"It's queer," said Mac, "how often he does that."
"Does what?" I asked.
"Answer your unasked question," replied Mac. "The green balls must have been south of Dieuze just as 'Mystery' said, for after leaving Mannheim I followed up the Rhine to Hagenau Wald, turned west and crossed the Vosges over Zabern; here we went above low clouds and I didn't see the ground again for over an hour. I steered my course all right, but was fearing a change of wind when just ahead of me I saw the Hun signal of two green balls come up through the clouds; as the last 'intelligence' placed these two balls at Morchange, I changed my course from 270° to 245°. It was only luck that about half an hour later a rift in the clouds showed me 'F' lighthouse, and as that is about thirty miles south of 'B' lighthouse, my original course over Zabern of 270° must have been about right to strike 'B' lighthouse. So the green-ball signal, as 'Mystery' said, must have been moved from Morchange to south of Dieuze, and that is just what I was puzzling out when Dick answered the puzzle for me. He's queer, all right." And Mac called for another rum.
And "queer" is the best description of Dick that any of the Bedouins could have given you, if you had asked them, until one night he was finally coaxed after many "treats" to tell about his earlier war experiences.
"In 1912 I was a subaltern in the Indian army," Dick said quietly; "a row over a woman resulted in my court martial and disgrace.
"When the war broke out I joined as a dispatch rider; I was wounded and was in the hospital for over five months. When I came out I succeeded in getting into the Royal Flying Corps and eventually was granted a commission. But as a pilot I was a complete failure; I 'wrote off' several machines and in my last crash I nearly 'wrote off' myself. I was unconscious for over a month and it was over eight months before I left the hospital.
"I finally got back to France as a recording officer to a Handley-Page squadron; here I ran into an old pal of mine, and one night, when his navigation officer was sick, my pal took me on a raid without saying a word to any one. It was the first time I had ever been in a Handley-Page aeroplane and it was the first time I had ever flown at night, but my pal was the best pilot in the squadron and the way to the Gontrode aerodrome was an open book to him, for he had been there many times before; he took me as a passenger for the experience.
"I remember as we 'taxied' over the aerodrome that the roar of the engine on each side of me, the flashing of lights, the other machines as they passed us or waited with slowly 'ticking-over props' for us to pass, the different-colored lights which were being fired down from machines already in the air and the lights fired up from the ground, all combined and whirled through my excited brain like a meaningless nightmare. Then there was a deafening roar and we shot down a path of light, bumped hard, bumped less hard, bumped again, and the huge plane with its great load of bombs was in the air. Lights on the ground and the lights of machines in the air became mixed until I could not tell one from the other.
"As we rose higher and higher, ground lights far off in the distance came hurtling toward us like the navigation lights of a fast approaching machine; I would clutch Jack, yell, and point out the lights in order to avoid a collision as it seemed to me; Jack would grin, pull me down on the seat beside him, and tell me the lights were on the ground and at least ten miles away. Gradually I got control of myself and tried to find the aerodrome we had just left; it was nowhere to be seen. There was a network of white threads on a black background, an occasional winding silver ribbon with here and there a silver blotch and queer-shaped blacker blacknesses on the general blackness; these were roads, rivers, lakes, and woods as they looked from the air at night.
"How long we had been in the air I don't know. Time seemed nothing, or an eternity. We were suspended in a sphere. Lights or stars rushed at us or receded or whirled about. Time and distance became mere words without meaning and I had fallen into a state resembling hypnotic sleep when suddenly roused by Jack. 'There are the lines,' he shouted, and as far as the eye could see, to left and right, out of the darkness beneath us were the constant flashes of the never silent guns of the Flanders front. Every now and then we got a sudden 'bump' as a shell passed near us. I had fallen into an almost semiconscious state when 'tut-tut-tut-tut-tut' jumped me off my seat; I realized that I was surrounded by a dazzling whiteness; the machine itself was brilliant. Amidst the 'tut-tut-tut' of our own machine guns shooting down at the searchlights there was a constant dull 'whonk,' 'whonk,' 'whonk,' and the whole machine seemed to be enveloped in puffs of black smoke as the anti-aircraft batteries found the range.