"I don't know. I may not be able to fly like the Frenchman, but he can't handle the wireless as I can, and he isn't the chain-lightning chauffeur that Carstairs is. Please to remember those facts."
"I do. But here comes Lannes, the man of mystery."
Lannes seemed preoccupied, but he greeted Carstairs and Wharton warmly.
"I'm about to take another flight," he said. "No, thank you so much, but I've time neither to eat nor to drink. I must fly at once, though it's to be a short flight. Take care of my friend, Monsieur Jean the Scott, while I'm gone, won't you? Don't let him wander into German hands again, because I won't have time to go for him once more."
"We won't!" said Carstairs and Wharton with one voice. "Having got him back we're going to keep him."
Lannes smiling sprang into the Arrow. The willing young Englishmen gave it a mighty push, and rising into the blue afternoon sky he sailed away toward the south.
"He'll be back all right," said Carstairs. "I've come to the conclusion that nothing can ever catch that fellow. He's a wonder, he is. One of the most difficult jobs I have, Scott, is to give the French all the credit that's due 'em. I've been trained, as all other Englishmen were, to consider 'em pretty poor stuff that we've licked regularly for a thousand years, and here we suddenly find 'em heroes and brothers-in-arms. It's all the fault of the writers. Was it Shakespeare who said: 'Methinks that five Frenchmen on one pair of English legs did walk?'"
"No," said Lord James Ivor, "It was the other way around. 'Methinks that one Englishman on five pairs of French legs did walk.'"
"I'm not so sure about the number, either," interjected Wharton. "Are you positive it was five?"
"Whatever it was," said Carstairs, "the Frenchman was slandered, and by our own great bard, too. But come and take something with us, if Lord James, our immediate chief, is willing."