“Don’t unhook that belt!” commanded Stillinger. “We can do nothing yet.”
“It’s a surprise,” said Tom. “We must help.”
“You sit still!” returned his friend. “I presume you can handle that make of gat?”
Tom nodded with confidence. Stillinger shot the airplane to an upper level and headed to the north of west, endeavoring to turn the flank of the farthest Hun squadron. Over the lines the yellow smoke now rolled and billowed. An intense air barrage was being sent up. They saw a German machine stagger, swoop downward, and burst into flames before it disappeared into the smoke cloud over No Man’s Land.
Stillinger knew he was disobeying orders; but his high courage and the plain determination of his passenger to help in the fight if need arose, caused him to take a chance. It was taking just such chances that had made him an ace.
Yet, as the airplane swung higher and higher, yet nearer and nearer to the group of enemy machines nearest the sea, and as the bursts of artillery fire grew louder, it was plain that this was going to be a “hot corner.”
The rolling smoke and the fog hid a good deal of the battle. Suddenly there burst out of the murk a squadron of flying machines with the German cross painted on the under side of their wings. With them rose three French attacking airplanes, and the chatter of the machine guns became incessant.
There were eight of the enemy planes; eight to three was greater odds than Americans could observe without wishing to take a hand in the fight.
Stillinger shot his airplane up at a sharp angle, striving to get above the German machines. Once above them, by pitching the nose of his machine, the enemy would be brought under the muzzle of the machine gun which already Tom Cameron had stripped of its canvas covering.
They were between six and seven thousand feet in the air now. Without the mask, the passenger would never have been able to endure the rarified atmosphere at this altitude. Unused as he was to aviation, however, he showed the ace that he was an asset, not a liability.