“Changed his mind,” Harper remarked, as the machine passed over them, took an upward tack again, then at a higher altitude began circling about them. “Looks as though he was sort of sizing us up. Tom, why not signal him?”
Acting upon the suggestion, Tom, who was the only one of the three who could talk in the arm signalling code, began to reveal their identity, while if the maneuvers of the aeroplane were significant, those in it looked on with interest.
“Americans seeking our own lines,” Tom spelled out with quick upward and outward jerks and sweeps of both arms.
The three youths waited for something that might be taken as an acknowledgment or reply, but none came, or, if it did, they were too far away to see it; and a moment later the machine swept to the eastward, swooped down so close to the ground that for a time it was completely lost to sight behind a nearby wood, then rose again and taking a wide swerve east and north finally disappeared entirely.
“He’s polite, anyway, whoever he is,” Ollie commented as they gave up hope of the pilot having any intention of returning to them. “He might at least have dropped us a biscuit or two.”
“Which reminds me that I’m pretty hungry myself,” admitted Tom Walton.
“Ravenous, better describes my awful emptiness,” said Harper, “and I don’t see any hope of eats around here. Let’s get started.”
They descended together into the dug-out to roll their blankets and get their equipment, but they were not to move on just then with the freedom they had expected.
The aeroplane, camouflaged as an American machine, had done some signalling, too, but not to the boys from Brighton. Its mission in descending almost to earth behind the wood had been to make the presence of the Americans known to a small detachment of Germans which somehow had escaped detection in remaining there, and which had been waiting for darkness to fall, in order to make an effort to skirt the long American lines and join their own, further on.
And while Sergeant Tom Walton and Privates Ollie Ogden and George Harper were down in the dug-out, totally ignorant of what was going on above, half a dozen of these Germans had crept up and concealed themselves in positions most advantageous to the capture of the Americans.