“You ought to be spanked and put to bed, you naughty boys,” admonished the giant pilot of the German craft, when he noted the youth of his captives.
“But I guess you are smart enough,” he admitted, “or you could not have made the play you did to get away. If it had not been for the gun we might have been fooled.
“Give them room there, Franz, maybe we can find places for them in the service.”
So they climbed aboard the big German flyer without a word, fully determined, however, that they would not enter the service of Germany any more than they had entered the service of England and France; but very thankful to the good-natured Teutons who had rescued them after plunging them into the sea.
Captain Johnson watched for his flying boys in vain, and when at last the wrecked seaplane was towed in from the North Sea by an English vessel he gave them up for lost.
CHAPTER XLI.
THE BOYS PUT ON THE GRAY.
When our Aviator Boys had been crowded into small space aboard the German seaplane, the big flyer cut through the mist at top speed. The capture of the young airmen had been but an incident; an accident, indeed. The German aviators were playing a bigger game. The boys heard the man called Franz jesting with his comrades about something that was going to spit fire like a volcano upon the English. Henri, in soft aside tones, let Billy know what it was all about, for Billy was as short in German as he was in the French language.
The seaplane gunner (they called him Joseph), when the machine soared above the mist line, kept a sharp lookout through field glasses for some expected coming over the sea.
The boys could see, now that it was clearing to the north, the familiar trend of the English coast.