"Break, my hat!" the English youth growled, and slowly got up onto his feet. "You call having my head practically bushed in, a break? The beggar probably thought he'd killed me, and didn't bother to make sure. Just dragged me over here and left me to be found a corpse."
"And what a lucky corpse you turned out to be!" Dave said with a tight chuckle. "Hold everything, pal. Don't take things too fast. You got a nasty crack. A clean one, though. The ship's surgeon will fix you up in no time. Here, hang on me, and we'll go hunt him up."
"I'm all right!" Freddy protested, and hung back. "Stick to the subject. How do you figure my coming a cropper was a break? I certainly don't follow you there!"
"Sure it's a break," Dave said excitedly. "The luckiest break you and I ever bumped into. And it was certainly luck, all of it. Don't you see, Freddy? Our little rat friend is worried. He's not sure whether we've got him spotted or not. He's got a job to do, see? He wants to be sure he'll be able to do the job, so he tries to remove us from the picture by crowning you. Get it?"
"Of course I don't get it!" Freddy Farmer snapped. "You're talking in blasted riddles, Dave. Make sense!"
"Look, pal!" Dave said slowly. "We know darn well now that he's a pilot, don't we?"
"Well, the lad who bashed me was, and is, a pilot," the English youth admitted with a nod that made him wince.
"Okay, he's a pilot," Dave continued. "That means he plans to make contact with the Japs by air, when out on patrol. He doesn't know if we are keeping an eye on him, so he slugs you so that we won't go on patrol this trick. See?"
"But what if we don't make the patrol?" Freddy cried. "What's that—?"
"For cat's sake, get it, Freddy!" Dave almost shouted. "It means that he is in our section! It means that he is in our section and tried to make sure that we wouldn't be aloft to keep our eye on what he did. Don't you see? It has to be that. If he were flying with some other section, it wouldn't matter to him whether we flew our patrol trick or not. But we're in the same section. So he lays you out just before take-off time, figuring that before I can be assigned somebody else to fly with me our section will be off and on its way. And I'll have to wait over, or go off with the next section."