Then there was an ominous calm, and the aeroplane slowly settled down to an even keel, held up on the glass-stripped frames of the greenhouse, one of the very few in that vicinity, which was considerably in the rear of the battle line.
Slowly Tom unbuckled his safety strap and climbed out, making his way to the ground by means of stepping on an elevated bed of flowers inside the now almost roofless house.
Martin followed him, and as they stood looking at the wreckage they had made, or, rather, that had been made through no direct fault of their own, the proprietor of the place came out, wearing a long dirt-smudged apron.
He raised his hands in horror at the sight that met his gaze, and then broke into such a torrent of French that Tom, with all the experience he had had of excitable Frenchmen, was unable to comprehend half of it.
The gist was, however, to the effect that a most monstrous and unlooked-for calamity had befallen, and the inhabitants of all the earth, outside of Germany and her allies, were called on to witness that never hid there been such a smash of good glass. In which Torn was rather inclined to agree.
“Well, you did something this time all right, Buddie,” Tom remarked to Dick Martin.
“Did I—did I do that?” he asked, as though he had been walking in his sleep, and was just now awake.
“Well, you and the old bus together,” said Tom. “And we got off lucky at that. Didn't I tell you to keep high, if you were going to fly over one of the towns?”
“Yes, you did, but I forgot. Anyhow I'd have cleared the place if the
controls hadn't gone back on us.”
“I suppose so, but that excuse won't go with the C.O. It's a bad
smash.”
By this time quite a crowd had gathered, and Tom was trying to pacify the excitable greenhouse owner by promising full reparation in the shape of money damages.