“It must be great to fly,” glowed Bob. “Those twins are wonders. I mean the way they’ve rigged up that plane and all that. I had to smile to myself, though, at what that one said about flying Auntie against the Boches. You can figure how long that little light-weight, with its patchy wings and misfiring engine, would last against a Fokker. Bing, bang! Away goes Auntie; all shot to pieces. They’ve got the proper spirit, just the same.”
“Wish we would meet ’em again in France,” emphasized Jimmy.
“I was struck dumb when they claimed Voissard as a relative,” declared Bob. “If it hadn’t been for that Red Cross Bazaar we’d never have met the Twinkle Twins. Talk about looking alike! They certainly are the original duplicates. But for goodness’ sake, what’s a dihedral angle?”
“Don’t ask me. You know more about planes now than either Blazes or I,” shrugged Roger.
“I ought to know,” deplored Bob. “Never was sent out to do an aeroplane story when I was on the Chronicle. I’ve read quite a lot about planes since the war began. Mostly about the newer types, though. That Antoinette of theirs isn’t one of them. It’s a fairly old-timer. I’m going to hunt up that dihedral angle puzzle in my dictionary.”
Back in camp barely in time for mess, Bob was forced to postpone his search for information concerning the mystifying angle. Returned to barracks from the mess hall he consulted a medium-sized, fat, black dictionary.
“Here you are,” he presently informed his still unenlightened bunkies. “Here’s a picture of Auntie, and here’s a Bleriot. See the difference? See the way the wings of this Antoinette are set in a slight V? There’s your old dihedral angle. Look at this Bleriot. Its one plane is set in a rigid horizontal line. Now I’m going to read up on this. Oh, wait till to-morrow. I’ll make the Twinkle Twins think I’m the man that taught Cousin Emile how to fly.”
“Those two must have done a lot of studying by themselves,” observed Roger. “I suppose being at Standford University has helped them some. I’ve heard that it’s a fine college. Many of its students have gone into the aviation corps.”
“Oh, those Twinkles have just absorbed knowledge of aeroplanes like a sponge takes up water,” was Bob’s sage opinion. “They’ve made it their chief interest in life. Sort of following in their cousin’s footsteps, you know. They’re lucky to have had the chance.”
“I suppose it’s hard for ordinary enlisted men in the aviation corps to get a chance to fly,” mused Roger. “Our training must be easy beside what they have to go through.”