"All right. I'll wait here for my answer."
"You know what risk you run, Jim?" pleaded the youngest of the airmen.
"Oh, certainly. All right, then. You'd better be on your way."
After they had left the room, the bandaged airman sat beside the table, thinking hard in the darkness.
Presently from somewhere across the dusky river meadow the sudden roar of an airplane engine shattered the silence; then another whirring racket broke out; then another.
He heard presently the loud rattle of his[pg 224] comrades' machines from high above him in the star-set sky; he heard the stertorous breathing of the old innkeeper; he heard again the crystalline bell-notes break out aloft, linger in linked harmonies, die away; he heard Bayard's mellow thunder proclaim the hour once more.
There was a watch on his wrist, but it had been put out of business when his machine fell in Nivelle woods. Glancing at it mechanically he saw the phosphorescent dial glimmer faintly under shattered hands that remained fixed.
An hour later Bayard shook the starlit silence ten times.
As the last stroke boomed majestically through the darkness an automobile came racing into the long, unlighted street of Sainte Lesse and halted, panting, at the door of the White Doe Inn.
The airman went out to the doorstep, saluted the staff captain who leaned forward from the tonneau and turned a flash on him. Then, satisfied, the officer lifted a bundle from[pg 225] the tonneau and handed it to the airman. A letter was pinned to the bundle.