"You must have been born for this kind of business," piped Billy, viewing the food display on a blanket laid like a tablecloth and the steaming coffee pot topping the little camp stove.
"I have had some experience in living in and out of an aëroplane," modestly admitted Roten, "yet I have seen days when I wished that I hadn't been born for this profession; hungry days, never-resting days, ever-perilous days. A sailor may be saved from shipwreck, a soldier has a fighting chance on the ground, but when an aëroplane goes too far wrong, just save the pieces, that's all."
"Right you are, sir," earnestly declared Billy; "but get it in the blood once and there's no quitting."
"By the way, speaking of military aviation, and the cold we have endured to-day, it is no more a question of climate in that sort of work. Why, Russia is away up in the hundreds in the number of its aircraft."
"I expect that is true, Mr. Roque; I know I have met a few from over there myself," grimly conceded Roten.
"Perhaps some that you will never meet again," suggested the secret agent.
"Perhaps," said the veteran airman, reputed to have been mixed up in as many air duels as there were weeks in the year.
Billy, chumming it with Ansel, Roten's pilot, had challenged the new friend for a footrace, which led the runners to the edge of the plateau on the north.
Looking across the intervening defile, their attention was attracted by a movement on the opposite slope, the first sign of life below observed since they took flight from the Austrian camp early that morning.
"There is something doing over there," panted Billy, not yet recovered from the exertion of beating his companion a foot or two in their speed contest.