[6]. He meant, of course, the big aviation school.
CHAPTER VI—UP IN THE AIR
The plane was running like a dream at an altitude of 1,800 feet and due west when they became aware of two tiny lights far below them. Not a glimmer was there anywhere near them and if Troyes were down there it was cautious enough to keep itself in the dark. Archer says that Slade did not speak to him nor even answer when he spoke, and he could only surmise what the pilot was about. He saw the altimétre register lower and presently he saw another light, the three forming a triangle. Slade said something about their being within gun fire range, but Archer could not hear him clearly and instinctively he kept still.
“I think it’s it,” he finally heard Slade say.
Archer did not fully understand why Slade thought it was “it.” He confesses that he was “nerrvous and flusterred” and did not dare to ask questions.
“Get your stuff ready,” he heard Slade say. “Do you see another light? There must be a patrol out—that’s lucky.”
As we know, Troyes was one of the places which Slade had often visited upon his official errands, and there he had once or twice met Archer. So we may assume that he knew something of the neighboring aviation school and field with its guiding corner lights. If there had been no patrol out these lights would not have been burning. At a second’s notice any one or all of them could be turned into a giant finger to probe the heavens, and Slade knew this.
In retelling, as well as I can, from Archer’s fragmentary narrative, the tale of their heroic fight, I wish not to minimize the element of luck, nor, upon the other hand, to draw upon my imagination. If I had Slade’s story I could write from the standpoint of the pilot, but as it is I am writing from the standpoint of his anxious companion who did his little part, kept discreetly silent and waited in suspense.
That Slade should have flown due west upon the strength of an original calculation and come directly over this place was remarkable and greatly to his credit. But he was mistaken in supposing that there would be a glare from the lights of the town and it was a piece of sheer luck that the corner lights of the big field were burning, for the night was not propitious for patrols.
Archer had just spied a fourth light, completing a square, and was dipping his tightly wound shirt into the gasolene, when a long, dusky column moved across the darkness, hesitated, groped, moved toward them, then away again, and then—there they were in a field of brightness and he saw Slade as he had not seen him in nearly a year.