“You are booked to pilot a couple of old friends of yours in another flight to Petrograd,” announced the boss airman; “that is if you are ready to resign from the police force.”
He was smiling when he submitted the last proviso.
The “old friends” were the scouts Salisky and Marovitch, who had just sent another pair of tired aviators to the rest ward, after a gruelling trip along the firing line in the southwest.
“Are you up to snuff, my laddybucks?” was Salisky’s jovial greeting.
“In the pink of condition, Brother-never-wear-out,” gaily rejoined Billy.
“None of your duke’s palace entertainments this time,” broke in the other iron man, Marovitch.
In destiny had been indelibly written a certain happening that would be, and was, and in the great capital city of the Russians resulted in the translation of our boys into an entirely new sphere of action.
But the pilots set out on the familiar route without other thought than that, if no unforeseen peril of aeroplaning intervened, they would slide again into these grounds in the same old way. The scouts had orders to return within three days, if it were by consent of the powers that be at Petrograd.
When the biplanes had winged their way along the flow of the Neva to the fixed point for the flight’s finish, there was goodly margin on the right side of the time limit.
Once more the young pilots climbed the marble steps of Admiralty Place, preceded by the veteran scouts and special messengers—this time, however, without encountering in the imposing interior any former fierce foe in parti-colored uniform. By the blood ceremony elected to the Cossack brotherhood, the boys could now look without tremor into the somber eyes of each and every knight of the desert in imperial service that they might pass in the wide and high corridors.