For full twenty seconds Dastral waited before he replied. Again there was that faraway look in his blue eyes as though he could see Himmelman on his fast monoplane, coming up out of the mists of the eastern horizon beyond the German lines. Then, recalling himself with an effort he replied calmly:
"You are right, Graham. Twice already I have encountered him. Once when my drums were empty, and the second time when my controls were damaged, and I had to make a forced descent just behind our lines. I have felt myself a coward ever since. But fight him I will, before sundown to-morrow, if he is anywhere in the heavens within fifty miles of Contalmaison. And not a shot will I fire, even if attacked by half a dozen Taubes, till I meet my man. I know his tactics now, and am better prepared to fight him than ever I have been."
"Better not tell the O.C., for you know our orders are to fight every and any enemy 'plane we see, while we have a round in the drums," replied his comrade.
"I know, Graham; that's the trouble. When your drums are empty or your gun has jammed, then this wary old Boche comes down from a small cloud where he has been hiding at twelve thousand feet, and comes hurtling down through space at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, spraying your fuselage from end to end with his machine gun. All the same, he is brave and courageous, and something of a sport--far away the best man they've got. But my belief is that if once he is sent down in a crash, the spell will be broken, and we shall have things all our own way," said Dastral.
Then, turning to Fisker, his observer, who had not yet had his twentieth birthday, though he had been with Dastral since they first left England, and thoroughly understood his method and tactics, he said:
"What do you say, old fellow? Do you think we're a match for this high falutin' Prussian?"
"Dastral!" replied his chum. "I repeat what I said to you only the other day. If you'll only get the O.C. to give you a perfectly free hand, and then lay a nice little trap for the Boche, you're more than a match for him. There's more room for strategy in the air than either in trench warfare on land, or in a naval fight, when the sea is strewn with mine-beds. And if you'll only try that new fast S.E. that you had out the other day, with the Lewis gun mounted for'ard, you'll do the trick, and it wouldn't be merely the D.S.O. that the King and a grateful country would confer on you, for ridding the western front of a nuisance, but you'd get the V.C. and a C.B. as well."
"Yes, I'd probably get the C.B. all right, Fisker, but not the V.C.," laughed the pilot, for in the army the letters C.B. have a double meaning.
"I don't mean Confined to Barracks, old fellow. You'll get that when you make a forced landing behind the German lines one of these days, if you will drop down to within a hundred feet of their batteries, just to put one of their 'Archies' out of action, and kill a few of their gunners. I mean the other C.B. which is usually given from Buckingham Palace."
"You're a sport, Fisker. I never had an observer or aerial gunner who served me so well as you do. The credit is yours for the majority of the enemy's machines we've brought down this last six months. But, as you're game, and you've got far more brains than I have, we'll just spend the night inventing such a trap for the wily old Prussian as you've mentioned, and to-morrow, if we don't get the weather-gage of the Boche, then we'll never put our heads inside this old mess again. Are you agreed?" said Dastral.