It was first acquaintance day with the pilots and their companions. The two behind and the pair in front had no knowledge of just how they would balance when it came to a weighing in of their metal on the scales of emergency.
If, however, the young aviators expected restraint in the matter of taking risks, they were entertaining an error in their minds.
Macauley and Canby were as free-handed in the acceptance of danger as any two men living, of which fact the wheelmen were very soon aware.
So the journey proceeded further and further afield without a word of protest from the officers, until all of a sudden the aircraft were in rapid ascent to clear a fortress crowning an elevation five hundred feet above sea level.
Rising above the battery, the aviators looked down and out upon the Sea of Marmora. It proved that the garrison here was on the alert, acutely so, for the reason that the British invasion of the peninsula to the near west had sent a note of alarm up and down the coast.
Before Henri could get the war-plane he was guiding wholly out of range, a sharpshooter on one of the four towers of the Seddil-Bahr fort opened up with a Mauser magazine rifle, and to the ill fortune of the airmen sent a bullet where it would do most harm in the propeller section of the craft.
The young pilot comprehended in a mental flash that a downshoot of the wings of the war-plane was the only thing to do, and he made it a long slide, so long, indeed, that the garrison waiting for the capture never made it.
But the landing on Marmora Island offered no other than the same result—the aviators had fallen into a web too wide for avoidance.
Billy never hesitated a minute in volplaning in the trail of the crippled machine, and the two warplanes alighted almost at the same time.
The young aviators jumped at the job of attempting repair, but failed to finish before they and their companions were surrounded by Turks. Macauley and Canby instinctively reached for their revolvers, but it would have availed nothing to resist, and would mean certain death from the muzzles of a score of rifles covering them.