It was a depressing, angering thought. Five days, von Herzmann had said. Then Siddons would face a firing squad. In the meantime, there was no human agency, on the Allied side of the line, that could stop the inexorable march of time and the certain death which this man must meet.
254It was this latter fact, the feeling of helpless impotency, that fired McGee’s brain with reckless daring and sent him boring through the fog like an angry hornet.
He soon found that this was of no avail and at last, seeking something that might be of value, he climbed out of the earth-blanketing fog into the clear sunlight, encountering clear blue sky at some fifteen hundred feet.
Below him, now, was a billowing sea of fog banks, tinted by the sun which had climbed about it. A short distance ahead he sighted an enemy tri-plane Fokker, but before he could give chase it had dived into the fog.
Over to the right, in what he thought must be the general direction of Montfaucon, he saw a single seater Nieuport cruising around.
He headed for it, and soon identified it as Yancey’s plane. The wild Texan was sitting above the fog, patiently waiting (as a cat waits for a mouse) for some observation sausage to come nosing out of the fog. Tex knew that the sun would eventually burn up the fog. The enemy, also knowing this, would be sending up their sausages so as to have them in position when the fog passed. Certainly the enemy had reason to see all that could be seen, for by this time they must be hard pressed indeed.
Directly in McGee’s path, about half way between 255his plane and Yancey’s, a black, formless bulk loomed out of the fog. A sausage!
McGee drove hard for it, and noted that he was in a race with Yancey, whose quick eye had sighted it.
The black bag was hardly out of the fog bank when tracers from McGee’s and Yancey’s guns began streaming into it. It exploded with amazing suddenness, the flaming cloth sinking back into enveloping billows of fog.
Yancey banked sharply, flew alongside McGee and shook his fist as though to say–“Go and find a rat hole of your own. This is my territory.”