Sybil, pirouetting on her toes upon the sands, subsided to the soles of her moccasins, in momentary apprehension--flat fright--her lips falling apart, a cleft flower, as her gaze fluttered downward, like a shot bird, to the dim dunes, searching them for two other lonely camps about an eighth of a mile distant, one just vacated, the other occupied by the Guardian’s artist-brother, who, at the moment, was far out on the bay, deep-sea fishing.
Other youthful glances strayed this way and that way, too. All tales of coast invasion which the girls had heard, of air-raid and wreck--invasion which, owing to the fleet of their British cousins and to the immortal valor of their own noble army, fighting for them, they were to be spared in the Great War--loomed up in a dark fog-ring encircling them.
“Bah! Enemy! Hostile!... Gammon and spinach!” cried Sara, flapping, fluttering like a brown leaf in a fish-tail breeze. “No such thing! It’s too far off for us to see the insignia--rings on the under side of the wings, but.... Oh, say! it is going to land; it’s doing a nose-dive now--heading straight down. Glory, d’you hear it whistle?”
“Whee-ee-oo-oo!” Blithely, indeed, whistled the splendid air-ship, nosing towards earth, as if it knew the feminine welcome awaiting it, settling into a natural glide, while the fine wires of the “struts” connecting the two planes cut the air with that homing sound.
“Hostile!... Piffle! Why! Why! the rudder is striped--can just make it out--red, white, and blue, the same--the same as our service-buttons.”
Ah! dear insignia. Perhaps, at that culminating moment, as the recognition bubbled forth, under all the merry dance of excitement in girlish breasts, there was a stable under-current of complaisance sweeping them upward bodily, as it were, to meet the aërial visitor; satisfaction that, nine hours before, on the hill of discordant name, they had not weakened--been untrue to the claim of those ringed colors linking them now in service to the Adventurers of the skies.
“Yes, here they come! Glory hallelujah! Three cheers for the Red, White, and Blue! Oh-h!”
A moment of tense silence, of flyaway breath fluttering, winged, through parted lips--of girlish faces transfigured, luminous in the dusk as the head-bands about girlish brows--flashing recognition signals into the gloom! And down it came, that army bi-plane--bump, bump, bump--in the briefest of jolting canters along the dim, dim beach!
“Well!... Well, we didn’t make a pancake landing, anyhow! No!”
Forth leaped, on the word, from his tiny cock-pit, his deep pilot’s seat, a young, boyish aviator, helmeted, gauntleted, leather-jacketed!