“Then we drill for a while, listen to a lecture,” he went on, “and then again for a space I am a bird of the air. We dine about half-after eight, and at ten comes taps, or ‘lights out.’ Anything more you would like to know, young lady?” he inquired teasingly. But Nathalie was satisfied, for surely her brother’s ruddy cheeks, tanned skin, and glowing eyes attested to what he called the “joy-time of his life,” and a few moments later the little party started for the aviation field.
Here Dick conducted them around the field and showed them many kinds of aircraft, as aëroplanes, dirigibles, kite-balloons, serviceable in war; in fact, they were so well instructed as to the uses and mechanism of so many different machines that Mrs. Morrow declared that they would be well-versed in aëronautics. But the little personal stories that Dick told about the heroism of well-known war-eagles over in France made a stronger appeal to the girls, especially when he explained the several varieties of aviators and their special work.
To the girls’ disappointment there was no flying going on while they were on the field, but they were partly appeased when Dick showed them a group of students, aviation observers, he called them, who were learning to sketch from a miniature battlefield, and in this way learn how it would look from the air. As they were about to leave the field they saw some students bringing out a machine, to get it ready for flying, as testing the motor and so on.
At this particular moment one of the girls uttered a sudden cry, and as all eyes glanced upward with newly awakened eagerness, they were rewarded by seeing an aëroplane returning from a training flight. As Nathalie gazed eagerly at the machine that flew like some strange monster above their heads, the perils of flying in space came to her with a sudden, keen realization, and, with a sickening pang as to what might happen to Dick some day, her eyes darkened with apprehensive terror and she turned hastily away. But Dick, catching sight of the girl’s pale face and fear-haunted eyes, as if to divert her mind from dismal forebodings, called attention to the camp mascot, a little yellow police-dog, who was standing by his master, equipped, like him, with goggles. The girls were soon laughing heartily as Dick told of the dog’s alertness in doing “stunts,” and the eagerness he showed when waiting to take a flight in one of the machines.
CHAPTER VIII
SEVEN PILLARS
Nathalie, seated in a low chair at one end of the broad white veranda, gazed with rapt intentness at the sun-hazed landscape, rising in green, undulating waves against the purple blur of the towering mountain-heights, that stretched in wide expanse before her, with a strange, mystical beauty.
Into her eyes, city-tired, came rest, as they swept over the velvet green of the meadow, splashed with the bloom of wild flowers, its scrubby bushes aglow with pink spires, and its spruces and maples standing upright with the slimness of youth, as it sloped gently down to the glen below. The trees of the glen, closely massed in a rich, feathery green, sombered by the darker line of the pines and firs, to the girl seemed weird and mysterious.
Her eyes quickly gathered in the stillness of the sunny slopes that rose from the darker hollow in squares of yellow cornfields, or the light green of unripe wheat or grain, and the brown of mountain meadow-land, dotted with browsing cows. Here and there a lone farmhouse stood forth on some higher knoll, or, from a background of forest land, came the bright red of a solitary barn; while still higher, a hotel, its gables and chimneys spying upward, glimmered picturesquely from the green. And beyond all, high and dark, with majestic brooding silences, rose the jagged ridge of mountain blue, its peaks looming with a strange distinctness against the clear, soft blue of the sky, while sweeps of white cloudlets trailed like films of spun silk across their tops.
The girl closed her eyes as if to imprint upon her subconsciousness the rare loveliness of the scene, and then, as if fearful that in some passing, whimsical mood the picture would flash out of view, she opened them quickly. At that moment a passing breeze fluttered the pages of a letter lying on a table by her side. With sudden recollection she caught them up, and then as if to impress upon her mind what she had written, in a soft, low tone read: