The great checkerboard lay below them. A hundred different phases of the landscape engaged their attention. They could see villages, towns, railway lines, and even fortifications that may have been erected by the German invaders in order to defend some monster gun that was aimed seaward, so as to give trouble to men-o’-war passing along the Belgian coast.
Billy and Pudge kept up a running fire of comment. Dozens of things were constantly attracting attention which had to be pointed out. Frank was not trying to make any great speed since there was no need of haste.
When they felt that they had gone far enough, and the spirit moved them, he changed the course, and they once more struck for Dunkirk on the French coast.
“No Taubes in sight yet, I notice?” Billy cried out gleefully; for he remembered how those German aëroplanes had risen like a swarm of angry hornets on the occasion of their previous visit.
“The news of the great raid must have been wired all over the country before now,” Frank explained. “Orders may have been given to keep all their Zeppelins and other aircraft housed until the danger is over.”
“Can you blame them?” laughed Billy. “They heard that as many as fifty seaplanes—for things are always stretched, you know, in the telling—were chasing up and down their coast, smashing everything to pieces. They therefore would wait and then raid the Allies’ quarters with a vengeance.”
“Yes,” added Pudge, “and right now I warrant you many a pair of field glasses is turned up this way, and all sorts of guesses are made about what sort of queer craft is whizzing over them. If your Government gets this seaplane, Mister Le Grande, and makes a bunch of them from the sample, you’ll give the enemy cold feet right away.”
“It is a wonderful machine, I am ready to declare; superb, beyond anything that I had ever dreamed could be made. I have only praise, I assure you,” was what the Frenchman told them in his explosive way.
“I guess that settles the business then,” remarked Pudge to Billy, meaning that the report made by the aviator must convince the French Government it was greatly to their interest to conclude the bargain with the Sea Eagle Company, Ltd., as originally entered into, for the delivery of this sample seaplane, and the privilege of making as many others, on royalty, as they chose within a given time.
This would be the only way of settling the matter, since no machines could be shipped from America without a breach of neutrality, as the Government at Washington had recently declared.