The mist curtain had grown so dense that the aerial bomb-throwers did little execution, in their turn, and soon abandoned pursuit of the fleeing cruisers, pushing hard for the Turkish coast.
The seaplanes settled in the path of the rapidly approaching Russians, and Billy and Henri rested after their introductory dash along a new line of strenuous endeavor.
Billy turned to Lieutenant Moppa, with the inquiry:
“Did everything work all right?”
“As far as you are concerned,” promptly advised the officer, “it could not have been better managed. I was a little off, though, in the matter of landing bombs in the right place.”
The observer with Henri had just told the lad that he was engaged for life.
The Russian warships, among which they were drifting, the boys learned, were in the Slav naval movement to approach the strait of Bosphorus from the north, and related to mighty effort of the allied forces to pound their way through the Dardanelles on the other side—that the fleets of all three powers might shell Constantinople from two directions.
“If we get through the Bosphorus, and I am wagering we will,” said Lieutenant Moppa as the seaplanes, side by side, gently undulated with the waves, “it will be the first hostile fleet that has done the trick for more than four centuries.”
“It will be getting by some 120 guns, I have heard,” remarked the brother officer, “and they are pretty near all Krupps, shooting irons not in the toy class.”
“I remember once reading a five-cent tear-me-up entitled ‘The Bride of the Bosphorus; or, the Fourteen Corpses of the Caspian Sea,’ and if the passage is as exciting as that story, count me in.”