“Give the barbarian credit for something,” replied the blue- eyed pilot, lighting a black cigar. “I’m afraid my friend here will want a doctor.” He indicated the very young and very pale officer, whose thumb had apparently been shot away. “He doesn’t speak English. My name is Prince Karl of Stettiz-Waldenstein, the last of the ancient race that carries the blood of Charlemagne.”

“Cheerioh,” said Baxter, “come along to our mess and have some lunch before the wolves get you and put you in a little cage. We’ll drop your friend at the hospital—my name, by the way, is Baxter, and I come from a long line of hardware merchants.”

The prince smiled. “Trade follows the flag,” he said. “My little friend’s father makes typewriters—and pretty bad ones. You ought to be friends.”

An R.F.C. picked them up and after depositing the wounded youth at the general hospital, the two foemen were whirled back to the aerodrome, their arrival coinciding with the return of the majority of the squadron from Amiens. The prisoner was talkative and lively. He had been educated at Harvard and Oxford, thought the war was pretty good sport, told a joyous tale of a grand-ducal aunt who had sent him a set of silken underwear embarrassingly embroidered with the legend: “Gott strafe England und America,” but would not offer any information about the machine he was flying.

“You can see what is left of it and discover for yourself,” he said to Major Blackie at parting; “she’s a fairly useful bus, but nothing as useful as she’s supposed to be. Oh, by the way, I nearly forgot to ask—where’s Tam?”

“Tam is in England,” smiled Blackie. “I thought you fellows knew. He got married and went away to be an instructor or something.”

“But surely he’s back,” persisted the other. “One of our circus commanders (you call them circuses, don’t you?) told me he was due back to-day—that was one of the reasons I came over. If the weather had been good we should have come in force!”

“A sort of ‘welcome home,’ eh?”

The prince grinned.

“Well, he isn’t here,” Blackie went on, “and so far as I know—excuse me.”

An orderly stood in the door with a scrap of paper in his hand which Blackie took and read.

“I MUST hurry you off,” he said; “the wind’s dropped and one of your circuses is going up.”

“Good luck to ’em,” said the prisoner as he shook hands.

The circus did not materialize in so far as the squadron was concerned, its activities being exclusively monopolized by certain enthusiastic but half-trained units of the U. S. F. C., which, while on a practise flight, and strictly against all instructions, engaged its more skilful enemy and bluffed it into retreat.

This was discussed among other matters after dinner that night.

“The gentlemen from Indiana got Fritz with his tail down,” said Baxter; “they were out doing a formation stunt with no idea in life save to avoid unpleasantness with their flight commander—it wasn’t a bad formation, by the way—when Fritz and his Imperial Circus butted into the simple children of the West.”

“What happened?”

“It was funny. The gentlemen from Indiana just dropped that formation nonsense. They simply went baldheaded for the nearest Hun and before you could say ‘knife,’ two Huns were spinning out of control and the circus was moving homeward with the United States of America in hot pursuit. It was comic to see the French instructor shooting off frantic recall signals.”

Blackie pulled out his cigar case and contemplated the interior with a look of gloom.

“I wonder why everybody thinks Tam is coming back—the cigars and the Americans remind me.”

“I’ll bet he’s no use for flying—when a chap is married he’s done for,” said a voice in a dark corner.

“Hit him, somebody,” growled Mortimer, the latest of the squadron benedicts. “Come out of your obscurity, Hector Misogynist; oh, it’s Cornish! Bah!”

Cornish came into the light unabashed. “Kipling wrote it about a fellow who wouldn’t take a fence or lead his squadron after he was married—got scared when he thought of his child and all that sort of thing.”

The door opened suddenly and a muffled figure stood in the entrance.

“Waiting patrol!” he barked. “Get up—light, bombing squadron over Corps Headquarters—get a wiggle on!”

A scamper of feet, wails and imprecations from the waiting patrol, a chorus of “Shut that door—damn you!” and the hum of engines outside. A confusion of voices, a more intense roar which dies down to silence, and the night patrol is away.

Blackie looked at his watch. “Simmonds, your flight had better stand by—they don’t usually strafe C. H. Q. There go our Archies—everybody stand by!”

Blackie hurried to his concrete office where a nonchalant telephonist was exchanging philosophy with another telephonist six miles away, and if the distant operator was the less philosophical of the two, he might be excused, since he was at that moment undergoing an aerial bombardment.

“Umpty-eighth bein’ bombed, sir,” reported the telephonist in the same surprised tone you might employ to announce that a football match had been postponed, “the ’Uns ’ave strafed two ’angars.”

“And knocked the H’s off the rest, eh?” said Blackie. “Ask O. Pip* if any of our people have signaled.”

[* Observation post.]

Click! A plug pushed home, a rasping buzz and— “Hello—O. Pip—Hallow! O. Pip. Reports? Right.” He turned. “Night squadron signaled nine thousand feet, sir—makin’ west. Encountered no H.A.”

He said this importantly, since there was a fine roll in “encountered” and a pleasant mystery—which was no mystery to anybody—in the abbreviations for “Hostile Aircraft” and “Observation Post.”

