The News the Airman Brought
He was turning in a sharp circle to flee even while he counted them. He was darting toward the coast, even while he still looked sidewise down at them to finish his count. Then, rolling and swooping as he put on the fullest speed of his racing engine, he fled, with five navy planes behind him, coming on the wings of their explosive storm.
He wondered if they were firing at him. All that he knew was that his world just then was only one blur of whistling, strangling, smiting air and deafening roar. He struck a hole in the air and pitched sharply. He swept over the fog bank. It could not help him now. He dared not sink low enough to hide in it. Shining brightly in the bright air, he volleyed straight on as if he were going to dash into the blue wall of sky ahead.
He won. He never knew how far the enemy planes had pursued, or whether they had come near him or not. He knew only that suddenly there was a yellow band of sandy land deep, deep under him, that the next instant trees and hills swept past like little color-prints, and that he came to earth.
Then he reached for a flask. And then he looked to wonder where he had landed. And then he heard the roar of a motor on one side of him, and the roar of a motor on the other. “Hands up!” shouted a man in khaki, leaning from the side of a swaying, drunkenly rolling car. He put up his hands, laughing hysterically.
Fifteen minutes later the telephone bells rang in the forts on Fisher’s Island, Plum Island, in the Narragansett Harbor defenses, and in the headquarters of the field army. It told them that the enemy transports were thirty miles south of Nantucket Island, standing in for Block Island Sound or Long Island.
Unleashing the Submarines
Up from Fisher’s Island under the Connecticut shore mounted an army hydro-aeroplane. It rose 2,000 feet, and circled there,
