“Do you want to go?” he asked, ready to cast out the sandbag on his friend’s word.
“Oi, la, la! I am not so crazee!” his companion repeated.
“Well, then, stand ready.”
Slade buckled himself in, fastened on the helmet, and turned on the little electric light and carefully examined and tested the controls. The rudders responded as he expected, the elevating planes moved to his touch. He located the contact button and made sure of that. He felt of the gas manet and made sure that there was nothing to differentiate it essentially from the same thing on French machines. Such differences as he found were merely of style and location. “It is a matter of daring, not of learning;” he remembered those words of Wilbur Wright’s.
I think there is no moment in Slade’s career when he appears so admirable as when he sat there in that Hun machine, self-assured and confident, yet forgetting nothing that he might need to know after starting. “He always used his brains,” Archer said.
“Give her a few spins,” he finally said. He wished the engine to suck in the mixture.
“All right—again.”
“The motor took, first crack out of the box,” he told Archer; “and as soon as I felt the vibration I knew everything was all right—it made me feel as if I could do anything. I pulled back my manet, full gas, grabbed my elevating plane control, and sailed over the barbed wires hitting right into the wind.”
“It made me laugh,” Archer said, “how he always spoke about his controls as if he owned them.”
The story of that extraordinary flight, at least the first stage of it, remains a mystery. It is not until Archer enters upon the scene that we get anything approaching a satisfactory view of that wild night in the skies. There is no doubt that he passed over Arracourt, for one of his missiles landed there, giving timely warning. The rag which was run through the eye end of the metal bar had been dipped in gasolene and ignited but was sufficiently far from the message at the other end of the bar to save it from the flames, particularly as the stone had a tendency to cause the whole contrivance to descend vertically. The flaming rag, as was intended, attracted instant attention and brought a curious horde of people to the field where it fell. Another of these fell in Pont a Mousson where, it is thought, the flier may have seen the light of a burning house and considered the place to be important. It was picked up by a little girl and was the cause of messengers being immediately despatched to Nomeny and Thiaucourt and to Toul, where heavy reserves were in billets.