As instructed, Josh and the boys “stood by” the biplanes. The captain had failed to get there first, and it did not look like he was going to even get there next, for already the soldiers of the garrison were scattering in search of a certain disturber, who had the nerve to fire back when he was fired at.
The entire garrison appeared to be charging about except the disgusted gunners, who found that they could not pump even a single shell at a suspicious-looking object off the water front.
The cable operators, with a number of the sentries, had raced down the steep incline to where the cable lifted from under the current of the straits. The casing of the wires on shore had twisted up like a great snake, hacked apart from the tension-creating line under the channel.
For a scant minute or two the far-reaching rays from the lighthouse tower on Bakkal headland splintered on a polished surface like a whale’s back, which quickly disappeared in a circle of foam below the rushing tide.
The gunners above had seen much more of the submarine before it dived, but that is about all the good it did them.
It was dawn before any of the Turks stumbled upon the hiding place of the aviators and their craft, and there was only four of this advance guard.
Josh counted a red furrow across the cheek after the first fire, and retaliated with one of the big service revolvers he carried, sending the marksman who marked him to the ground with a shattered knee-pan. Another of the attacking party got a chunk of lead in the shoulder, and the remaining two backed out for reinforcements.
In the meantime, the boy pilots had started the motors to humming, and Josh, though his fighting blood was up, concluded that there were too many coming just then, and hopped aboard with Henri.
“Not by a blamed sight are we leaving the captain to skirmish for himself,” he announced with the uprise; “we’ll hang around here till doomsday but what we’ll get him out.”
It was a mighty brief hang-around, after all, for the aviators were barely out of range of the Turks’ rifles, when Billy’s quick and roving eye caught the vivid flutter of a bandana handkerchief, Captain Johnson’s favorite colors, from a cactus cluster in the sandy expanse over which the aircraft circled.