Baxter came back ten minutes later to report and inquire. “They seem to be leaving us alone, which is strange, after what that prince person said.”

“Apparently they are after the gentlemen from Indiana, who, I suppose, will be gnashing their teeth at their good kind instructor because he won’t let them go up in the dark, dark night.”

“We’re a cheerful lot of boys,” said Baxter. “Who called them the gentlemen from Indiana, by the way?”

“Tam,” said Blackie laughing; “he’d read a book with a title like that—Indiana was the word that took Tam’s fancy.”

“Hello—hello—yes—speak up, Clarence—bombin’ yer, are they—all right.” The operator half turned. “Bombing Squadron H. A. operatin’ over American Squadron H. Q., sir; one ’angar slightly damaged.”

Blackie nodded.

“Hello! Yes—one H. A. forced to descend by Archie fire, sir.”

Blackie nodded again. “They’re out to-night with a vengeance,” he said; “every bombing squadron Fritz has must be working.”

“Headquarters call, sir,” reported the telephonist and slipped the apparatus from his head.

Blackie sank into the seat vacated and adjusted the ear-pieces. “Yes—Umpty-fourth—yes, sir, Blackie speaking. Yes—they seem lively, yes, sir—(check this, Baxter) twelve machines to escort 947th and 958th squadrons on a bombing raid to be in the air at five aco-emma! (Got that, Baxter?) Yes, sir.”

He hung up the receiver. “Reprisals by order—wind up at D.H.Q.—slow music and death to the sleep-destroying Hun!”

WITH the dawn the escorting squadrons rose to their station, and Blackie from the ground saw the flicker of blue and green lights as the British bombing machines came over and their escort fell into place.

The drone of their engines had hushed to an intermittent buzz when Blackie strolled across the aerodrome to the deserted mess-room for his morning cup of tea.

The sergeant-major who walked at his side was expressing the gloomy views on the weather which sergeant-majors are permitted to hold, when he suddenly stopped talking and stood still.

“What’s the matter, Sergeant-major?” demanded Blackie.

“Somethin’ comin’ our way, sir.”

Blackie listened.

The sound of airplane engines which had almost died away was again audible.

“They’re not coming back?”

Blackie listened with a puzzled frown.

The noise rose from throb to buzz, from buzz to angry purr.

“’Uns,” said the sergeant-major’ sapiently. “That’s a circus—look, Sir!” He pointed eagerly. Twelve thousand feet above, the rays of the yet invisible sun caught the white wings of the enemy squadron. Tiny flecks that glittered in the dawn light and unmistakably hostile.

“Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!”

“Pang! Pang! Pa-pa-pang!”

The sleepless Archies were at work and the skies were full of wailing.

“Oh, damn!” snapped Blackie, “every one of my machines up! Bomb-proof shelter for us, I think, Sergeant-Major.”

But the sergeant-major was staring at the skies. The big German formation so perfectly alined had suddenly broken. “The leader’s in trouble, sir.”

No need to say as much, for the leader was sweeping earthward in wide circles.

“Ticka-tacka, ticka-tacka!”

“Machine gun—what the dickens is wrong with ’em?”

A second machine fell out of formation, disastrously blazing. The formation was now confused and scattered. Three machines had banked over and turned for home. Another three—obviously fighting machines—were circling and the fierce chatter of their guns was eloquent of their annoyance.

“But what are they fighting—one another?” demanded the mystified Blackie. “None of our people are up—glory be! There goes another!”

One of the attackers crumpled and broke in the air and spun earthward.

Then Blackie saw.

High above what had once been a formation was poised an airplane of microscopic size. It was a pin-point of light in the skies, so tiny that Blackie could not believe the evidence of his eyes until the circus turned homeward, one machine, obviously damaged and losing height with every yard it traveled, lagging in the rear.

Then did the midget in the blue condescend to give the ground observers a closer view of himself. He dived steeply on the tail of the damaged machine. They heard the splutter of his gun and saw the lame duck crash.

“But what is it—Sergeant-Major? Good Lord, it’s as big as a large-sized hat-box.”

The tiny stranger wheeled round, poised for a moment and then began a glide for the aerodrome.

As it drew nearer Blackie saw that his estimate of its size was not an extravagant one. It might be stowed in a big packing-case and might with no discomfort take shelter under the wing of a Handley-Page.

The midget lit lightly at the far end of the aerodrome, and Blackie ran to meet the visitor as he stepped down the few feet which separated the nascalle from the ground.

“I say, I’m awfully grateful to you, but from what toy-store did you dig out this contraption?”

The pilot shed his furry gloves and lifted the mica-eyed mask that hid his face before he spoke.

“A’ll be thankin’ ye, Major Blackie, sir, if ye’ll no speak disrespectfully of ma wee frien’, ‘Annie Laurie,’ the pride o’ Scotland an’ the terror o’ the Hoon.”

“Tam!” yelled Blackie, and gripped the scout by the shoulders. “Tam! You melodramatic humbug! You villain! Back again!”

“From ma honeymoon,” said Tam, shaking his head, “an’ just as I were gettin’ used to it—mon, war’s hell—have ye a seegair in your pooch—A’m travelin’ wi’oot ma baggage!”